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!
This part is probably the hardest part of putting together the mining rig, but it can also be fun. Just take your time and think about different options before you go forward, no need to rush. Continue reading
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.