June 7, 2017Following on a note yesterday by Mitch Steves of RBC Capital, who sounded a bullish note about Nvidia (NVDA) because of the efficiency of its chips in an experiment in “mining” the virtual currency Ethereum, Steves is back today with a bit of clarification.Steves writes it’s “fake news” that either Nvidia’s or cards from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are being used to mine Bitcoin.Alluding to “reports” to that effect, Steves writes today that “this is not the case as Bitcoins are mined using ASICs and without becoming too technical about the terms, mining Ethereum is 'ASIC resistant' making it unprofitable."A CNBC report yesterday by Tae Kim mentioned both Bitcoin and Ethereum in the same piece.What to Read NextGDAX Is Refunding All The Traders Who Lost On The Margin Flash Crash.Out Of Coinbase's OWN Pockets!In this second installment of our DIY Ethereum mining guide, we’ll look at how to install and configure Linux to setup your rig as an automated, remotely-manageable appliance.

Don’t be dissuaded if you’ve never used Linux before—our step-by-step guide makes it simple!Why Linux over Windows?First, it’s free—and saving ~$100 on the operating system is a big plus when you’re trying to maximize profitability.Other reasons include lesser hardware requirements (Linux is perfectly happy running from a USB stick plugged into ancient hardware!), simpler remote administration capabilities, and oftentimes better stability.The downside of running Linux is that video driver support isn’t on the same level as Windows, and things like GPU undervolting are trickier (but still possible via BIOS mods).If you missed the hardware portion of our guide, make sure to check it out first.The following is heavily adapted from my original 2013 Litecoin mining guide, updated for the latest Xubuntu LTS version, the new AMDGPU-PRO drivers, and necessary ethereum mining software.If you’re a bit nervous because you’ve a complete Linux newbie, don’t be.Simply follow the step-by-step instructions exactly as they’re written, and you’ll be fine.

Even if you’ve never done anything like this before, you should be up and running in roughly an hour.Before we even get to Linux, let’s take a minute to make sure that your mining computer’s BIOS settings are in order.Power on your computer, and press the “delete” key a few times immediately after power on.You should end up in the BIOS configuration area.Do the following, then save & exit: Xubuntu is a lightweight version of Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution.best bitcoin wallet singaporeMost other distros should work just fine, but be aware that the GPU drivers require the presence of Xorg, which means server distros that don’t have a GUI will not work properly.bitcoin justice departmentAt the Xubuntu desktop, press CTRL+ALT+T to open a terminal window.bitcoin qt location

With SSH installed, you can unplug the keyboard/mouse/monitor from your miner, and complete the rest of the installation from your desktop computer.Simply download Putty onto your desktop, run it, and enter the IP address of your mining rig (type ifconfig at the Xubuntu terminal to find your miner’s address if you don’t know it—it will probably look like 192.168.0.x).That should bring up a remote terminal session to your miner, which is more or less just like sitting at the keyboard in front of it.bitcoin za paypalIf you plan to manage your mining rig remotely over the internet, you’ll need to forward port 22 on your router to your miner.reuters bitcoin economyMake sure that you use a strong Xubuntu password!mercedes benz bitcoinSetup should be pretty quick from this point, as now you can simply copy text from this webpage (highlight it and press CTRL+C) and then paste it into your Putty session by simply right-clicking anywhere inside the Putty window.

I highly recommend that you complete the remainder of the guide in this manner, as it eliminates the risk of typos!Next up, we’ll install AMD’s video drivers.I tested several versions and found that the latest release (17.10 as of 6/9/2017) gives the best performance.So that’s what we’ll use.The second command will reboot your rig, which will cause you to immediately lose your SSH (Putty) connection.Wait a few seconds to give the computer a chance to boot, and then re-establish a new connection via Putty, and re-login.Next up, we’ll install the Ethereum software that will let us create a new wallet address.We’ll need this to store the coins we receive from mining.You’ll be prompted to enter a password, and then to confirm it (use a strong password!).The output will be a long string between two curly braces { }.That’s your new wallet address—make a note of it (highlight it within Putty to copy it to your clipboard).Important: The combination of the password you just used to create this address *and* the associated encrypted key file is what gives you control over your new wallet address.

If you lose either of these, you’ve also lost control of your wallet and all of the coins associated with it—and there is literally nothing that anyone will be able to do to help you.Remember your password, and keep multiple backups of your key file(s)!Your key file(s) are stored in the ~/.ethereum/keystore directory.Copy the entire /keystore folder someplace safe to backup your wallet (I’ll cover backups in detail in a later section of this guide).If you ever forget your wallet address, you can type geth account list to see your addresses and the location of their key files.There are several options as far as mining software, and I’ve experimented with all of the popular ones.I think Claymore’s miner is the best option, even if it does have two fairly significant downsides: it’s closed-source, and it’s not free (~1% of your mining time benefits the creator of the miner).Two alternatives are the stock ethereum miner (ethminer) and Genoil’s fork of the stock miner.They’re both open-source and free, but they have pretty crippling downsides.

The stock ethminer is much slower than Claymore’s miner (by a margin of over 5% on my test rig).In addition, ethminer creates the Ethereum DAG file on disk instead of in GPU memory, which is slow and uses a lot of space (and if you’re running off a USB stick, all those writes may eventually wear it out).Genoil’s fork seems to be nearly as fast as Claymore’s, and it doesn’t use physical disk space for the DAG, but it’s not stable (at least not for me).It often crashes, especially on startup (whereas I have yet to see a single crash on Claymore’s miner after nearly a week of full-time mining).The author abandoned development months ago, so improvements are unlikely.So, explanation aside, here is how to setup Claymore’s miner: First return to your downloads directory and grab the latest version (9.5 as of 6/9/2017): cd ~/Downloads /nanopool/Claymore-Dual-Miner/releases/download/v9.5/Claymore.s.Dual.Ethereum.Decred_Siacoin_Lbry_Pascal.AMD.NVIDIA.GPU.Miner.v9.5.-.LINUX.tar.gz Then create a new directory for it, and unpack it there: sudo mkdir /usr/local/claymore95 sudo tar -xvf Claymore.s.Dual.Ethereum.Decred_Siacoin_Lbry_Pascal.AMD.NVIDIA.GPU.Miner.v9.5.-.LINUX.tar.gz -C /usr/local/claymore95 Then let’s head over to the installation directory and create a startup script: cd /usr/local/claymore95 sudo chmod u+s ethdcrminer64 sudo nano mine.sh Nano will open a new blank text file; enter the following into it: #!/bin/sh export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100 ./:4444 -ewal YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.Miner01 -epsw x -mode 1 -tt 68 -allpools 1 Where it says YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS, use the address you created in step 5 (you’ll need to put “0x” in front of it).

The “Miner01” following your address can be changed to any friendly label that you want to give your miner (only important if you plan to run multiple rigs).It’s easiest to copy the last line from my guide into something like notepad, then replace YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS with your actual address there, and then copy the finished line into putty via right-click to get everything into nano without typos. as the mining pool here.It’s a fairly typical ETH pool that seems to have good reliability, but feel free to pick your own pool.Most don’t require registration, and simply payout to whatever wallet address you supply whenever a certain threshold is met (usually whenever you accumulate 1+ ETH)., /miners/[YOUR WALLET ADDRESS] You should see the Claymore miner start up.It’ll take a minute or two before it actually starts mining, but it should get there eventually.When you see a scrolling log of outputs that includes non-zero hashrates (expect hashrates in the low to mid 20s for unoptimized GPUs), you’re good to go.

If the script fails to start, or you see errors, make sure that you’ve created the script exactly as outlined in the guide.Press CTRL+C to exit the miner when you’re satisfied that it’s working.We want to set up our rigs automatically start mining whenever the rig is powered on.That way, we keep mining losses to a minimum whenever a power outage occurs, and we don’t have to worry about manually starting it back up in other situations.Then save and quit out of nano (CTRL+X).We’re essentially done at this point, but you’ll probably want to manually SSH into your miner from time to time to manually check on your hashrates & GPU temperatures, etc. Creating an alias will make that easy.You’ll probably want to run a full test now.The easiest way to do that is to close your Putty session and power down your miner.Turn it back on and the following should happen: Congratulations—you have your own headless linux ethereum miner!The next section of this guide covers setup under Windows, and then we’ll take a look at optimizing miner settings for better performance.