Today we’re excited to announce our latest development: Ethereum Scrypt Cloud Mining!Several months ago, we locked our developers in the conference room and told them not to come up until this was complete.This morning, they walked out of the conference room victorious!For those who don’t know, Ethereum is an alternative cryptocurrency protocol developed by Vitalik Buterin since 2013.By some it it called Bitcoin 2.0.The new protocol has received community and professional support since being announced.The first sale of Ethereum coins raised over $15 million and today has a total market cap of nearly $75 million.You can learn more about Ethereum here.“More miners on the network definitely helps to increase the network security.It’s great to see operations & organizations such as Genesis Mining take an interest in supporting Ethereum,” said Vitalik Buterin in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine.We are very bullish on the future of Ethereum and are extremely excited to be able to offer this to our miners!

But as always, you can also upgrade a specific amount on the fly in your dashboard.CLICK HERE to start mining Ether!Our customers asked and we listened.Due to our large scale GPU mining activities we are excited to offer significant parts of our farms for Ethereum mining in the cloud.Users can benefit from our economy of scale and our geothermal powered and optimized GPU mining rigs in Iceland.We are bullish on Ethereum and look forward to giving our customers the chance to profit from this exciting innovation and also to support the network.All the best to you miners!As part of exploring the blockchain technology, and specifically the Ethereum ecosystem, I have settled on an IoT-related use case around solar energy grids.You can read more background in the first article in this series.In this post, I am going to focus on building a small private blockchain that I will later use to deploy Smart Contracts and build my solar energy marketplace demo on.I am going to use an Azure virtual machine to start a reasonably powerful mining node, and a Raspberry Pi 3 to simulate an on-premises equipment running a lighter, non-mining node, but which can still be involved in blockchain transactions.

We will be using geth, the Go Ethereum client, to set up our cluster.Since the blockchain is basically a peer-to-peer network, geth is used both as a client and a server connecting to the blockchain.The installation procedures are fairly straightforward, I will be going through all the steps in the next few paragraphs.bitcoin index meaningYou can start from one of the Azure DevTest Labs VM templates for Ethereum-Go, or you can install it from scratch on a base Ubuntu VM.how to convert bitcoin to pmIn this documentation I will be starting from a blank VM, just because I want to understand how all the bits and pieces fit together.bitcoin faucet no sign upYou can follow the official Ethereum installation instructions to install geth on your Ubuntu VM.btc china accept bitcoin

I would recommend using the latest stable version, i.e.do not add the ethereum-dev repository.sudo apt-get install software-properties-common sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ethereum/ethereum sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ethereum You can choose pretty much any size of Azure VM you would like, but since it is going to be mining (i.e.bitcoin anfangerprocessing transactions) you probably want to go for a D2- or D3-class machine.ethereum burn addressOnce you have installed geth on the VM, we are ready to get started.bitcoin wallet 64First, to initialize a new private blockchain, we will need what is called a Genesis block, which is going to be the first block in our blockchain.bitcoin atm safe

This first block sets a few fundamental parameters for our blockchain, captured in a genesis.json file: {: ,: ,: ,: : ,: ,: ,: ,: } Most of these values are pretty much zeroes, except for difficulty which sets the mining difficulty to a low level so that we don’t have to wait too long, or spent too much CPU time, waiting for transactions to be executed.litecoin value predictionsYou can read more about the Genesis block in Ethereum’s documentation for private test networks.Copy/paste this bit of JSON in a file, then we can initialize our blockchain: Once this is done, we are ready to run the geth console.The console is a JavaScript runtime environment that exposes Ethereum’s JavaScript APIs and allows you to interact with the blockchain from the command line.When running geth, we use a specific Network ID to differentiate from the public blockchain (whose Network ID is 1), and the nodiscover and maxpeers options to limit network connections for now.

The goal is to make sure that we do not connect to the public blockchain by mistake.geth --networkid 42 --nodiscover --maxpeers 0 console geth will complain that it has no default account, this is something we need to fix so we can start mining some Ether.WARNING: No etherbase set and no accounts found as default You can close the console using the exit command.Then create a new account: Enter a password and don’t forget it!You will need it to unlock that account.Geth will display your new account address: Another way to do this, and also get familiar with the Ethereum JavaScript APIs, is to use the console directly: Once you have created an account, you can explorer the Ethereum APIs from the console, for example you can list existing accounts using eth.accounts, and you can see that our new account has been set as the “coinbase”, i.e.the account that will receive mining rewards, using eth.coinbase.Now we can start mining!The mining process is very verbose by default, so I suggest you use the tmux or screen commands to be able to open a separate, clean window to enter commands in the console.

geth --mine --networkid 42 --nodiscover --maxpeers 0 console The first time, geth will spend some time generating its Ethash DAG; when it is finished, it will start mining blocks.While it is doing that, you can open a new virtual terminal using screen/tmux and attach a new geth console to the local node: Then you can check your account balance from the console: After a while, the mining process will start and your account will start getting credited with Ether.Of course this is not “real” Ether, this is just our own private Ether currency!Now, let’s build up our network a little bit by adding the Raspberry Pi as a peer node.In order to simplify things for this test/demo setup, I am going to configure direct connections, rather than using the Ethereum discovery protocol.In a larger private blockchain network, we would probably use bootstrap nodes in order to facilitate the discovery and connectivity of the different nodes.First, we need to retrieve the enode address of our VM, so the node running on the Pi can connect to it.

From the console, type admin.nodeInfo.enode and you will something like this: You will use this address later to configure the Pi client.In order to allow clients to connect, you will also need to restart the geth node with a non-zero maxpeers parameter, e.g.: geth --mine --networkid 42 --nodiscover --maxpeers 3 console I did not find a pre-built version of geth for the Raspberry, but it is easy to build it from the source code.First, download and install Go 1.6 from the official builds.At the time of writing, the latest ARM build was: Compile geth on the Pi from the GitHub repo: You will then need to use the same genesis file as above to initialize the node: In order to connect this new node to our VM, create a file static-nodes.json to point our client to the Azure VM’s public IP address.Just use the enode string we got from admin.nodeInfo, but replace the [::] with the Virtual Machine public IP address that you can find on the Azure Management Portal.Then copy this file in place in the Ethereum data directory: You can then run the node using the same networkid we used before; you can raise the verbosity just to see the networking messages and check everything is going OK.

./go-ethereum/build/bin/geth --networkid 42 --nodiscover --verbosity 5 console You should then see the synchronization start: I0524 08:23:19.851867 eth/downloader/downloader.go:299] Block synchronisation started You can use the admin.peers command from the console to check the two nodes are connected.It can take a little while for the nodes to sync.On the Raspberry Pi, let’screate a new account, e.g.from the console: On the mining VM, you can send some Ether using the account you created previously: since this source account is receiving the mining rewards, it should now have a few Ethers to spend.First, unlock the account using the passphrase: Then send a transaction using the account addresses you created: .: , : , : .(1,The transaction should be received on the Pi, where you can get the balance account to check you received the Ether: This is it, we now have a small, but working, private blockchain network!In the next few posts we will see how to write a Smart Contract, deploy it privately and then call it from different application contexts.