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There are several options for Mining Bitcoins some of these are no longer profitable, but for the sake of being thorough here they are in order of efficiency lowest to highest:
Methods
CPU Mining (minerd)
GPU Mining (cgminer, bfgminer)
FPGA Mining (Custom software - https://github.com/fpgaminer/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner)
ASIC Mining (cgminer, bfgminer,...
10
For Mac OSX users, you must have Snow Leopard (10.6) or newer
installed.
A fully-connected BitCoin wallet. see http://bitcoin.org/
If this is the first time you have launched BitCoin, it must
download and verify all the existing blocks in the system.
This can
take an hour or longer - just ignore it for a while.
Update: since the time of this ...
8
So is there a nice tutorial which explains how to start mining using FPGA.
Not really, not a "starting from scratch" one.
Or this is so complicated?
Yes, it is quite complicated - in order to work with FPGAs, some additional skills on top of software are required. You need to understand logic design and some (fairly basic) electronics in order to make ...
6
poclbm has not been set to alter the clock rate of your GPU. Windows media player is doing this when open and adjusts the system to what it requires.
If you specify clock speeds for your GPU via parameters or a separate application you can overcome this.
Theres a number of applications which effect clock rates on windows machines, flash player open within ...
6
If you want to allow connections from any machine, use:
rpcallowip=*
If you want to allow connections from one specific IP address, put that IP address instead of *:
rpcallowip=192.168.0.101
You can have as many of these lines as you like. Use one for each IP address you want to allow. And wildcards are also allowed:
rpcallowip=192.168.0.*
rcpallowip=...
6
BitMinter is an attempt at making just this sort of thing easier and a more pleasant experience.
Install Java if you don't have it, e.g. on Ubuntu sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre icedtea-netx (the icedtea-netx is for Java WebStart)
If you will mine in GPUs, install the latest drivers (e.g. from amd.com)
If you will mine on FPGA/ASIC, give yourself access ...
6
The higher difficulty means you will be reporting results less frequently to the pool. This reduces network load on both your system and the pool. It also reduces the restart delay for your mining hardware as it prepares for the next work unit. Most pools base the rewards on the number of difficulty 2 shares accepted. So they increase the reward based on ...
6
I was confused by this as well, but I figured it out through trial and error. AM means arbitrary message (they should have explained this), which is a regular message you send to the forging pool through your wallet.
First you must join the forging pool (Account Balance -> More Info -> Account Leasing). No additional message is necessary at this point.
...
5
After searching and searching I found these possiblites.
Use bitminter Java client in Version 1.1.2 http://bitminter.com/client/1.1.2/bitminter.jnlp (current version doesn't work)
Make your own miner which supports proxy
Use a tool like Proxifier (I have not tested it personally, because it is commercial)
5
"gen" is by default 0 (off), so you should not really need to specify "gen=0" anywhere.
"gen" will generate bitcoins (mining), but you should only do this if you know what you are doing (you probably want to mine in a pool, and use proper tuned hardware/software).
And yes, you will only get transaction fees if you mine a block.
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No, it doesn't have to be. Mining doesn't require private keys, only (part of) the public one. Having only the address of the destination is enough, so the wallet can be locked.
5
Yes, this is related to GPU mining. From cgminer's README:
INTENSITY INFORMATION:
Intensity correlates with the size of work being submitted at any one
time to a GPU. The higher the number the larger the size of work.
Generally speaking finding an optimal value rather than the highest
value is the correct approach as hash rate rises up to a ...
5
The miner you are using does not support the stratum protocol. Instead you must use a pool that uses the old and now obsolete getwork protocol
If I see it correctly BTCGuild still offers the getwork access with the following URL:
minerd.exe -o http://btcguild.com:8332 -u username_1 -p password -a sha256d -R 2
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You need to be online because mining is sort of like a mathematical race: whoever finds the hash of the next block (with value less than the current target) wins. And in order to prove that you found this value before anybody else, you need to be online in order to broadcast it to other users.
4
If you are after bitcoins I wouldn't even spend time on CPU or GPU. It is now difficult with specialized hardware (butterfly labs, kncminer ... ). You can have a look at cloud mining (cexio) as well it is expensive and you have to have bitcoins already but you can buy and sell GH/s and you can actually make more from trading than mining.
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I don't know what this frequency analysis technique would do, so this answer corresponds to the second question you asked:
Blockchain.info connects to hundreds of nodes:
http://www.blockchain.info/connected-nodes
The IP address Blockchain.info shows is the address of one of those nodes that they happened to be connected to which first saw that transaction....
4
The hashespersec field reports the speed of the built-in miner. It does not (and can't accurately) report the hashing power connected to it via the getwork or getblocktemplate interfaces.
4
So, while Mac includes python it does not include gcc by default, even once you've installed Xcode 4.2 or later. For now, grab that, go to preferences, downloads and get the command line tools.
Once a version of Xcode higher than 4.6 is out you'll have to find a new way to install gcc on your mac, as gcc will no longer be included, but I guess that's a ...
4
The official bitcoin client from bitcoin.org has a CPU mining option. Add a file named bitcoin.conf to the bitcoin data directory, with the contents gen=1
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin#Bitcoin.conf_Configuration_File
4
I know this is an old question but recently I got a similar server.
I've tested rpcminer, GUI Miner (Which is actually UFASoft miner).
Personally the best I've found is CPUMiner. With a hash rate of about 75MH/s, it takes a bit of setting up as CPUMiner is normally used for Litecoin mining. CPUMiner gave me about 10%-20% more than the closest rival, which ...
4
You should use multiple workers if you want separate statistics for them, or if the pool you are using limits the number of connections that are allowed per worker.
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If you are mining bitcoins successfully, then don't worry about it.
There's no need to install the SDK. OpenCL drivers are included with AMD's Catalyst drivers.
Also note that solomining on a GPU could mean you never make a single coin. It may look like now that it will take a couple years, but by that time the difficulty is much higher. Unless you are ...
4
With the advent of ASICs, Bitcoin GPU mining is no longer profitable. I would recommend mining a Scrypt coin such as Dogecoin or Litecoin. (You can then trade it in for Bitcoin on an exchange, if you prefer.)
To answer your original question, yes, you can use one card for mining and the other for actually running the computer.
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I would highly recommend using Ubuntu Server for this, as long as you know what you are doing without a GUI. Not having a GUI at all means smaller OS size and much less OS tasks. This translates into more power savings. If you are using graphics cards, a non-GUI OS will improve your mining performance. If using an ASIC/etc. you probably will not see ...
4
Even on testnet the difficulty is sufficiently high that it will take you a long time to mine anything using cpu. (Lots of people testing ASICs, presumably.)
Your best bet is probably Testnet in a box. Then you can cpu mine just by using ´setgenerate true´ in Bitcoin Core.
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In order to be able to calculate the nonce for the next block you need all the information from the last known block. The time between the blocks is 10 minutes in average, so if you stay offline for more that 10 minutes you will not be able to perform any valid calculations and essentially you will be in a solo, forking mode, solving the wrong block.
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Bitcoin is a gossiping network. There is no hierarchy among the nodes, each node operates at equal privilege level. Bitcoin has an established protocol defining how nodes communicate with each other, and some stepping stones to find the first peers (although they could easily be replaced by other on-boarding mechanisms).
Whenever a node learns new data on ...
3
It is trivial for solo miners to use tor to hide IP adresses. This defeats mentioned above frequency analysis attack.
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No there is not. The ATI Catalyst driver implements OpenCL, which is what GPU miners use to accelerate the SHA256 hashing used in mining. The open source driver does not implement OpenCL. There are experimental projects that aim to implement OpenCL in the open source driver (Clover is an example) - as a Gallium3D state tracker - but so far these only run on ...
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