Mining Primecoin with one server and no pool?

Question

Is it possible to mine with just one server (for learning about mining, not for making a living!) and one wallet?

I've configured a Ubuntu VPS on a server I had spare and run Primecoind. My primecoin.conf has a random RPC username and password that I generated but I haven't put server=1 in the configuration file. I'm not sure if I should/need to.

When viewing the information of the process running, I can see the following data:

Every 2.0s: primecoind listtransactions & primecoind getmininginfo

Thu Jul 11 22:43:27 2013
{
    "blocks" : 16149,
    "currentblocksize" : 1000,
    "currentblocktx" : 0,
    "errors" : "",
    "generate" : true,
    "genproclimit" : -1,
    "primespersec" : 7,
    "pooledtx" : 2,
    "testnet" : false
}
[
]

I'm confused by a couple of things.

Firstly, why does pooledtx fluxuate from 0 to 2 from time to time. Secondly, how would I now if I have successfully mined for the first time and if there was any balance at all?

I've got MultiBit setup on my Mac with a wallet ID available.

I'm just unsure on how it all fits together. Any pointers would be appreciated.

Answer 1

pooledtx is likely the number of transactions that are waiting to be confirmed by the next block. These transactions are broadcast to the network and the miners collect them to include them in a block. Since primecoin still has a really low amount of transactions and since your mining a reward transaction this will swing between 1 (just your reward transaction) and 2 (someone just made a transfer).

Since you have a fully fledged primecoin client on your system to be able to mine (primecoind) it will also generate new addresses on demand, and the balance will be credited to those addresses. with primecoind listtransactions you'll see which addresses received the mined amount. You can now use primecoin sendtoaddress <primecoinaddress> <amount> to send any amount to an external address, i.e. your multibit client.

Answer 2

While true; do primecoind listaccounts; sleep 600; done

Would check if your wallet generated any coins ... Hope this helps

Answer 3

Primecoin defaults to the wallet in .primecoin/wallet.dat, which it creates the first time it is run. You should be able to transfer funds from the primecoind wallet to another one easily enough.

Multibit is a Bitcoin wallet, a different currency to Primecoin.