How Did I Find Out About it?
This youtube video. I followed the video tutorial and made just a few modifications to his instructions to spin up a cpu miner.
The youtube guy referred me to a few links. The most important one is this one. This is BitcoinTalk, the ground-floor of the crypto-world. For the tech-savvy it’s self-explanatory from here.
I installed the qt-wallet on my personal computer and installed the new mac miner on my old mac. From that forum link you can find all the downloads you need to set everything up for any OS. If you like step-by-step guides, here you go…
How I Got it to Work
The youtube video above was the one I used to guide me through the process, but there were a few glitches I ran into that I want to make sure you don’t have. Instructions will vary slightly based on OS. I’ll be using MacOS for this tutorial. If you don’t have a mac and can’t get it to work, feel free to message me. It’s pretty much the same process across all OSs.
- Visit the forum
- Download and initiate the wallet client (OS agnostic)
- Click “mac”
- Click “Raven-Qt.dmg”
- Download the file and open in. Drag the application into your Application folder.
- Start the wallet by finding it under “Applications” or clicking the magnifying glass at the top right of your screen and typing “Raven”. Wait for it to sync with the blockchain. It will look similar to this (without the RVN)
Create a receiving address for your wallet
- Click “Receive”
- Label it “Miner”
- Click “Request payment”
- Copy the address that pops up. That is your wallet’s address. Close the window if you want.
Visit the forum again, but this time do it on the computer from which you’d like to mine. Find the download link that looks like this:
- Since I’m using and old mac for this example, I click the last link and see a page that begins like this:
It’s ideal to upgrade your mac to 10.13.2, but I didn’t. Mine was still at 10.11.
- Open up your terminal application by clicking the magnifying glass in the top right of your screen and typing “Terminal”. Click enter and you should see a blank terminal.
Copy these commands into the terminal…. (under “Requirements)
This setup assumes you have homebrew installed. If you’re not a web developer, you may not have this installed. To install it follow this guide and then retry this step.
Then continue following the instructions on the github page. (Check “A Common Problem” below if you have trouble)
Simply copy and paste these commands into the terminal.
A Common Problem
If you have never used github before and you try this command: git clone git@github.com:tpruvot/cpuminer-multi.git, you’ll probably get an authentication error because you need to set up an account and an ssh key first. It sounds intimidating but Github has very simple guides that show you how to do it. Don’t forget to do step 4….
Almost there!
This line of code will start the miner, but you need to provide it with a few things. First it needs the address of the mining pool you will be connecting to. (read more about mining pools here). There are lots to choose from. The youtube guy recommended using the yiimp.eu mining pool, but that didn’t work for me. Next it needs your wallet’s mining address we created at the beginning.
As you can see below, there is a list of pools you can choose from. I ended up using RVNMiner just because it was the first one I tried that worked. I believe the most popular one is yiimp.eu, but it’s full at the moment.
Anyway, what you do is replace -o stratum+tcp://rvn.suprnova.cc:666 -u with whatever address your preferred pool gives you.
In my case (running with RVNMiner) I ran this command….
./cpuminer -a x16r -o stratum+tcp://ravenminer.com:3636 -u [wallet-address]
EDIT: I recently switched to minepool instead of ravenminer. So the new command is… ./cpuminer -a x16r -o stratum+tcp://minepool.com:3636 -u [wallet-address] -p -c=RVN
And my miner started working just fine and has been running for days!
And wallah. Once you hit enter, you should start seeing the miner running. Mine looks like this when it runs. Now you just check your wallet once in awhile to see how many RVN you have earned. There are services that some pools provide to show you stats such as average hash rate and cool looking charts, so look into that if that’s you’re thing.
Mining Rigs
I’m a huge noob at this stuff and I don’t know where to begin with GPU mining, but my plan is to learn more about it and build my own rig so I can earn more RavenCoin (and other coins of course). It’s fun stuff and who knows, maybe one of these coins will blow up someday.
As I learn more about making this process more efficient and mining in general, I’ll post about it all again. Also, let me know if you can help me learn about mining and maybe we can swap knowledge!
Good luck!