ASICs are coming fast, and we must act soon to prevent long term damage to the Dogecoin community. Please read and help convince others that something needs to be done soon!
For my first mining rig, I dropped close to 1700 dollars, but you can actually get closer to the same performance that I get for much cheaper, and it will pay for itself very quickly. Here’s how.
3x Graphics Cards - $600
None of the cards I linked are in stock? Try this out. Its automatically updated with in stock cards.
In stock 270, good brand too:
ASUS R9270-DC2OC-2GD5 Graphics Cards
My original cards for this build is out of stock, and 270s are starting to move upwards in price, if the price for 270s goes towards 250 dollars, you are better off getting a 270x for a little more, like these:
Sapphire Radeon R9 270X 4GB GDDR5 DVI-I/DVI-D/HDMI/DP Dual-X with Boost and OC version PCI-Express Graphics Card 11217-04-20G
Out of stock, last I checked:
3x Gigabyte R9 270 GDDR5-2GB 2xDVI/HDMI/DP OC Graphics Card (GV-R927OC-2GD) - People report 450 kHs with these.
(XFX 270 925MHz Boost 2GB DDR5 DP HDMI 2XDVI Graphics Card were out of stock, last I checked)
These are the core of the machine and are what gives you all your doge. Running three of these, you can hit around 1200-1350kH/s or more in mining speed. This is quite a bit for the price, and likely to be the best bargain for your money.
Or you can go for a 270x, they are more expensive but you will generally get more Dogecoins out of them:
ASUS R9270X-DC2T-2GD5 Graphics Cards R9270X-DC2T-2GD5
CPU - $38
AMD Sempron 145 Processor
Processing speed of the CPU makes no difference for mining. We just need something that can run the operating system. Plus this CPU is actually good because it uses less power.
Motherboard - $89
ASUS M5A97 R2.0 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
This motherboard is a good choice for being cheap and able to handle the 3 graphics cards (Up to 4 actually). But you will need powered extenders.
Power Supply - $149 or $189
SeaSonic Platinum SS-860XP2 Power Supply
This is a really high quality power supply. The main benefit this has over other power supplies that are a little cheaper, is that the energy efficiency is much better than what others recommend (Being Platinum Rated). This will mean your electricity is much cheaper, and over the long run it will pay for itself. So you can pay an extra 40 bucks for this or go with a slightly cheaper one like this $149. Just make sure it is at least gold rated or you will be really wasting more electricity than necessary.
Hard Drive - $45
32 GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive
Just big enough for the OS. Since we are just using it for mining this will be fine. You can also get away with using a fast USB drive if you want to boot Linux off of it.
Riser Cables for Graphics Cards -- $45 Total
The motherboard has 2 PCI-Express x16 and 2 1x slots. So you can go with 2 PCIE “1x-16″ risers and 1 PCIE “16x-16x” Riser or vice versa. I went with 1- x16 riser and 2 x 1 to 16 riser to reduce power usage through the motherboard. It is important for the 1x to 16x ones are powered, so that your motherboard isn’t overloaded. Risers are also necessary to help disperse heat.
1x Micro SATA Cables -- PCI-E Express 16X Riser Card with Flexible Cable - $15
2x Qody PCI-E Extension Cable: 1X to 16X (powered) - $30
Ram -- $44
Kingston Hyper X Blu 4 GB 1600MHz DDR3 Non-ECC CL9 Desktop Memory (KHX1600C9D3B1/4G)
All we need is 4gigs or so of ram. RAM has no impact on mining, we just need enough to run the OS. You might be able to pick up a stick for slightly cheaper, but this one is good and more consistently in stock. Plus free shipping with Amazon Prime.
Case $~14
Milk Crate Case
Most miners go with a simple milk crate to hold their components. I use 2 of them, 1 to hold my power supply and hard drive, and another stacked on top with the motherboard, graphics cards and other components. Mine are 13inches x 16inches x 10inches(Height) and I wouldn’t getting any that are much smaller. You can probably find these cheaper at an office max or a home depot than on amazon.
You will also need to line your crates, so that your motherboard can lay flat, I use Plastic Canvas. Its sturdy but has holes and helps with ventilation. Others options include using Plastic Standoffs instead of the canvas. Just make sure whatever you get doesn’t generate static electricity, as this can be very bad for your computer.
You will also need:
Some Zip Ties to help secure things in place.
Something to hold your graphics cards up. You might have to get creative here. I simply used stuff I had lying around the house. (A Wooden Square Rod with Grooves). You want something at least 20ish inches (50 cm) long, and sturdy enough to hold 3 cards. If it bows downward at all, its a no go. If it can release a static charge easily, its a no go. Something like this or this.
Some people may opt to screw their cards in. I’ve gotten fancy with zip ties but it probably isn’t as secure as actually screwing them in.
Total -- $1024 (1064 with better power supply)
Not bad! This is pretty cheap and one of the most effective machines for the price per coin you will gain.
Nice to Haves
Cheap Good Wireless Card
Make sure the wireless card is PCI, not PCIE, so if you want to add another graphics card later, you won’t be using a PCIE slot by your wireless card.
Make sure you grab one of these if you will be needing it.
Windows 7
You will need this if you prefer Windows over Linux.
This board supports up 4 cards, so if you wanted you could grab 4 270s, a beefier power supply (At least 1050 watts or second power supply), and another riser you could run all 4 cards at once. But this of course brings the price up.
And that should be everything you need! This assumes you already have a keyboard, mouse and monitor you can use to start your miner up.
So how much Dogecoin can you make from this? At the current difficulty of 1300, you would get around 11027 dogecoins a day for 1.20-1.3mH/s. How much cash is that equivalent to? Around 15-20 bucks a day. So it begin to pay for itself after less than 2 months! Even the machine I paid 1700 for 2 months ago has already made me back more money than I paid for it, thanks to dogecoin. But to be fair I got into it when the difficulty was much lower, and who knows what prices are a month from now. They could go up or down so its always risky. But the good thing is you still have a decent computer if you stop mining, and not lose all your cash if you bought coins. I just purchased my second rig and this is what I went with.
3 months ago, I knew very little about cryptocurrencies and dogecoin wouldn’t even exist yet. I had heard about bitcoin before, but I hadn’t looked at it in detail at all. I didn’t know about the big price increase and crash in April 2013, or any of that stuff. But hearing that it went from 30 dollars to 600 dollars(and later all the way to 1150) in 1 year was enough to grab my attention. I was on the fence a few times about trying out mining and seeing the price increase had me kicking myself for not getting on it sooner. So from here on out I would spend the next few months to make sure I would take the time to get involved so I wouldn’t miss another opportunity.
So it begins…
The first thing I did was bought a few BTC for around 650 on Coinbase here. This was pretty stupid of me, as I really had no idea what I was getting into at the time, but I got lucky that I got in before all the hype had completely taken over. But since it was close to half of my savings, it did make me pretty nervous to see it dip down to 500 a few times since then. It has been steady at 800 for a few weeks so it seems like I got in at a decent time.
So I had bought a few BTC, now I wanted to take it to the next level and actually start mining the stuff. I spent a few weeks researching how I would do this, and I saw that BTC was pretty much impossible to mine and all the ASICs were on back order, but LTC (Litecoin) was pretty profitable. With 3 7950‘s, I could get 1LTC a day (As of November 25th 2013). At the time, LTCs were going for 40 bucks each, so this seemed like a great opportunity.
Buying My Mining Machine
So I put together my system with 3 7950′s on Amazon (I signed up for the free Amazon Prime trial so I could get free 2 day shipping on all my stuff), and had it by November 27th. My goal was to make sure that if mining became unprofitable, that I could use the computer to replace my 4 year old desktop, so I put beefier components than necessary so if I started to use it I wouldn’t have to pickup anything else. CPU and RAM can be a lot more basic than what I chose, but here is what I got, some of this stuff is out of stock now:
Video Cards -- Most Recommended for Mining are the 7950s -- Hard to get the other 7950s so I went with these 3x Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB DDR5 HDMI/DVI-I/Dual Mini DisplayPort PCI-Express Graphics Card with Boost 21196-00-20G - Out of stock, you can try the other cards I have listed here.
Ram -- Overkill for mining Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory (CMZ16GX3M2A1600C10)
Power Supply -- One of the most Efficient Power Supplies, Keeps Electricity costs down -- Seasonic PLATINUM-860 ATX 860 Power Supply
CPU -- Overkill for mining AMD FD8320FRHKBOX FX-8320 FX-Series 8-Core Black Edition
Motherboard -- Has 3x PCI x16 Ports for Cards, so you only need to get unpowered extenders ASRock MB-990EX4 Socket AM3+/ AMD 990FX/ AMD Quad CrossFireX& nVidia Quad SLI/ SATA3&USB3.0/ A&GbE/ ATX Motherboard
SSD -- Overkill but not that much more Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 120GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Single Unit Version Internal Solid State Drive MZ-7TE120BW
Wireless Card -- Wouldn’t recommend this without extenders to move your Graphic Cards out of the Way Cheap Wireless Card w/ High Reviews
Extenders to help reduce heat -- PCI-E Express 16X Riser Card with Flexible Cable - Out of Stock -- Risers may be hard to find now.
The total for everything was 1,646.54. If I went with a cheaper hard drive, RAM, CPU and motherboard I could have saved 150 more. The 3 video cards themselves were 300 each, so the minimum won’t move much from 1400-1500ish for this setup. I would not recommend skimping on the power supply, it is very important to have a platinum rated supply for mining as it reduces overall power consumption of your machine and saves you electricity costs.
Lets Start Mining!
So I had my machine, now I needed to set it up so I could start mining. I installed Linux Ubuntu, set up the drivers and scripts necessary to start mining with CGMiner. I then signed up for a mining pool (At the time it was LTC though), and filled in the stratum details, and off it went. Things were going pretty good for the first week. I was making a little over 1LTC a day off of the 3 cards going at 520khz each. Some people get much more off of 7950s, but after tweaking with the overclock settings and crashing a card a few times, I just left it alone, as I didn’t wish to damage the cards. Going from 520 to 600-700 was possible with certain models of 7950s, but my model was not as recommended for mining and it could put a lot more stress on the card which I didn’t think was worth it.
Starting in the second week, a lot more miners were starting to come online for LTC. The hype wave was catching up to me, I was a little ahead but it didn’t take long for LTC to start dropping to below 1 LTC and even 0.5-0.7 LTC a day. The price of LTC would start dropping soon a well, going from 35-40 dollars to 20-25 dollars, so the forecast for making back my money on the machine was beginning to look bleak. I had to start looking at other options.
Along comes DOGE
Dogecoin was introduced on December 10th, 2013. I started reading about it, and I loved how everyone was using it as a parody for Bitcoin and LTC, as it really showed how ridiculous everything seemed to be. The community was great and everyone was super nice, which is very unusual for an anomymous internet community. It was a great motivator for me to learn more about how cryptocurrencies and scrypt coins worked. Before I just cared about getting my coins, now I wanted to know why and how I was getting my coins.
The cool thing about my litecoin miner, is that it could be used for any other scrypt coins, which includes DOGE, and it was really trivial to switch over. I would just need to change the URL and login details of my launch script and it was ready to start mining DOGE.
On December 19th I started mining Dogecoin. It was the first real coin after LTC that I got into and it was awesome to see me getting 50k+ coins a day vs 0.5 coins a day in litecoin. With the above factors, I knew something about Dogecoin would separate it from the others, in fact here is a quote I made on reddit from over a month ago:
“People keep thinking that there is only room for 1 cryptocurrency to be accepted. But they don’t realize that bitcoin/litecoin are paving the way for any of these currencies to be used for everyday purchases, because after one is implemented, it becomes trivial to implement others. They would mostly piggy back on the same infrastructure.
For me, I am keeping my dogecoin/litecoin as well as bitcoin. A few hundred bucks lost if I am wrong, but worth the gamble I think.
Dogecoin may seem like a fad but I think it also has a lot of other benefits over other cryptocurrencies as well. The psychological factor alone of seeing thousands of coins instead of 0.000003 coins from a few hours of mining will draw more people in. Hell, people are excited for 3 dogecoin tips and offering to do tasks for a few hundred… and are going to all these faucets that offer 5 coins. But in reality this is just fractions of cents, but people are flocking to it. The less seriousness and playfulness of it makes people less intimidated by it as well.
Dogecoin will be #2 I think, unless there are technical factors which will limit its growth over Litecoin.”
I still think this may be true today. Litecoin is great, and is the only reason Dogecoin exists as it currently does, but dogecoin has the advantage of drawing so many people in. If you look at the size of the litecoin(18000) vs dogecoin(43000, and only around for a few months!) subreddits alone, you can begin to understand why I may think this. And shortly after I started mining dogecoin, I decided to make a website dedicated to the coin, as you can see here.
So How Did the Mining Go?
So I paid 1650 for the machine, how much did I make? I haven’t made actual cash per se, as I haven’t cashed out anything, but this is how my Portfolio looks:
So pretty close! If I were to sell all my coins, I would be able to get around 1600 USD for them, minus some exchange fees. So mining pretty much paid for itself. I probably spent an extra 150-200 on electricity though, so this puts the break even point a little higher. By the end of February I should be ahead as long as the price of DOGE doesn’t crash, and if it grows (Which I think it will), I should be even further ahead.
The key is to stay on top on what new currencies come out and be ready to switch off a coin if the difficulty becomes too high. Look for new coins that aren’t just copies of other coins, but coins that have something interesting to offer. Doge was the first successful parody and its playfulness drew in many people. The community is gigantic and super friendly and I expect it to be around for quite some time. The willingness of many people to give out tips really is a great motivator to pull in other people. I hope it is able to keep the momentum.
In case your wondering, the screenshot is from an app I made called Cryptowatch, and you can find it on the google play store here. It is completely free with no ads. It pulls your balances in automatically and shows you the total worth of all your coins and all you have to do is enter your public addresses.
Hi all, a new version of the dogecoin client has been released, be sure to update.
Copied from the Reddit post:
You can find the complete post and trouble shooting information here.
I created an app for watching the balances of your public addresses on Android, called Cryptowatch, and a lot of people seem to not know that the dogecoin clients, bitcoin clients, litecoin wallet backups do not automatically stay in sync with your current wallet. This is really important to know if you send a lot of coins out of your wallet. The more often you do this, the more often you will need to backup your wallet. This is also why online websites and my app may show a different balance for your address than what you see in the client.
This happens because of how cryptocurrency clients work. When you send someone money, it is actually getting sent to two places. First, the person you are sending money to receives it, but the second address is what we call a “change address” that the wallet generates and uses to send the remaining coins. It is often described like breaking a 20 dollar bill. You buy something for 9 dollars, and get back 11. But instead of putting the 11 dollars back into your wallet, you put it into another wallet that belongs to you. This gives you some small privacy into which address is the payment address and which is the change address, so people can’t guess what you are buying or track your coins as easily.
The client program you use hides these details to you. You don’t know which change addresses you have and which are being used, you only know about your public key to your main address that shows up in your wallet. All the change addresses will be grouped under a single public key and show a totaled balance, even though they are actually separate. This creates a few problems.
Wallet Backups are NOT in Sync
This single address actually has many other addresses hiding under it.
First, many of the change addresses are only generated when they are used, or slightly before. Your client will start you out with 100 addresses, and when it runs out, it will make new ones. At the moment it begins making new ones, your wallet backups are no longer in sync with your actual wallet, because your coins are actually stored under several different addresses that aren’t saved in your backup. So if you send coins regularly from your wallet, make sure you do regular backups. If you have a large amount of coins that you don’t plan on spending, don’t keep them in the same address as an address you use to send coins from. Create 1 address that you don’t touch, and send coins there that you won’t move. In case you forget to do a backup, as long as you don’t send your coins from the address you shouldn’t lose any from that address. You can continue to send coins from the other address, and won’t lose as much if you don’t have the most recent backup.
Programs Can’t Show Balance Information
This creates another problem. When you go to make use of apps like Cryptowatch, the balance you see won’t be the same as what your client shows you, because you actually have several change addresses that aren’t shown. To fix this, you can create another public address in your wallet, and send everything from your public address with all the hidden change addresses to the other new address. You can then either send it back to the first address, or just use the new address to retrieve balance information. This will pull all the coins back to a single address.
So Again, How do you avoid going out of sync?
Use two addresses, 1 for sending, 1 for receiving and storing. Receiving/Storing coins does not make your wallet go out of sync. Only sending. This way if your wallet does go out of sync and you don’t make a backup you would only lose some coins from your sending address. Anytime you move coins from your storing/receiving address, make a new wallet backup. User “loserkids” on reddit pointed out that you can’t specify which address to use when sending through the client using the gui. So this storage address should be kept in a different wallet to avoid issues.
You can see other guides on wallets here:
Hi guys, I just released my free app for android, Cryptowatch, on the google play store. Here is a copy from the app description:
What This App Does
*Monitor the balances of your public addresses for dozens of different cryptocurrencies!
*You don’t need to provide any private keys, 100% secure with no chance that you will lose anything!
*Gives you up to date estimates on BTC values of your altcoins, as well as the USD total of your addresses!
*Great for checking balances of cold storage wallets or gifts that you have given to make sure they are used!
*Very simple to use and so much easier than checking dozens of wallets and addresses seperately to get balance information!
*Works with any public address for supported coins, even offline addressses! Your wallets don’t have to be imported into any third party service!
~~*Easy copy and paste to add your addresses.
*Quickly copy and share your public keys with others!
*Will be updated regularly with new coins and providers!
Supported Coins Currently Include (Please read below for disclaimer):
BTC,LTC,DOGE,ANC,BQC,BTB,BTE,CRC,DBL,DGC,DVC,FRC,FRK,FTC,GLD,IFC,IXC,JKC,MEC,MNC,MOON,NET,NMC,NRB,NVC,PPC,PTS,TRC,WDC,ZET
What it doesn’t do
*You can’t send currency through this app -- This will not be a planned feature either, sorry. I don’t want to store any sensitive data like private keys, and I recommend that you use the official wallets for this purpose.
*You can’t get specific transaction details -- Sorry, but many of the sources I get my data from do not provide specific transaction details, they only give me total received and sent for addresses. The app does keep track of balance changes though. It locally timestamps data to when the app retrieves it.This is not the time that the transaction was posted to the blockchain.
NO ADS, completely free! Permissions are only requested for retrieving and storing data, nothing crazy!
You can find it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.myoid.cryptowatch
A desktop version may be released in the future. Its currently working on PC but I want to polish it up a bit as it could be harder to update on pc.