Building an ethereum miner workshop

Building a Ethereum Miner
Workshop

Who am I
● Long Time Friend (@d1vious in slack)
● Do Security in Fastly by Day
● Play with Cryptocurrencies some nights

Agenda
● Light Concepts
● Anatomy of a Mining Rig
● Sourcing Components
● OS and Mining software
● Mining Pools and Selling Mining Power
● Overclocking GPUs
● Troubleshooting
● Economy of Mining

DAG
D - Directed = One direction
A - Acyclic = cannot ref self
G - Graph = as in graph DB

non-critical components
● CPU— any slow processor would do, you will be running low overhead *nix
OS, least likely Windows, just make sure it works with your motherboard.
● Memory— as long as it has minimally 4GB of RAM memory
● HDD/SDD— Any would work, although I highly recommend purchasing the
pre-loaded SSD with ethos from gpushack.

critical components
● board— The most important aspect of purchasing a motherboard is making
sure it has +4 PCI 2.0 slots, the more slots supported by the motherboard the
more GPU density you can have and thus a bigger hash rate.
● Power Supply— It is what will feed your rig, two things are important when
selecting the power supply, make sure you have plenty of capacity and it is
very efficient. The lowest capacity I would recommend is 850 WATT.

Critical components continued
● GPU— The most critical component in an ethereum mining rig by far. Base on
crypto compare the best GPU to use today based on the consumption/vs
hash rate generated. For ETHER mining it is recommended for the GPU to
have +4GB of memory. Cryptocompare.com has a great list of suggested
GPUs and reviews.

accessories
● USB Riser Cards— you will need these to comfortably connect all GPUs.
● Power Meter (optional) — you will need this to understand what your power
consumption is, see the economics portion of the guide for details.
● Power switch for ATX MOBO— if you don’t plan on shorting the two power
pins on the motherboard buy this ;-).
● Case— open air cases are recommended to allow a rig to breathe, most open
air frame cases are $100 — $250 USD. Personally I decided to use a bamboo
dish rack which has exactly the same effect and it costs $15 USD on
Amazon. It does not look half bad either and is extremely portable.

ethos
● Purpose built for mining
● Built on Ubuntu 16.04 with an LXE Desktop Environment
● Runs many popular miners
● Supports AMD + NVIDIA GPUs
● + 8 GPU support natively (windows has an issue here)
● Great admin panel

Other considerations
Windows
● 8 GPU Limit
● Better driver support for GPUs
● More options for tweaking like firmware
hacking
SMOS
● Don’t know much about it
● Looks easier to use than ethos
● Although very similar
● Forces claymore

Common ones (in ethos)
● drwxr-xr-x 2 ethos ethos 4.0K Sep 9 09:26 ccminer [old]
● drwxr-xr-x 2 ethos ethos 4.0K Sep 9 09:26 cgminer-skein [old]
● drwxr-xr-x 2 ethos ethos 4.0K Sep 9 09:26 claymore [details next]
● drwxr-xr-x 2 ethos ethos 4.0K Mar 16 2017 claymore-zcash ^
● drwxr-xr-x 3 ethos ethos 4.0K Mar 16 2017 ethminer [details next]
● drwxr-xr-x 2 ethos ethos 4.0K Jul 8 10:22 ewbf-zcash [details next]
● drwxr-xr-x 8 ethos ethos 4.0K Mar 16 2017 optiminer-zcash [old]
● drwxr-xr-x 4 ethos ethos 4.0K Nov 9 22:36 sgminer-gm [details next]
● drwxr-xr-x 2 ethos ethos 4.0K Mar 16 2017 silentarmy [old]

claymore
● Mines ETH, XMR, ZCASH
● Supports NVIDIAS and AMD GPUs
● Great Performance for ETH in AMD
● 2% Mining Fee
● Supports Dual Mining Decre, Pascal, SIA

ethminer
● Mines - ETH
● Good Performance
● No mining Fee

ewbf-zcash
● Best zcash (equihash) miner currently available for NVIDIAS (only)
● Great Performance
● 2% Mining Fee

sgminer-gm
● Mines many coins
● No Mining Fee
● Supports Dual Mining Decre, Pascal, SIA

Mining Pools
In the context of cryptocurrency mining, a mining pool is the pooling of resources by miners, who share their processing power over a network, to
split the reward equally, according to the amount of work they contributed to solving a block. A "share" is awarded to members of the mining pool who
present a valid proof-of-work that their miner solved
● helps you get paid faster and track your progress for a fee, in nanopool’s case
is 1%
● There are many out there research, some without fees, some whom have
more rejects etc..

Types of Wallets
Software
● Easy to setup
● No cost
● Many features built in like shapeshift
● Great for daily (weekly) mining profits
● Risk of losing via a hack etc..
Hardware
● Most secure
● Great for long term storage of currency
● Not great for depositing mining gains

Common Wallets
Software
● Jaxx
● Exodus
● Coinbase
Hardware
● Trezor
● Ledger Nano S

Common Trading Services/Exchanges
● Coinbase
● Bittrex
● Binance

Variables to Consider
● Power Cost - typically ~.12 KWH in Miami see your power bill
● Power Consumption - Depends on GPU + mining algo + miner
● GPU Hashing Speed - Depends on algo + miner
● Price of currency

Calculators
http://coinwarz.com/ - what coin (algorithm is most profitable)
https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/ - what would my potential
earnings be base on coins
https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator - what would my potential
earnings be based on hardware + algorithm if selling mining power

BTC use of the
Merkel Tree
Vitalik Buterin
Creator of Ethereum
The benefit that this provides is the concept that Satoshi
described as “simplified payment verification”: instead of
downloading every transaction and every block, a “light client”
can only download the chain of block headers, 80-byte chunks of
data for each block that contain only five things:
● A hash of the previous header
● A timestamp
● A mining difficulty value
● A proof of work nonce
● A root hash for the Merkle tree containing the
transactions for that block.
If the light client wants to determine the status of a transaction, it
can simply ask for a Merkle proof showing that a particular
transaction is in one of the Merkle trees whose root is in a block
header for the main chain.

Building an ethereum miner workshop

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