Some of you might have run into the same dillemma I did when I first discovered Banano mining by participating in the Folding@Home program. For the uninitated, F@H is an application you can install in the background on your computer that donates computing power to scientists fighting Covid-19 and other diseases. Twice per day, the Banano team airdrops BAN to participating members based on how much computing power they contribute. Donating CPU power hardly makes a dent in the folding (but it does suffice if you want to participate) but putting a GPU to work folding proteins creates magnitudes of progress. How is one to partcipate if they don’t have a GPU handy? Enter Amazon Web Services.
In this article I’m going to walk you through, step by step, to create a Banano miner using Amazon Web Services. I’ll warn you now; there’s a lot of information to handle on AWS (it’s a massive undertaking by Amazon to provide cloud computing), but I’ll try to make it as easy to understand as possible with screenshots and a solid breakdown. If there’s something missing, or unclear, let me know in the comments. Full disclaimer here that it will also involve communicating with Amazon support to procure the required resources – they even called me at 10pm one night to happily inform me that my request went through (which I thought was bizzare). The TLDR there is that Amazon doesn’t want to just hand over GPUs from their customers to people who are just looking to mine cryptocurrency…. But we’re here fighting Covid right? ;)
Jokes aside, it’s amazing that we can fight deadly viruses while earning some crypto on the way. It’s my favorite thing about Banano. It feels more virtuous (albeit less profitable) than draining the worlds energy to mine Bitcoin.
Now for the question you’re all probably asking right now: How much does it cost? Can you make money doing this?
It costs about 5$ per day to run the miner and you earn about 400BAN. And as for profit the short answer right now is… no. It’s not profitable. But it can be! As the price of BAN goes up, the viability of this does as well. It’s close to breaking even at the moment so that could change any day. Besides, it’s a fun way to earn some BAN and contribute to the world. It’s a win-win in my book even if it costs a little money.
Without further adieu, here are the steps to creating a AWS Banano Miner.
What we’re essentially doing is requesting a ‘Spot instance’ from Amazon. A spot instance uses computing power when the premium users of AWS have idle machines. The result is a super cheap way to get some GPU power going on F@H - it doesn’t run 24/7 but it runs often enough to complete some huge work orders. We’ll request to use a P spot instance which is the cheapest cloud machine provided by amazon that has a powerful GPU built in. We’ll then create a template that will load the machine as a Banano miner by installing the requisite software and applying your user credentials.
Here’s how we do it:
Download and set up a Banano wallet (Skip this step if you already have an address)
- I recommend Kalium
Make an AWS account
- Go to https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup
- Choose the free level of support
- You’ll need to enter your credit card info - we will be using paid services to run our miner. Equate it to your electricity bill if you were running your miner at home.
Request resources for your Miner
- Go to “My Service Quotas” under your account name in the top bar
- Select “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)” from the list
- Select all P Spot instance requests
- Request Quota Increase
- Set the vCPU quota to 4 (you can expand on this later if you want to start more miners)
- Wait for Amazon to approve your request. Mess around on Nanogames.io, think about the universe or something ;)
- Support may contact you directly. Respond to their emails politely and explain that you’re trying to set up a virtual machine that will run Folding@Home, a service that helps scientists fight Coronavirus.
- When your request is approved we can move on to the next step
Create a launch template for your miner
- Go to EC2 Services
- Launch Templates
- Fill out the settings according to the photos
- Go to Bananominer and enter your Ban Address to get your username and team id
- Replace the text here with your relevant user names and paste it into ‘Userdata’ under advanced details
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -qy nvidia-headless-435 ocl-icd-opencl-dev expect
wget https://download.foldingathome.org/releases/public/release/fahclient/debian-testing-64bit/v7.4/fahclient_7.4.4_amd64.deb
sudo mkdir /etc/fahclient/ || true
sudo chmod 777 /etc/fahclient
cat <
EOF
cat <
#!/usr/bin/expect
spawn dpkg -i --force-confdef --force-depends fahclient_7.4.4_amd64.deb
expect "Should FAHClient be automatically started?"
send "\r"
# done
expect eof
EOF
chmod +x /home/ubuntu/install.sh
sudo /home/ubuntu/install.sh
Launch your Banano Miner using the template
- Go to ‘Instances’ and launch instance with template
- Choose the template you just made :D
Congrats! You now have an operational Banano / Nano Miner!
You can check it’s progress at https://apps.foldingathome.org/teamstats/team234980.html by searching for your username on the page. It should start showing results in at least twelve hours. And then you’ll begin getting airdrops to your wallet twice a day.
If you found this guide helpful- please feel free to donate !
Nano
nano_3xe93r5n8pe4w1tfxt4err9wi3h7sy93yb9kghbkba5ettfobqjkjbqg1sig
Banano
ban_3yo7tkdcsx5iin1wz3bfy64um44jxoi6jn557snhjpoq7haexmty33ymu3my
PhotoCred to CryptoMonkeys for the cover art.
Check em out at cryptomonKeys.cc
