I decided to try to mine coins with my laptop. It's hard to answer why now, when the difficulty is so high, instead of when I bought my laptop, when it would have been much more cost-effective, but I wanted to see what my precious laptop is worth 3 years later.
So first, I'm doing a system-wide backup, just in case, because well, my laptop is not very young anymore. And better safe than (very) sorry.
After some googling, I decided to try
MinerGate (it is an affiliate link). Because I thought mining alone, on my old laptop maybe won't be a good idea. Since I'm mining with that pool since today, I don't know about the earnings. But I'd like to share other impressions:
- There is NO(!!!) client for Gentoo/Sabayon. But, surprise surprise, their Windows client works very nicely trough Wine. You just download and run it. At some point I may try to install their Ubuntu client, but I wanted to first experiment with them for a while.
- The client is VEEEERY simple. Seriously, I'm actually shocked how simple and pretty it is. And it works fine. I'm mining some 2.5 cores, because I need to have at least 1.5 core on my disposal for work. Also, I'm mining ETH on my Nvidia GPU. I'm doing this, because apart from occasional Steam game and 1 month CUDA course, this video card hasn't seen ANY action in those 3 years. So I decided it needs to see some heat.
- GPU mining is tricky on the client. So for 1 hour, I run GPU mining from the client just fine, no complain whatsoever. Than I decided to see what happens if you turn on 1 thread of CPU. Well, it started creating the DAG file (it took forever) and at 96% or so it gave me an unknown error. But that also screwed my GPU mining and even after restart, it's still not working. Oh well. It could be because the DAG file is 1.5GB and I have only 2GB in my home dir. But still...
- The client has extended mode. From it you can see info such as SHARES:GOOD/BAD/LAST, Difficulty, unconfirmed balance etc. Stuff you can see on their website dashboard (which is very useful)
- Now, being the smart I am, I downloaded ethminer (from here) and started konsole GPU mining with:
#ethminer -G -F http://eth.pool.minergate.com:55751/email
- And it worked!
- A great tutorial on mining with ethminer can be found here.
- Note: you can mine a pool without minergate. For a list of pools see here. All you need to mine is your wallet adress. But that will work well I guess for more serious machines. Also, here's a tutorial how to mine with GETH.
- The MinerGate client and the dashboard know that the console miner is online and count the shares. Which is kind of cool.
- There is a bat script on their website which has a bit more options to set in you would like.
- Note : on my pc, I got the following error: "No work. Pause for 3 s. m 16:20:53|ethminer Waiting for work package...", so I'm not using the bat script.
- There is calculator on the website. Which enables you to see what are the coins worth bothering to mine.
- The dashboard of the website is very cute, has tons of info, shows you realtime what you're running, how much
Well, that's it. I kind of like the ethminer simplicity. We'll see what will come out of my mining efforts. Obviously, with this computer I cannot mine for profit. But I can do it for fun.
Last - it seems that ETH wallets are a pain. I have an Exodus, but for now it's empty. In this
website, you can find an explanation how to create a wallet with geth (
geth account new) . In Sabayon it seems that the package to install is
go-ethereum.
P.S. I'm also using
hashflare.io (affiliate link) to cloud mine. For experimental purposes. Because I wanted to buy some fraction of BTC but most sites required sending them your ID. This site accepted credit card. For the moment, the site seems ok, I withdrew my first earnings. But only time will show how good it is.
