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If you have followed me for a while you should know a few things by now:
1) I have tried mining various crypto's already and currently mine Banano (Folding@Home) on my GeForce 1050 TI
2) I don't like Ethereum but it's a necessary evil
3) I get bored and like to try new things out in the crypto world.
So this morning while sipping on my morning Mountain Dew I was reading an article about how much money will be saved when Ethereum switches from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake next year. That being you will no longer be able to mine Ethereum when it switches over, you will only be able to stake Ethereum to earn Ethereum.
I then realized that I never tried to mine for Ethereum before, because well I never had a decent enough card to do so. I thought that I did have one now. Turns out that I still don't. In order to mine Ethereum you need a Graphics Card that has more than 4GB of memory. My card has.... yep you guessed it 4GB of memory. So after I setup the mining software and got everything running I ran into issues and took way to long to troubleshoot them. I then found out that I can't mine Ethereum but I could mine Ethereum Classic. So follow me on my adventure to mine Ethereum Classic!
1) Pre-requisites
2) Mining Pool
3) Setting up Software
4) Waiting to earn those sweet ETC rewards
1) Pre-requisites
Alright there are some things that you are going to need. Some of them are obvious and others maybe not so much.
- Download and install Notepad++, If you are a heavy PC user you should already have this. If you are going to be editing .bat files then you should have this. It is a free open source Notepad software that lets you do so much more than just regular Notepad. https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/
- Have a Ethereum Classic Wallet. You will need your Wallet address during the configuration. I am using my Trust Wallet address. Make sure its ETC and not ETH though.
- Have a decent GPU, I am using my Nvidia GeForce 1050 TI
2) Mining Pool
Like any good mining operation you will need a good mining pool. If you are running along by your lonesome you probably won't ever earn any block rewards. If you join up with a mining pool you will earn reduced rewards but you actually will earn some rewards. Originally I chose Ethermine to mine Ethereum with and when I had to switch to mining ETC I still stuck with Ethermine because well I was lazy.
Ethermine: https://etc.ethermine.org/?theme=light
Here are the top 10 ETC mining pools according to PoolWatch.io
It is a good rule of thumb to try a few pools out to see what works best for you. I however am in the camp of find the first one that works that doesn't charge crazy fees and stick with it because I am lazy.
Ethermine (ETC) is not bad by any means. It has a 1% fee which is awesome. You can also change your minimum payout amount.
Now let's assume you are going to use Ethermine to mine ETC. You need to go here to get your miner details.
Assuming you are in the US the Server will be us1-etc.ethermine.org. The Port will be 4444.
Now an interesting bit is that lolMiner is not listed under Windows-NVIDIA but it is listed under Windows-AMD. I already downloaded lolMiner so I am sticking with it. It may have some side effects. We will get into what miner to pick next.
3) Setting up Software
There are options here that you can pick from. Even Ethermine gives you 3 options if you are using Nvidia or AMD and Windows. For this guide I am going to setup lolMiner because, well it's what I am currently using.
Go to this GitHub repository: here. Then scroll down a bit until you see lolMiner 1.28a. (version 1.29 is for Linux only so if you are using Linux pick that)
Once you find 1.28a scroll down to the bottom of it (before 1.27) and find the "Assets 4" text. Click on the little triangle next to it.
You will find a "lolMiner_v1.28a_Win64.zip", click on it to download. You may run into browser issues warning you of security concerns, if so ignore them and download anyways. BRAVE Browser does a decent job of not bothering you with this.
Now that you have it downloaded, right-click on it and select "Extract All..."
I personally extracted it to my desktop but you can put it where ever you want. Once it is extracted open the folder and you will see a subfolder called "1.28a". Open that folder and you should see the following files.
The only one we care about is "mine_etc.bat". Right click on it and select "Edit with Notepad++"
This is what it should look like.
Lines 9 and 10 are the ones we need to change. You need to do this carefully or you will not earn rewards. SO PAY ATTENTION!!!
Line 9 is: set "POOL=etc.herominers.com:10161"
You need to change "etc.herominers.com" to your server address from above.
You need to change "10161" to the port number from above.
So my line 9 looks like this now:
set "POOL=us1-etc.ethermine.org:4444"
Make sure you keep the colons and all syntax.
Line 10 looks like this by default:
set "WALLET=0x36937DbADF0cD0bC68C8b6d95482fb2D2be0a730.lolMinerWorker"
you need to paste your Wallet address over the address already in there. But make sure to keep ".lolMinerWorker" after the address.
set "WALLET=MY_WALLET_ADDRESS.lolMinerWorker"
So it will look like this but with your wallet address in there.
You can see this bat file sets your information and then called the lolMiner.exe program to start. So, what you are going to need to do is run this bat file to start mining.
4) Waiting to earn those sweet ETC rewards
Now that you have everything setup you need to start mining. You will need to double click on the "mine_etc.bat" file. If Windows freaks out on you, then just tell it that it's safe to run and ignore it going forward.
When you start mining you will see this:
The Green text shows you what GPU you are using to mine with. My red blocked out section is my wallet address. Above the red section will show the mining pool you are using.
After a little while you will see some text outputs like this. The yellow lines are new jobs and the blue text are your stats. It updates your Blue text every little while to give you a better idea of your ongoing stats. It's fun to watch but there is a better place to watch from.
https://etc.ethermine.org/ <-- Go to this website if you are using Ethermine like me.
You need to paste in your ETC address here and hit enter.
Here you can see my stats after about an hour of running it.
The Immature Balance is how much you have earned before it is validated. Usually this amount is transition over into the Unpaid Balance. There it will sit until you have enough to withdraw. Once you run it for a while it will also give you a Estimated Daily earnings on the top right.
Do not freak out about the Hashrate right away. It takes upwards of 2 hours to level out to an accurate rate. I am mining at a 12MH/s according to the mining software.
There is 1 thing I recommend doing. On that Ethermine dashboard go to the "Settings" tab.
By default the minimum payout is 1ETC. I recommend changing it to 0.1ETC. However in order to do that you need input your IP address. This may seem odd but it's actually quite brilliant. There are no password to use the Ethermine site but it does require the user of the Miner to known their IP address. And this isn't referring to your computers IP address like 192.168.1.52. This is referring to the IP address of your home router. When you send data out into the world it's your routers IP address that is shown. This is super simple to get.
Go to www.google.com and search for "What is my IP". Google Search will return you with your external IP address. Paste that IP into the 3rd field on this page and click Submit.
And that's it guys. If you followed my steps you are mining for Ethereum Classic. There are a few tips I would like to state that may help. On the mining dashboard there is a little orange slider in the top right above the "estimated earnings". If you click it, the webpage will refresh every 60 seconds to display updated information.
The Dashboard does not update until about 15 minutes after you start mining. So if it doesn't show up right away don't freak out. Give it about 20 minutes and if still nothing double check your bat file or comment here and I will try to help.
To put it into perspective, with the BananoMiner that runs Folding@Home and pays out in Banano I was making about 20 Banano a day recently (used to be a lot more). At current valuation that is about $0.50 a day.
Now after a few hours of running the miner I was being told I would make 0.00984 ETC a day which at current valuation is $0.62 a day. But if we go based on the 7 day high price it would be worth $1.02 per day. While Banano at 7 day high would be worth $0.90. So mining ETC makes a little more then I would if I was "mining" Banano.
With all that being said though, you need to take into account what you think the valuation will be down the road for ETC or BAN. Because if ETC raises in value say 300% over the year and BAN only raises 1% then well mining ETC now makes so much more sense!
