Getting Started with Mining - Omnicoin-Project/Omnicoin GitHub Wiki

##Quick pool mining tutorial

  1. Choose a pool and create an account
  2. Create a new worker on your account - Use a simple name and password. The password will be stored in plaintext on the miner so do not use the same password as any other accounts
  3. Download a mining script:
  • CGMiner 3.7.2 - Download. It is important that you use version 3.7.2, as newer versions don't support GPU mining nor scrypt mining and those are the things you need. CGMiner is one of the best miners available for AMD GPU's, and AMD's hardware is generally better than NVIDIA when it comes to mining, so pick CGMiner if you use an ATI/AMD graphics card.
  • CUDAMiner - Download. CUDAMiner is a fork of CGMiner which specializes in mining with CUDA cores. A CUDA core is the same as a stream processor or ALU, only NVIDIA has made it 'smarter' and capable of more complex things. This means there are fewer of them on each graphics card as they're naturally more expensive to produce and physically larger to fit on the die. This is one of the major reasons why AMD outperforms NVIDIA. Get CUDAMiner if you are using NVIDIA graphics.
  • Pooler's CPUMiner - Download. If you don't have a graphics card (using onboard or integrated graphics instead) your only option is to mine with your CPU. It doesn't come close to the performance of the GPU miners listed above, but you can still participate and earn some omnicoins to play around with.
  1. Extract you chosen miner
  2. Create a batch file to run the miner - create a batch file named run.bat inside the miner directory. Inside the file, choose the appropriate code for your miner, just replace username, workername and password with the values in step 2:
  • 'cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://192.99.42.54:3333 -O username.workername:password'
  • 'cudaminer.exe -o stratum+tcp://192.99.42.54:3333 -O username.workername:password'
  • 'minerd.exe --url=stratum+tcp://192.99.42.54:3333 --userpass=username.workername:password'
  1. Find your GPU/CPU here - If you find your CPU/GPU then copy the parameters given to the end of the line in step 5
  2. Run run.bat

Thanks to 'Snorlax for the mining tutorial

Mining related FAQ

What is mining? This is the process of attempting to solve a block. When a block is solved the owner is granted 66.85 coins. Every day a set amount of Omnicoins get dealt out, and the amount is X and is always the same, so to make sure the currency is being dealt out evenly, the people who have the most mining / hashing power get the highest share of the block reward. The more hashing power on the network the higher the difficulty is to ensure that only X amount is being dealt out every day. The reward per block is 66.85 omnicoins per block. That means roughly 1337 coins are generated per hour, 32,088 per day, and 224,616 per week. Note that the reward per block will be cut in half after 100,010 blocks have been mined which is roughly 208 days or 46,720,128 coins from the date of launch. Mining will take all available resources on your computer in order to submit hashes so you may experience a loss of performance if you are trying to do things while mining, usually hardly noticeable unless you're playing a game while mining off your video card.

How often are blocks generated? Blocks are generated based on their block time, for omnicoin that is every 180 seconds. The difficulty will adjust using Kimoto's Gravity Well. What this means is that if a block is solved too quickly the difficulty is increased, thus making it harder to find the solution to the block. If it takes more than 180 seconds for the solution to be found then the difficulty will be adjusted accordingly.

I want to mine! Omnicoin is a scrypt coing which means you cannot mine with SHA-256 or any other method. If you want to mine I suggest you take a look at your scrypt mining rate using this link. With that rate you can then estimate your earnings based on the current difficulty using this mining calculator. If you are interested in renting rigs there are several sites which do so, I personally have used betarigs with much success in the past. Should you need help setting it up I recommend looking at Snorlax's tutorial on the subject.

What software to mine with? The same link we used for hash rate we can also use to find out which miner is best. All current Omnicoin pools have download links under the 'Getting Started' section. Be aware that these are not the only miners that exist, they are just the ones that have gained notoriety as being high quality and free.

CPU or GPU mining? Both can be used to mine scrypt coins such as Omnicoin but GPU offers a much higher hash rate. AMD (better) and Nvidia offer the best hashing rates. For instruction on how to set these up please reference Snorlax's thread.

I don't know what kind of video card I have To find out what video card you have follow these steps:

  1. Open up start menu
  2. In the search bar type 'device manager' and open it
  3. Expand 'Display adapters' There you go! That's your video card(s) which you can now look up using this link. If it is not under there you will most likely find it on google by searching ' hash rate'. If you have no success let me know and I'll see if I can help you out.

Can I mine with a laptop? You can, but I wouldn't recommend it. Laptops have integrated graphics cards which offer poor hash rates and many people have experienced laptop failure in some way due to over working it through mining. Mining with a smartphone would be even less efficient.

Solo mining verse pool mining Solo mining is when you are hashing alone to try to solve the block. A pool is a group of people mining together that will split the reward if they solve the block. Very very rarely will it be better to mine alone as when you mine in a pool you'll be contributing to the greater hash rate (pool hash rate) and will receive rewards accordingly. If you have a mining rate of 20MH/s in a pool of 300MH/s in a network of 500MH/s then your pool is likely to solve the block 3 in 5 times, and of those times you would receive 6.67% of the block reward as that was your contribution towards solving it.

Choosing a pool and setting up If you plan to mine your best option is usually to join a pool. For Omnicoin there has been several pools but there have been two that have been consistent since launch which are: Doctor Blue's pool: Pool.Omnicoin.CC Xen0n's pool: Omnipool.Me

After registering on these pools you'll want to set up 'workers'. The purpose of setting a worker name is to identify who gets credit for the hashes submitted to the pool. After you have created some worker names you will use those along with the stratum address you get under the 'Getting started' tab to point your computer, server, or rig to the pool of your choice with the name of your choice.

Can I mine with a botnet? Yes you can but be aware that the rates will be much lower and you would need a silent miner to do so. You should also be aware that some pool owners ban the use of botnets. To get a silent miner you either need to find a free one, purchase one in the marketplace, or create one yourself.

Thanks to Aceman for the Mining FAQ