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Mining Altcoins

Mining Altcoins

In this talk we will cover the steps to take to build a "effective" mining rig which is capable of mining various altcoins. We will break down how to calculate profitability and different steps to take in order to increase it. Finally close off the talk with a mention of mining pools, scaling, and storage of mined currency.

Jose Enrique Hernandez

November 20, 2017
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Transcript

  1. Who am I • Long Time Friend (@d1v in slack)

    • Do Security in Fastly by Day • Play with Cryptocurrencies by night
  2. Agenda • Concepts • Anatomy of a Mining Rig •

    OS and Mining software (miners) • Mining Pools and Selling Mining Power • Economy of Mining
  3. non-critical components • CPU — any slow processor would do, you will

    be running low overhead *nix OS, least likely Windows, just make sure it works with your motherboard. • Memory — as long as it has minimally 4GB of RAM memory • HDD/SDD — Any would work, although I highly recommend purchasing the pre-loaded SSD with ethos from gpushack.
  4. critical components • board — The most important aspect of purchasing a

    motherboard is making sure it has +4 PCI 2.0 slots, the more slots supported by the motherboard the more GPU density you can have and thus a bigger hash rate. • Power Supply — It is what will feed your rig, two things are important when selecting the power supply, make sure you have plenty of capacity and it is very efficient. The lowest capacity I would recommend is 850 WATT. •
  5. Critical components continued • GPU — The most critical component in an

    ethereum mining rig by far. Base on crypto compare the best GPU to use today based on the consumption/vs hash rate generated. For ETHER mining it is recommended for the GPU to have +4GB of memory. Cryptocompare.com has a great list of suggested GPUs and reviews.
  6. accessories • USB Riser Cards — you will need these to comfortably

    connect all GPUs. • Power Meter (optional) — you will need this to understand what your power consumption is, see the economics portion of the guide for details. • Power switch for ATX MOBO — if you don’t plan on shorting the two power pins on the motherboard buy this ;-). • Case — open air cases are recommended to allow a rig to breathe, most open air frame cases are $100 — $250 USD. Personally I decided to use a bamboo dish rack which has exactly the same effect and it costs $15 USD on Amazon. It does not look half bad either and is extremely portable.
  7. OS

  8. ethos • Purpose built for mining • Built on Ubuntu

    16.04 with an LXE Desktop Environment • Runs many popular miners • Supports AMD + NVIDIA GPUs • + 8 GPU support natively (windows has an issue here) • Great admin panel
  9. Other considerations Windows • 8 GPU Limit • Better driver

    support for GPUs • More options for tweaking like firmware hacking SMOS • Don’t know much about it • Looks easier to use than ethos • Although very similar • Forces claymore
  10. Common ones (in ethos) • drwxr-xr-x 2 ethos ethos 4.0K

    Sep 9 09:26 ccminer [old] • drwxr-xr-x 2 ethos ethos 4.0K Sep 9 09:26 cgminer-skein [old] • drwxr-xr-x 2 ethos ethos 4.0K Sep 9 09:26 claymore [details next] • drwxr-xr-x 2 ethos ethos 4.0K Mar 16 2017 claymore-zcash ^ • drwxr-xr-x 3 ethos ethos 4.0K Mar 16 2017 ethminer [details next] • drwxr-xr-x 2 ethos ethos 4.0K Jul 8 10:22 ewbf-zcash [details next] • drwxr-xr-x 8 ethos ethos 4.0K Mar 16 2017 optiminer-zcash [old] • drwxr-xr-x 4 ethos ethos 4.0K Nov 9 22:36 sgminer-gm [details next] • drwxr-xr-x 2 ethos ethos 4.0K Mar 16 2017 silentarmy [old]
  11. claymore • Mines ETH, XMR, ZCASH • Supports NVIDIAS and

    AMD GPUs • Great Performance for ETH in AMD • 2% Mining Fee • Supports Dual Mining Decre, Pascal, SIA
  12. ethminer • Mines - ETH • Supports NVIDIAS and AMD

    GPUs • Good Performance • No mining Fee
  13. sgminer-gm • Mines many coins • Supports NVIDIAS and AMD

    GPUs • No Mining Fee • Supports Dual Mining Decre, Pascal, SIA
  14. Mining Pools In the context of cryptocurrency mining, a mining

    pool is the pooling of resources by miners, who share their processing power over a network, to split the reward equally, according to the amount of work they contributed to solving a block. A "share" is awarded to members of the mining pool who present a valid proof-of-work that their miner solved • helps you get paid faster and track your progress for a fee, in nanopool’s case is 1% • There are many out there research, some without fees, some whom have more rejects etc.. Example: https://eth.nanopool.org/account/0x3EDeFEe8B452A74b15997000FF9D3c913ED d03fb
  15. Types of Wallets Software • Easy to setup • No

    cost • Many features built in like shapeshift • Great for daily (weekly) mining profits • Risk of losing via a hack etc.. Hardware • Most secure • Great for long term storage of currency • Not great for depositing mining gains
  16. Variables to Consider • Power Cost - typically ~.12 KWH

    in Miami see your power bill • Power Consumption - Depends on GPU + mining algo + miner • GPU Hashing Speed - Depends on algo + miner • Price of currency
  17. Calculators http://coinwarz.com/ - what coin (algorithm is most profitable) https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/

    - what would my potential earnings be base on coins https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator - what would my potential earnings be based on hardware + algorithm if selling mining power
  18. BTC use of the Merkel Tree Vitalik Buterin Creator of

    Ethereum The benefit that this provides is the concept that Satoshi described as “simplified payment verification”: instead of downloading every transaction and every block, a “light client” can only download the chain of block headers, 80-byte chunks of data for each block that contain only five things: • A hash of the previous header • A timestamp • A mining difficulty value • A proof of work nonce • A root hash for the Merkle tree containing the transactions for that block. If the light client wants to determine the status of a transaction, it can simply ask for a Merkle proof showing that a particular transaction is in one of the Merkle trees whose root is in a block header for the main chain.