Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Dogecoin mining.

I wanted to be able to tip people on reddit with dogecoins, and for that I needed to obtain some, might as well go mining.  Unfortunately I have a trusty nvidia GPU, and not an AMD which is more efficient for mining crypto-currencies but that's OK, I don't want to profit, just make some coins so I can tip.

For that I need a couple things, a gpu miner designed for nvidia GPU's called cudaminer, and a pool (or two) to mine from.  Please visit the dogecoin subreddit for specific instructions.

My card is a Asus Geforce GTX650. I downloaded MSI Afterburner so I can fine tune the fan speed on the card and better monitor the temps.  I am going to up the gpu fan to 75%:


You are going to want to sign up for a pool (or two) in order to maximize your time.  A pool splits the mining workload amongst many miners and shares the payouts.  I signed up for hashfaster and netcodepool, but any from the litecoin pool list would work, as long as they support Doge.

The script to start cudaminer is going to do a few things, first, start the cudaminer program and tell it which card and settings to use to mine, and then specify the mining pool and workers to use for mining.  The best way to find the best settings for your card are to use trial and error as outlined in the main cudaminer forum thread from above.  I got my settings from the Litcoin Mining hardware comparison guide.

The script is in the x64 directory so it uses the 64 bit cudaminer.  Here is the script, replacing the worker with a fake one:
 cudaminer.exe -C 1 -H 1 -i 0 -l K6x32 -o stratum+tcp://stratum-us.doge.hashfaster.com:3339 -u worker -p password 


And soon enough we are in production!  We can also log into our pool to see the work we are doing:



Cudaminer does not support failover pools at the moment, once it does its a good idea to have a failover in case the pool goes down, and you don't loose out on mining time.