An Advanced Guide to Mining Dogecoin with CGMiner

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If you haven’t already seen it, be sure to check out the guide to getting started with CGMiner.

Just a warning before we start, if you let your card run too hot, you can risk the chance of permanently damaging it. 80 is what I keep my cards at, and some can go to 85 and even higher safely, but you will want to check with the specific card on what it can handle, some can be more and some are less.

So the basic guide can get you started with mining, but you won’t be really getting the most out of your card. This will go over some of the advanced settings that you can try out to get more out of it.

Beware, this can be tedious and/or frustrating. Your card will crash and you will need to reboot when you are trying to find the best settings. You may have driver issues. You might want to just find someone who has the same card as you and see what specs they used. If you want to not go through the hassle, this is a good place to start.

So here’s what CGMiner looks like after I start it with the bare config:

The two most important values are highlighted above. The Blue(on the left) is the temperature. The red(on the right) is the kH/s (Kilohash/sec), which means how much work your cards are doing.

This is with 2x270s. This is really low. So obviously I have a lot to work with.

1) Make sure you have a good set of drivers for your card. I am using the latest catalyst beta drivers, found here. Please note, some people have been having issues with these drivers, if you have drivers that are already working without issue with CGMiner, you may want to stick to those, or read more about which drivers may be best for your specific model card. You can find some details around this here.

2) Next, you need to make a bat file or a launch script. This guide will cover Windows. We do this because there are some command line parameters we need to set to make your GPU work to its maximum potential. Create the file cgminer.bat and place it in your CgMiner folder.

3) Copy this into the file:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer.exe

This won’t work if you didn’t set your pool information in the cgminer.conf file from the first tutorial, so either do that as mentioned in the first tutorial or add them as parameters to cgminer.exe in the bat file.

Now from here we will start adding other parameters to increase our mining rate. First I will go over some of the most used parameters and what they do, then afterwards we can see how we can actually go about getting the most out of our card.

Thread Concurrency:

--thread-concurrency is a parameter to tell your graphics cards how many different tasks it should be juggling at the same time. Depending on your card, this can be set for anything between 2-30,000. It may or may not help your performance, but most people set it between 10,000-25000. There is a way to get a good estimate on what thread count will be best, and this is detailed below.

GPU Overclocking Parameters:

The parameters --gpu-memclock and --gpu-engine allow you to specifically overclock your cards. If you don’t know the defaults off the top of your head, a quick way is to go into CgMiner and Press G, it will take you to the graphics card details screen:

: I’m running on low settings so it doesn’t lag me out while I do this tutorial = )

E: would be your --gpu-engine and M: --gpu-memclock for GPU 1. (You can also see these values if you go to change settings for a specific card). These are the baselines. More detail on how to change these follows below.

Intensity:

A value between 1-20, this is a general setting that makes our graphics cards work harder. Putting it on 20 will put your cards into high speed. Intensity is usually the last parameter that you will set, after you tweak everything else.

Changing the file to this alone will make your hash rate go way up:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer.exe -I 19

Where -I 19 is for intensity.

You can see the hash went up from 20kHs to almost 400kHs. But you can also see that at the top, there is “HW:2″. This is bad, it means we set the intensity too high. We can try lowering it until we have no more HW errors.

So, Intensity is the clear cut choice to get fast results in your mining speed. But there are other parameters that you may want to try out first.

Autofan and Temp Targets:

--auto-fan gives cgminer more control on keeping your cards a specific temperature. --temp-target 80 tells cgminer to keep your card around 80. You can also use --temp-overheat 85 to help prevent overheating. But these will need adjusted based on your card model. You should have --auto-fan on when you are starting to put more work on your cards.

So before you start overclocking, lets start with this:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer.exe --auto-fan --temp-target 80 --temp-overheat 85 -I 13

Depending on your card, your temp-target and temp-overheat may be different. Be sure to look up some recommended temps for your card. Reddit user RedstoneValley has pointed out that you shouldn’t be running your fans at 85% or more for long periods of time, as it will drastically reduce their lifespans. So if you notice your fans going at full speed all the time, you should kick it down a few notches. -I 13 is for Intensity 13, which we will use when we begin to overclock.

Changing the Parameters

Finding the Best Thread Concurrency

The Scrypt readme file has an excellent overview on finding the best thread concurrency:

First, find the highest thread concurrency that you can start it at. They should
all start at 8192 but some will go up to 3 times that. Don't go too high on the
intensity while testing and don't change gpu threads. If you cannot go above
8192, don't fret as you can still get a high hashrate.

Delete any .bin files so you're starting from scratch and see what bins get
generated.

First try without any thread concurrency or even shaders, as cgminer will try to
find an optimal value
cgminer -I 13

If that starts mining, see what bin was generated, it is likely the largest
meaningful TC you can set.
Starting it on mine I get:
scrypt130302Tahitiglg2tc22392w64l8.bin

See tc22392 that's telling you what thread concurrency it was. It should start
without TC parameters, but you never know. So if it doesn't, start with
--thread-concurrency 8192 and add 2048 to it at a time till you find the highest
value it will start successfully at.

So out of the file that looks like this in your cgminer directory:

scrypt130302Tahitiglg2tc22392w64l8.bin

Pull out the value that looks like the highlighted, and use + 2048 that for --thread-concurrency, if it works, add another 2048, and so forth. When it crashes, use the value previous to that. This will be for moving further into customizing the parameters, after we are finished overclocking, we will readjust it again.

So if you got to 24440 before you crashed, your file looks like this:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer.exe --auto-fan --temp-target 80 --temp-overheat 85 -I 13 --thread-concurrency 24440

Overclocking your Card’s Memory Clock and Engine

Also, the Scrypt readme has an excellent explanation for finding the best parameters for your card:

Then start overclocking the eyeballs off your memory, as 7970s are exquisitely
sensitive to memory speed and amazingly overclockable but please make sure it
keeps adequately cooled with --auto-fan! Do it while it's running from the GPU
menu. Go up by 25 at a time every 30 seconds or so until your GPU crashes. Then
reboot and start it 25 lower as a rough start. Mine runs stable at 1900 memory
without overvolting. Overvolting is the only thing that can actually damage your
GPU so I wouldn't recommend it at all.

Then once you find the maximum memory clock speed, you need to find the sweet
spot engine clock speed that matches it. It's a fine line where one more MHz
will make the hashrate drop by 20%. It's somewhere in the .57 - 0.6 ratio range.
Start your engine clock speed at half your memory clock speed and then increase
it by 5 at a time. The hashrate should climb a little each rise in engine speed
and then suddenly drop above a certain value. Decrease it by 1 then until you
find it climbs dramatically. If your engine clock speed cannot get that high
without crashing the GPU, you will have to use a lower memclock.

Then, and only then, bother trying to increase intensity further.

So to do this, in CGMiner, from the main screen:

1. Press G

2. Then C for Change Settings

3. Then Select the GPU. If all your GPUs are the same, I’d recommend NOT testing on the one that your monitor is hooked to, if you aren’t remoting in.

From here you can select E or M to modify these properties.

After you find good values, go add them to your bat file like this:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer.exe --auto-fan --temp-target 80 --temp-overheat 85 -I 13 --thread-concurrency 24440 --gpu-engine xxxx --gpu-memclock xxxx

You can also find your specific model card(not just a 270, but which specific 270) and find out what other people are using in these parameters. This might give you an idea what might be good to use if you are feeling lazy. This is a good place to start.

Upping the Intensity

After you have found a good engine and memory clock, now you can start upping the intensity. The -I 13 is what we started with, so you can go to -I 20, and if it shows HW errors or your fans start running too hard, take it down to 19, then 18, until you reach a comfortable level.

Refinding your Thread Concurrency

Final thoughts from the Author of CGMiner:

My final settings were:
--gpu-engine 1141  --gpu-memclock 1875 -I 20
for a hashrate of 745kH.

Note I did not bother setting a thread concurrency. Once you have the magic
endpoint, look at what tc was chosen by the bin file generated and then hard
code that in next time (eg --thread-concurrency 22392) as slight changes in
thread concurrency will happen every time if you don't specify one, and the tc
to clock ratios are critical!

So after you found good values for everything else, you take back out thread concurrency, and go back to letting the program generate the file. Then you copy the generated threadcount from the filename back to your startup script.

Other Parameters

Powertune:

This parameter tells CGminer that the cards are able to draw up to more power if it needs. This is what it looks like as far as possible performance gains:

It is not advisable to set this over 20. But it can be set with the --gpu-powertune command.

Shaders:

Shaders isn’t really used by anyone, because you can only use shaders or threadconcurrency, and thread concurrency is said to be superior . But this is what it does:

The --shaders XXX command provides a hint to cgminer on how to pick the best baseline parameters for mining. I found this list for recommending settings for shaders:

GPU Shaders
7750 512
7770 640
7850 1024
7870 1280
7950 1792
7970 2048

6850 960
6870 1120
6950 1408
6970 1536
6990 (6970x2)

6570 480
6670 480
6790 800

6450 160

5670 400
5750 720
5770 800
5830 1120
5850 1440
5870 1600
5970 (5870x2)

It is from the cgminer readme on scrypt, found here. It is also a good general readme on scrypt mining. Again, --shaders doesn’t work with --thread-concurrency.

Work Size:

-w is the parameter for Work Size, or the size of jobs your cards will be doing. Most people flag this at -256 to start for mid tier cards. But the effect this parameter is described as “minimal”.

-g

This is labeled as an optional parameter that can give some small boost, but shouldn’t be be the first thing you go after. It seems to crash cgminer if it is set any higher than 4, and many people leave it at 1 or 2. Some people have gotten a lot more than others out of this.

Voltage:

Voltage may be set for cards by using --gpu-vddc. This requires an unlocked BIOS and special drivers for your card. Otherwise it won’t do anything. This is a good one to explore if you want to make your cards run cooler/more energy efficient, but it is not generally recommended to touch for increasing, and you should know what you are doing here before you decide to touch it.

Example CGMiner.bat files

Sample completed bat file for a R9 270x (may not be your specific 270x), supplied from the wiki linked to above:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer.exe -I 19 -g 1 -w 512 --thread-concurrency 15232

Sample 7950:

cgminer.exe -I 20 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 24000 --gpu-engine 1050 --gpu-memclock 1250 --gpu-vddc 1.087 --temp-target 80 --auto-fan

I left the pool info in the cgminer.conf doc, but you can add it as additional parameters to this file or leave it where it is. I prefer to have the pool info separate myself.

FAQ

This guide is not meant to be a starting point, please see the guide I posted here first.

1. Why doesn’t it work?

I set the --scrypt variable, the pool info, and other stuff in the last tutorial through the cgminer.conf file, if you are missing these values it won’t work. Try getting the first tutorial to work first before you start on this tutorial.

If you are having problems starting CGMiner, try to go back to the basic config in the bat file. If there is a typo in your config file it won’t load up. Sometimes in two -- are getting transformed in my post to a single -- instead I tried to fix all of them, but maybe I missed one. So for parameters besides intensity try -- on the start.

Mining for 2 Months Now… Here’s How It Happened and How I Witnessed Dogecoin Take Over

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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.

Dogecoin Client 1.5 Released

Downloads

Windows
Mac OS X
Source on Github

Highlights

Updated code base to Litecoin 0.8.6.2 (inherits all Litecoin updates since 0.6.*). Highlights include:
- New database engine for block storage resulting in faster index/sync times
- Implements txindex, reindex and walletnotify
- Coin control options for advanced users
- Overall increased stability
- A range of security fixes
Graphical tweaks, including splash screen
New official DNS seed added (seed.dogecoin.com) for improved sync times
Updated PROTOCOL_VERSION for better node detection
New alert keys to allow for network-wide alert notification in future

You can find the complete post and trouble shooting information here.

A Reminder – Wallet Backups are not in Sync – And Why Your Public Keys Show Conflicting Amounts in the Blockchain

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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:

Backing up your Wallet

Cryptowatch Android Application – Monitor your Dogecoin in real time!

10 Replies

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.

How to Restore Your Dogecoin Wallet

19 Replies

Restoring your dogecoin wallet is pretty easy if you have backed it up, you simply need to do the following:

1) Stop your Dogecoin Client, if it is running.

2) Navigate to the Dogecoin data directory.

A quick way to do this is to type this in: %AppData%/DogeCoin.

Pressing Enter here will take me to my Dogecoin Data Directory.

This is not the same as the installation directory.

This should work on Windows 7 and maybe XP. If not, You need to navigate to one of these:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\DogeCoin (Windows 7 Default)
c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Dogecoin (Windows XP Default)

It will look like this:

3) This wallet.dat file is whatever your client is currently using, so if it has Dogecoins on it, be sure to make a backup of this wallet.

4) With the default wallet.dat file in the directory backed up, rename it to something like default_wallet.dat, just in case for some reason you need to restore it.

5) Copy your backup wallet into the directory. Make sure it is named “wallet.dat”

6) Start up your Dogecoin client. If it is still loading blocks, give it time to load before it will show your balance.

If your blocks are all up then you should be good to go.

Getting Such Dogecoin (A Basic Guide to GPU Mining with CGMiner)

154 Replies

While CPU mining through the dogecoin client is a good start to grabbing a few dogecoins, it really doesn’t compete with mining with a dedicated graphics cards(GPU) instead. With a CPU you may get a few hundred coins a day, a GPU with the current difficulty of around 350 you can get thousands or even hundreds of thousands, depending on the card.

Just a little warning before you start: Like CPU mining, GPU mining is very intensive on the computer. I would not recommend running very high settings unless you have adequate cooling. Both may reduce the lifespan of your computer components as well, if you are running the mining program 24/7, so keep that in mind when deciding whether or not you want to mine.

GPU Mining with CGMiner

As commenter SoShibe suggests, those with NVidia cards may want to check out cudaMiner instead. So this tutorial may not apply to you. But those with ATI cards will want to check this out.

If you haven’t already signed up for a mining pool, be sure to do so, as instructed here. We will use this information to further configure CGMiner. You may wish to sign up for a second pool if you want a backup incase the first pool goes down. This way you will continue to mine even if the first pool is unavailable.

1. The first thing you will want to do is download a program called CGMiner. CGMiner only supports GPU mining in versions up to 3.7.2.(3.6.0 used in tutorial but it should be nearly the same). ~~So make sure you don’t download anything newer than this. For general downloads, you can find them here. For the recommended download for windows, you can find it here.~~

The official links for these downloads are down, I have added my links here:

cgminer-3.7.2-windows.zip

The program may be flagged as a virus by your antivirus program, but its not. Its because some of the tools used to build it are commonly used in malicious programs. You can see more information about this here and here. If chrome blocks it, you will need to go to your downloads page and reconfirm that you want to download it.

2. After you download the proper version of CGMiner, extract it to a directory.

3. Open up the location that you have extracted the files and look for a file titled “example.conf”.

4. Open it with notepad or a text editing program. You should see something like this:

5. To get started quickly, We can strip the file down, because most of the configuration probably won’t be correct for you. Important: We also need to add a line to tell it to use the proper method for mining dogecoin. “scrypt” : true, (Delete everything and copy and paste this if you want):

{
"pools" : [
 {
 "url" : "http://url1:8332",
 "user" : "user1",
 "pass" : "pass1"
 }
],
"scrypt" : true,
"kernel-path" : "/usr/local/bin"
}

If you have backup pools, keep additional locations so that you can configure those as well.

6. Now lets edit this to have our own pool information (this assumes you already signed up for a pool, described here) to the file:

{
"pools" : [
{
"url" : "stratum+tcp://www.suchcoins.com:3333",
"user" : "weblogin.WorkerName",
"pass" : "workerPassword"
}
],
"scrypt" : true,
"kernel-path" : "/usr/local/bin"
}

6. When finished, save the file and close it.

7. Rename the example.conf file to cgminer.conf.

8. You should now be able to start mining. Simply launch cgminer.exe in the same directory as the config file, and you should get something like this:

The defaults for CGMiner should be pretty safe, but be sure to monitor your GPU temperature. If it goes over 80C for a long period of time, I’d recommend stopping the program and reading about the advanced settings for CGMiner so that you can reduce the strain on your graphics card. For example, you might want to check out “intensity” and “temp-target” for starters. The same goes for getting the most out of your cards for mining. There are several settings you can tweak for getting more performance out of your cards.

In general though, I really wouldn’t recommend mining 24/7 with any older graphics cards. If it is more than a few years old, chances are that the dogecoin you will mine won’t be worth the electricity costs and possible damage to your computer, unless you are running it on very safe settings. But if you want to give it a quick try and see how it all works, just make sure you are running at safe temperatures and it shouldn’t be any more straining than playing an intense 3d game.

If you want to get serious about mining, you may want to think about picking up a new graphics card, check out my automatically updating list of good graphics cards for mining.

You can also check out my guide on building a dogecoin rig for just 1000 dollars.

I myself run 3 7950s and get around 50000-70000 a day.

Check out the advanced guide to CGMiner here.

Quick Guide: How to Join a Dogecoin Pool

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Joining a Dogecoin Pool

I pulled this information out of the CPU mining guide so that it can be more easily accessible.

There are two types of ways to get coins through mining with Dogecoin. You can either “solo mine”, which means you will mine by yourself. This is considered “Herd Dig” by the program. Or you can use a pool, which means you mine in coordination with other people. The second choice is usually the best, and the benefits usually trump trying to mine dogecoin solo. If you go by yourself, you will get a big payout if you discover a block, but the odds of finding one keep getting harder and harder. With several people, the payout is split, but there are much better chances that you will find a block. Mining without a pool is kind of a waste of time, so you are much better off joining a pool.

Here is a list of pools, for this example I am using http://doge.pool.webxass.de/. But ideally not everyone should use the same pool. So pick any of those from the list.

Security tip for the shibes: I’d advise using passwords you never use for anything else for pools and for workers. Don’t use the same password for a worker than you use for the pool login.

So go over to the pool website and make an account really quick. Most all pool websites look the same.

After you create the account, the next thing you will want to do on the site, would be to create your worker.

1. Go to Worker in the Sidebar of the Pool Website:

2. Put in a worker username and password, and add the worker.

3. Go to the “Getting Started” Page in the right sidebar of the pool. You should see something like this.

We will use this information to configure your mining program.

As “anaon” has posted in the comments below,

Username: Weblogin.Worker means that you would use TheUserNameForthePool.Workername for the username of your configuration.

See the details in the CPU or GPU mining guides for what to do next.

Securing and Backing Up Your Wallet and Coins!

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This is a very important step not to skip once you start getting coins in your wallet. Your wallet and addresses are stored in a local file, and if your computer crashes you will lose all the coins you have, and unless you have written down your private keys (which you probably haven’t, and this isn’t really recommended) for each address that is in your wallet, you won’t be able to recover them without a backup. Also, any viruses running on your computer are able to find this file and if it isn’t password protected, they can easily steal all of your coins. So do this now!

Get Virus Protection If You Don’t Already Have

The first step, is I would recommend getting/having a good virus scanner for your computer and run it. You should do this before you set your wallet password, to lessen the chance that your password is stolen by reading the keys that you are typing. If you have windows you should download and run Microsoft Security Essentials/Windows Defender. They are free and work pretty well. After that is out of the way, time to move on to setting your password.

Password Protect Your Wallet

I’ve been informed by myturn19 on Reddit that password protecting may crash your client on some PCs and not others. So you may wish to test by backing up your wallet first, unencrypted, before attempting to encrypt it. You can use other encryption tools like trucrypt to store the backup as encrypted if the client gives you problems.

The second step is easy, before you make any backups, you need to come up with a secure password. This password should not be one you use for anything else, and it should contain special characters, uppercase, lower case, numbers and be at least 12 letters long. But you also must make sure that you don’t forget or lose this password. So if this is writing it down and putting it where no one will find it in a burn proof container, or another strategy that you use.. that’s up to you. But just make sure you won’t forget it!

Once you come up with a password, go to Settings > Encrypt Wallet and put your password in there.

To double check your password, go to Help > Debug Window > Console

Type this into the console:

walletpassphrase YourPassword 30

If no error message comes back, you were able to unlock your wallet successfully.

Type:

walletlock

to relock your wallet. Don’t leave it unlocked without needing it. You generally only have to unlock if you will send someone else money or add a new address.

If you have no viruses on your computer and only you know your password, this should be 100% secure. But there is always a chance that your virus scanner didn’t catch something. Avoid downloading any suspicious files and unlocking your wallet unnecessarily. With the rise of cryptocurrencies it will become even more of a danger of being targeted by viruses looking for unsecured wallets. But even if you secured it, you must make sure to back it up!

Backing Up Your Wallet

There are a few very important things to keep in mind when backing up your cryptocurrency (dogecoin, bitcoin, litecoin, etc.) wallets.

The most important thing to know : Backups are NOT in sync.

This is important in two scenarios:

1. If you change your password on one wallet, a copy of the same wallet will not have the same password change. So many as few copies of your wallet as possible while still giving you a way to recover it. I store 1 copy of my wallet online, and 1 on each of my hard drives. Do not keep ANY copies of your unencrypted wallet, as it would be like leaving open windows in your house but bullet proofing and triple dead bolting your front door.

So how can I save my wallet online? My wallet is encrypted 2 times by different components, and renamed as well. So even if I post my wallet online there is no way for anyone to take my coins without first knowing its a wallet, and knowing two separate complex passwords for each level of encryption. If a computer program can break into my wallet, then the whole system for encryption is broken and digital transactions are now useless anyway.

You can most likely get away with just the encryption that the wallet file has when you do “Encrypt” from the program, provided you use a very complex password. Again, it should be 12 characters minimum and have at least 1 of all of these numbers, upper, lower, special character, and not used anywhere else by you!

2. If you add new addresses to your wallet, you risk the chance that they won’t be added to the backup versions of the wallet. Wallets come with 100 premade addresses, that are ready for use. Once you use all 100 of these, your wallet has to create new ones. Any backups of your wallet won’t know any of the new addresses. So if you will be active in creating new addresses, make sure that you update the backups. I also really advise reading my post here for more details of this. Your wallet backup may got out of sync even if you don’t realize.

So, with all that said, when your wallet is encrypted with a strong password, to make a backup, simply go to:

Save the file to a location you prefer. I would then rename the file from wallet.dat to something non obvious like weddingpic.png, and email it to yourself. that should work pretty well. Just remember to rename your file back to wallet.dat before you try and open it back up.

If you are extra paranoid like me, you can try out a program like trucrypt for an additional level of encryption before you upload to the web.

Quick Guide: Getting Coins Into Your Wallet from Mining

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Getting the Coins into Your Wallet

So you started mining, where are your coins? Until you cash out of the pool, the pool has ownership of your coins. You will want to set an auto payment to your wallet address to make sure your claiming ownership of the coins you mined.

The program you used for mining can also be used as a wallet to take ownership of your coins.

1. Go to the third tab in your dogecoin client, this shows your public addresses that you can give to other people to pay you:

2. Right click on your Public Address and select Copy:

3. Go back to your mining pool website, and select “Edit Account”:

4. Fill in your Payment address by pasting it in, and setting the threshold. Put in your pin you set when creating your account, and click update:

You should be good to go. When you have enough coins mined, they will be sent to your wallet. Now you should make sure to back up your wallet in case your computer crashes!

Dogecoin Mining Guide

Such Mine