The Easiest Guide To Mining Ethereum on Windows (and Siacoin, Decred, Lbry, & Pascal)
Since cryptocurrencies have risen exponentially in the past few months people want in. And one of the best ways to make money with currencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin is to 'mine' them. When you mine a cryptocurrency you are running a program on your computer to use your computers computing power on the network. Whenever your computer solves a piece of the puzzle, a block in the blockchain, your miner is rewarded. There are two main ways to mine:
- Rent out miners. I will not be covering this topic today.
- Use your computer as a miner.
I will go through start to finish on how to set up an Ethereum miner on Windows. If you have an Nvidia Graphics card I would suggest dual booting your computer with a Linux partition because the Windows drivers are terrible for mining with Nvidia GPUs. If you have Nvidia GPUs follow this guide here.
Step 1: Download the Mist Client
How to set up Mist
Once you have downloaded and installed this create your wallet and copy the address.
Step 2: Download and Install AMD Drivers
Step 3: Download the Claymore Dual Miner
Download Link
Find the most recent version for Windows. Right click on it, and select standard download. Once it is downloaded extract the file.
Step 4: Download the Sia Client
Sia Download
If you want to mine something other than Sia you will need to create a wallet for that coin. Once you have downloaded it make a wallet and copy the address.
Step 5: Edit the start file
Go in to your extracted Claymore file and fine the 'start.bat' file. Select it, right click on it and click 'Edit'. Once you are here you will need to delete the contents in it and paste this with your addresses and press save.
setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
::Remove the ‘::’s if you want to only mine Ethereum
::EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool us1.ethermine.org:4444 -ewal 0xf9ea6F60Dd61ffF6B2e1b34D274383AaBd918880.rig01 -epsw x
EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool us1.ethermine.org:4444 -ewal 0xf9ea6F60Dd61ffF6B2e1b34D274383AaBd918880.rig01 -epsw x -dpool stratum+tcp://sia-us-east1.nanopool.org:7777 -dwal ae847addc8f9a98c2dd41a2b35a3ca7d38da5e1fec0c423f9a1c6ac6f67e301c20fe6e6463dc/rig01/[email protected] -dcoin sia -dcri 18
You can change the number after -dcri to increase or decrease the intensity of dual mining. I have it set at 18 because this is the highest return for me. These addresses are set up to specific mining pools. Look around for the ones you think are best. Those are just my choices. This is also set up to mine sia, if you want to switch you will need to find a mining pool for the coin you want to mine.
Step 6: Start your miner
Double click on the 'start.bat' file.
Congratulations!! You are now mining Ethereum and Siacoin!
If you have any questions feel free to ask me. I'll help out as much as I can.
Awesome share. Appreciate the details. Can I mine ETC?
You can, that miner works with ETH and ETC all you have to do is get an ETC wallet and find an ETC mining pool. Then you just replace that info in the 'start.bat' file.
Wicked. Thanks Josh, you're the man! :)
Thanks! I'll be posting one for mining with Nvidia cards as well!
does it cover the electric bill when mining yourself?
I'm lucky enough to have pretty cheap electric and a few GPUs. So I am making around $1,500 - $2,000 a month and that includes electric.
how much is a KW ?
.065
Thanks for sharing.
Great share Josh! Thanks for your follow👍👍
@joshmocek
Thank you for sharing this. :-)
a big thumbs up mate,,,,keep em coming n i'l keep reading....n thanks for following
Nice post! I've messed around with mining years ago but haven't kept up with it. I'm kind of interested in getting back into it. I've currently got a Geforce 1080. Are AMD GPU's still way ahead of NVIDIA for mining, or has that gap closed at all? What kind of setup do you have Josh?
For ethereum mining amd is the way to go, but with Nvidia I would suggest mining ZEC. I'll post an article about how to do that either today or tomorrow. So my gaming pc has 2 980tis and that is mining around $300 worth or zec a month. Then I have two miners:
Ryzen 7 1700
Intel g4400
With 10 gpus 470s, 480s, and 580s.
Total I'm making about $1,500-$2,000 a month. Once I reorganize all my rigs I'll post pictures!
Very cool! Maybe I'll look into mining ZEC for the moment. Thanks for the help!
Can you do this with a regular pc or do you really need a souped up one?
It's not necessarily a nice pc that you need, it's a nice graphics card. I'll post some stuff on CPU mining later because depending on what you mine that can be pretty profitable as well.
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