MinCoin - Getting started & Start mining!

MinCoin – How to get started.

To begin mining MinCoin (MNC) you need a few things like (i) a MNC wallet to hold MNC’s, (ii) a computer to mine MNC’s and (iii) some basic knowledge on the mining process.

Below, I will explain the steps to get your mining operation started. First, we will deal with setting up your first MNC wallet and using it. After you have become familiar with the MNC wallet and its use, we will continue with setting up your PC for mining MNC.

1. Create a MNC wallet

First, download the MinCoin-qt client.

Windows or Mac
http://www.MinCoin.com/

Once you have downloaded the client, unzip the files to a location you like (e.g. (in Windows), “C:\Program Files (x86)\MinCoin”). MinCoin has no installer – it is just an executable – so you place the files at the desired location yourself.

2. Run the client for the first time

Now launch the file ‘MinCoin-qt.exe’ located in your MinCoin folder. You might get a Windows pop-up asking if you want to allow the client to connect to the Internet. Since the client needs access to the Internet to function properly, choose the option that allows the client to access the Internet.

The first time the client starts it will download the entire so-called ‘blockchain’. This is a file that contains all MNC transactions ever made. Everyone who runs the official MinCoin client also hosts the entire blockchain on their PC. All clients share and update this blockchain by means of a torrent-like peer-2-peer system. If you make a MNC payment, your transaction is send out over the network and – in the end – stored as part of a block in that blockchain. Every time you start up the client, it will automatically receive the newer blocks since the last usage.

Once the blockchain has been downloaded (This can take some time, depending on your Internet connection).

When you click on the button ‘Receive coins’,you see your ‘wallet address’ which was automatically created for you by the client.

If you do not see any – create new. The address either starts with a ’6′ or a ’7′. This is your unique wallet address and only you can access this address. The address itself is used publicly as an address to receive MNC in. However, only you have the keys to access the MNC associated with this address. These keys are stored on your PC only (see below). You do not have to run the client 24/7; you can just run it now and then, during which the client automatically updates the blockchain. When the blockchain is being downloaded, the client will recognise if there are any transactions in respect of your wallet address and, if so, those transactions will be applied to your MNC balance.

3. What if my computer crashes?

Upon the first run, the MinCoin client creates a ‘wallet.dat’ file. This file contains the keys to your wallet address. Be very careful with this file, threat it like your pin-code. If you ever lose this file without having a backup, you will never be able to retrieve the MNC in your wallet again. They would be lost forever.

The ‘wallet.dat’ file is located in:

(Windows XP) “C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application data\

(Windows 7/8) “C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\MinCoin”

If you don’t see an “AppData” or “Application data” folder do the following:

(Windows XP) Open explorer -> go to Tools -> Folder options -> View -> select ‘show hidden files and folders’ -> apply.

(Windows 7/8) Open explorer -> go to Organize -> Folder options -> View -> select ‘show hidden files and folders’ -> apply. Now you will the AppData folder!

Make regular backups of the ‘wallet.dat’ file in case your computer crashes! Preferably, zip the ‘wallet.dat’ file with a password so that the backup file is useless for thieves.

4. Extra layer of security

To create an extra layer of security you can encrypt your wallet. To do so, start your client and go to Settings -> encrypt wallet.

Choose a password you will never ever forget, because if you do forget this there is no way to access your wallet ever again! Now that you have encrypted your wallet, a thief cannot access your wallet unless he is able to crack your password. Therefore, choose a password that is sufficiently random and long.

MinCoin – Start mining with a pool

5. What is mining

By running the official MNC client (basically, your wallet), your PC connects to all other MNC clients running and forms a network between which MNC payments can be made. Every MNC transaction is added to the blockchain, which stores all transactions and is shared between all connected clients.

To make sure that the network functions and integrity is maintained, the MNC network needs miners. Without going in too much detail, miners perform mathematical calculations that – generally speaking – check whether payments send out over the network are genuine and valid. In return, miners receive MNC’s as a reward. The amount of the reward is determined by the MNC protocol and part of the software itself. Mining is essential for MNC to function properly and, of course, a nice method to earn some MNC yourself.

6. Type of mining (solo or pool)

MNC can be mined ‘solo’ or by connecting to a pool. Solo mining is done on your own PC without help from others. Your PC tries to solve the calculations and when successful, it is called finding a so-called ‘block’. For MNC a block is 200 MNC which you receive in your wallet as miner. That sounds pretty nice, but the chance that you are successful in finding a block is not very high. It may take a lot of time (weeks) to obtain a block, because there is a lot of competition from other miners.

In order to spread the risk of finding a ‘block’, people have formed groups of miners in so-called ‘pools’. Each miner creates an account with a pool (run by smart people that know the ins and outs of mining) and let’s his minder(s) work in a pool with other miners in a joint effort to find a block. When a block is found, the pool software divides the revenues of the block found to all miners of the pool in accordance with the rules of that pool. It is quite common that pool owners also pay you as a miner for submitting mining power even if you ultimately do not find a block. This makes mining in a pool a lot more interesting for the casual miner and miners with only a small amount of mining power than solo mining.

In this guide, we will focus on pool mining.

7. Joining a pool

There are already a lot of pools that support MNC mining. The pools differ in the rules, payout methods and fees but the larger pools use similar conditions.

In this guide I use guugll MNC Pool as example.

You need to go to the pool’s website http://www.guugll.eu:11327/static/ .

8. CPU or GPU mining

You can mine MNC with the CPU of your PC or your GPU (the 3d chip of your video graphics card). For mining MNC, GPU mining is generally a lot more powerful than CPU mining. CPU mining is rarely profitable unless you do not have to pay for the electricity (mining requires quite some electricity).

If you want a list of the kHash/s other people get with specific video cards you can check this topic on the MinCoin forum: http://forum.MinCoin.com/index.php?topic=264.0 or check this hardware mining comparison site: https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Mining-hardware-comparison (this one is made for Litecoin – another crypto currency -, but since MinCoin also uses ‘scrypt’ for mining it provides useful information).

8.1. CPU Mining

First, we will describe CPU mining.

For CPU mining, you need a third party program. There are several software solutions for CPU mining. This guide takes ‘ScryptMiner – GUI’ as example. This miner has a dedicated thread at Bitcointalk.org where you can download the latest version: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=62414.0

After downloading the latest version, extract it to a folder of choice and then run ‘ScryptMiner.exe’.

The program provides for several options. You will notice the details of the pool inserted as well as the username and the password. The data inserted matches the credentials created at the pool website. The pool server details can usually be found in the FAQ of the pool website.

The option ‘thread’ relates to the numbers of cores of your CPU. Every core that your CPU has counts as a ‘thread’. Therefore, if you have – for example – an AMD X6 CPU, you have 6 threads. If you want the software to use all 6 cores, you can choose this option form the ‘Threads’ dropdown list, but it is also possible to keep a few cores free for other tasks.

Now press ‘Start Mining’ and the program will try to start mining (give it 30 – 60 seconds to start).

Note that it will take some time before your kHash/s will appear on the pool’s website. Furthermore it is noted that everything below 500 kHash/s is not very accurate.

8.2. GPU Mining

Below, GPU mining is described.

First, we will create another worker at the pool’s website to keep things separated. I recommend doing so in order to know where to start looking if something is not working correctly.

In this guide, credentials for the GPU mining worker are:

username: YourMNCAddress

password: x

GPU mining also requires third party software. This guide takes ‘cgminer’ as example. You can download the latest version here: http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/

After downloading the latest version, extract it to a folder of choice. In that folder where the cgminer.exe file is located, you need to make a new text file (.txt).

You can make a new .txt file by clicking the right mouse button and go through the menus appearing. This will create an empty text file in the folder.

Name the text file ‘guugll mining pool.txt’ or something that you will continue to recognize.

Now open the text file and add this single line to the file:

cgminer.exe –scrypt -o http://www.guugll.eu:11327 -u YourMNCAddress -p x –intensity 13

This line is a command line running the cgminer.exe file including certain commands. Those commands are called ‘flags’ and set certain data or options of the program. Below, you will find a brief explanation of the flags.

–scrypt means that you are mining a scrypt coin. You have to add this flag to let cgminer know that you need a specific type of mining method

-o means the server you are connecting to

-u means username

-p means password

–intensity (also used as –I) means the intensity your card is working to solve blocks (please note that higher is not always better)

Note that this is a line to begin with; there are many other parameters that can be configured and tweaked to obtain optimal results. You can read up on the different parameters here:
https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer/blob/master/SCRYPT-README

Now save the .txt file as a ‘batch’ file (by changing the extension of the text file from ‘.txt’ to ‘.bat’). You can do so in the file explorer if the explorer is configured to show file extensions. Another method is using the ‘save as’ option of the text editor with which you have opened the text file.

You have to create a filename with .bat and select ‘All Files’ at ‘Save as type’.

When you have saved this file, double click on the .bat file and a command window will pop up.

This command window gives you some information on your GPU temperature (as reported by your video card), fan speed, average kHash (may differ from that reported by the pool website) and more geekish data.

If you run into problems like ‘cgminer stopped responding’ instantly, you probably need to download the AMD APP SDK, which can be found here: http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/heterogeneous-computing/amd-accelerated-parallel-processing-app-sdk/downloads/

A good tool to completely uninstall your AMD driver is:  AMD Uninstall Utility

Hardware errors appear most of the time because your settings are too high (like the intensity setting). Try lowering them and play with the settings in the .bat file until you reach an optimal balance between noise, temperature and (uncorrupted) kHash rate. Preferably, your GPU temperature should hover around 75C. This may take some experimenting.

It is also possible that you have the newest drivers and windows isn’t allowing you to load your GPU for 100%

You should add the following line above the “cgminer.exe” line in your .bat file:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

Mining Mincoin

The major factor which impacts hash rate/hardware errors is the thread_concurrency. The second most important factor for some cards is the ratio of core speed to memory speed. Typically optimum values of thread_concurrency are a multiple of 64 and vary per card and per card family (see below). The (core speed/memory speed) quotient should be 0.8 or less for 5xxx/6xxx cards and 0.7 or less for most 7xxx cards. Some evidence suggests that different 7xxx cards may have different ideal core:memory clock ratios, too.

GUIMiner-scrypt is out! Comes with all settings in this thread and all miners. No more command line interfaces! Try it here.

For all series cards,

Install AMD APP SDK: http://developer.amd.com/tools/hc/AMDAPPSDK/downloads/Pages/default.aspx

Install latest AMD drivers: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

or

Use current recommend AMD driver (12.8):

13.1 32-bit

13.1 64-bit

AVOID 12.10 DRIVERS, THEY SEEM TO BREAK LITECOIN PERFORMANCE. 13.X SEEM TO BE OKAY.

5xxx series cards

Use cgminer.

Command line to run:

cgminer –scrypt -o http://www.guugll.eu:14327 -u walletAddress -p x –thread-concurrency ???? -I 18 -g 1 -w 256

You can use pretty much any thread_concurrency between 1536 and 8192 that is a multiple of 64. Some people recommend using 4 or 5 * the number of SPs. You can find those in the table here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_(GPU_family) (1st number in core config)

Recommended thread concurrencies for

57xx cards: 2368-4096 (3200 is common)

58xx cards: 4096-8192 (5600, 7168, and 8000 are common)

5970 card: 4096-8192 (5632 or 8000 are common)

Typical 5xxx series performance: 0.255 kh/s/shader

6xxx series cards

Use cgminer.

Command line to run:

cgminer –scrypt -o http://www.guugll.eu:14327 -u walletAddress -p x –thread-concurrency ???? -I 18 -g 1 -w 256

You can use pretty much any thread_concurrency between 1536 and 8192 that is a multiple of 64. Some people recommend using 4 or 5 * the number of SPs. You can find those in the table here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Islands_(GPU_family) (1st number in core config)

Recommended thread concurrencies for

67xx cards: 2368-4096 (3200 is common)

68xx cards: 3008-6144 (4800 is common)

69xx cards: 4096-8192 (5600, 7168, and 8000 are common)

6990 card: 4096-8192 (5632 or 8000 are common)

Typical 6xxx series performance: 0.313 kh/s/shader

7xxx series cards

Use reaper or cgminer versions 2.11.3 and up (see update below). Set thread_concurrency to somewhere slightly below 64 * bus_width_of_card_in_bits. So, for a 7950, that would be 64 * 384 = 24576; ideal values are 21712 or 24000. Find your bus width here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Islands_(GPU_family)

To find the optimum thread_concurrency for your card, you will need to search above and below this estimate ideal value and see what is fastest.

If you’d like to use reaper, follow the steps below.

Make reaper.conf the following:

kernel reaper.cl

save_binaries yes

enable_graceful_shutdown no

long_polling yes

platform 0

device 0

# device 1

# device 2

# device 3

mine mincoin

device ? must be added for every card you have to avoid using the CPU as well to mine. Make sure when reaper starts that it states that the CPU platform is disabled. CPU mining does not work correctly and may actually slow down GPU mining with reaper.

Example configuration (550kh/s, 7950) of litecoin.conf:

host yourpool.com ### Do not add http://!!

port 8344

user username

pass password

protocol litecoin

worksize 256

vectors 1

aggression 20

threads_per_gpu 1

sharethreads 32

lookup_gap 2

gpu_thread_concurrency 21712

Save litecoin.conf and run reaper.exe.

The 7xxx series can be tricky, for instance the 7770 seems to have an optimum thread concurrency of 8000 and works fine with cgminer and an intensity of 16 (I get 191kh/s with those settings). The 79xx cards should be amenable to the configuration above and are the fastest possible cards you can mine with.

Optimal thread concurrencies for 7xxx family:

7770: 8000 (200 kh/s, aggression 19)

7850: ????

7870: 15360 (400 kh/s, aggression 19)

7950: 21712 or 24000 (~575 kh/s)

7970 (cgminer): 22392 (~700 kh/s can be obtained with a core/memory ratio of 0.57)

7970 (reaper): 20992, 21712, or 24000 (~

7750: ????

7770: 8000 (200 kh/s, aggression 19)

7850: ????

7870: 15360 (400 kh/s, aggression 19)

7950: 21712 or 24000 (~575 kh/s)

7970 (cgminer): 22392 (~700 kh/s can be obtained with a core/memory ratio of 0.57) or 8192 (-g 2 -w 256 -I 13)

7970 (reaper): 20992, 21712, or 24000 (~650 kh/s can be obtained with reaper and core/memory ratio of 0.57, e.g. 900 MHz core and 1580 MHz memory. Over 725 KH/s can be achieved with memory overvolting.)

Typical 7xxx series performance: 0.321 kh/s/shader

If reaper crashes periodically on a single card, use the following python script to keep it alive (starts reaper, runs for two hours, shuts it down, then restarts it):

import os, subprocess, time

while True:

print(“Starting reaper…”)

p = subprocess.Popen(“C:\\Users\\my-pc\\Desktop\\reaper\\reaper.exe”)

time.sleep(7200)

print(“Terminating reaper…”)

p.terminate()

time.sleep(10)

This seems to fix the problem for my 3x 7950 rig.

Update: 3-20-13

cgminer versions 2.11.3 and up can be used to mine with high thread concurrencies now. Follow these instructions:

WINDOWS: Open console and type

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

Now, close the console (it will not work if you open cgminer in the same window). Open cgminer using a .bat or a new console, high thread concurrencies will now work.

LINUX: Open terminal and type

export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100

Now high thread concurrencies should work in cgminer.

TABLE OF USER REPORTED HASH RATES AND SETTINGS

https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Mining-hardware-comparison

CARD MEMORY SPEED SETTINGS

Usually it is most effective to have the memory speed of the card equal to or greater than the core clock speed. For some cards this is more important than others, but this is generally true. From experimental data for a 7770, a (core speed)/(memory speed) ratio of 0.7 or less is recommended.

HETEROGENEOUS MIXTURES OF CARDS

CGMINER: Use a comma to separate thread-concurrency values, eg. –thread-concurrency 3200,8000. Values correspond to the card number in zeroeth order.

REAPER: Run multiple instances of reaper. To do this, clone the folder and then add “device x” to reaper.conf, where x is the number for the card in zeroeth order.

RAM REQUIREMENTS ON-MOTHERBOARD

The equivalent amount of system RAM as for the sum of all the vRAM used by the GPUs is required when mining with reaper. For instance, 3x 5970s mining with thread_concurrency values of 8000 each would require 3x 500MB = 1500MB system ram (plus additional RAM for the OS). The memory requirements for 7xxx cards are also higher because of larger thread_concurrency values, for instance a thread_concurrency of 24000 means 1.5GB system RAM per card is required.

THREADS PER GPU

Some people state that increased hash rates are experienced upon increasing the number of threads per GPU in 5xxx series cards (-g # in cgminer or threads_per_gpu # in reaper). That has not been my experience with 6xxx or 7xxx cards, but you can try it and see if it helps out your hash rate.

source: http://mincointalk.com/index.php?topic=9.0

MinCoin - Getting started & Start mining!