Hello, I have been trying out Monero Mining, My dad told me about this originally as a way to make money and I have been trying it out. As I get farther along and doing more things I will post more posts about it.
SETUP
So I made an account on MyMonero. That is the wallet I have been using but I will probably use till my dad gets his Ledger hardware wallet which I hope I will be able to have an account on. I then set up my mining software. At that point, I was using xmr-stak-amd, but I don't recommend that anymore, I recommend xmr-stak which is an updated AMD, Nvidia, and CPU miner.
Its not hard to configure, all you really have to do is find a pool, which at the time I was using Monerohash but now I don't just because of the increasing network hash rate which essentially means more people are mining so it makes it harder to get monero, so you get monero more slowly. The problem is that Monerohash has not made it where you need a lower amount of monero to get your money. The reason they make you get a certain amount is because the transaction fees for sending the amount you get per block would be so high that they would have to spend 10 dollars to send 0.1 dollars which doesn't make any sense, but if you wait till the person has 100 (In this case actually 200) dollars but the fee is the same then you don't have such a problem, the problem is that at this point even with having 2 decent graphics cards (RX 480 8gb and a RX 570 4gb). It still took me a little under a month and a half to get a payout. That also with that the fee is 1.6% compared to the pool I am using with .6% it makes it stupid to use.
The pool I am using is SupportXMR has a much better minimum payout with it having 0.3 XMR compared to having a 0.5 XMR on Monerohash with a 0.1 XMR payout coming soon, and the fee is also better so a win win situation.
I would recommend you though choose one for your self, a website that has several pools for you to pick by yourself is Moneropools though I am going to warn you it is made by the same person as SupportXMR so he does have his pool at the top of the list.
So once you have a pool, and an address you can enter that info into the mining program it also will ask for a pool password, with Monerohash this was blank, with SupportXMR this was your MinerName:YourEmail (In my case xmr-stak) and it will start mining. You are now mining. If you want to check your stats, there should be some kind of check stats button somewhere where you put in your monero address and it gives you the data.
Now I am going to warn you that it will take about 2h after the pool gets its first block you helped with for any monero to show up on your account. The reason this is is because you have to wait till the pool finds a block that gives them monero with you helping them to give you money, and then secondly the pool has a maturity period for the block to make sure it does not become an orphan. A orphaned block is a block that 2 people mined at almost near the same time so part of the world sees one block as the new block, and the other part sees the other one as the new block, eventually one block will be seen as correct and the other one will be considered an orphan and the pool with not get monero for that that is why they wait to put the money in your account in case it is an orphan.
OPTIMIZATION
Before I even start explaining this, I am going to say I am not very good at this and there are much better guides on this on other websites and on youtube then this that also has bios modding and other things that give you more performance.
The way I have been optimizing my cards is very simple compared to bios modding and is not likely to break your card. I simply have been trying underclocking and overclocking on the clock speed and overclocking on the Memory to see what gives me the best result for the amount of electricity I am spending. I would recommend before even starting with this, overclocking the memory by 150ish because its mostly the memory that helps and I have never seen a time when this doesn't help performance. This has gotten me an extra 10ish % performance but nothing compared to bios modding and other things you can do so I would still recommend doing some research on this yourself. My next post will probably be about me bios modding my cards and making my cards better.
The software I have been using to overclock my cards is OverdriveNTool Which allows you to simpily put OverdriveNTool.exe -p0"Profile Name" In a .bat file then have a task setup like this #4 and run by this command in the .bat file schtasks /Run /TN {Name of Task} You then put this .bat file in your \Appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup folder and it will run on startup.
Example of Code:
C:\OverdriveNTool.exe -p0"480" -p1"570"
schtasks /Run /TN NoUAC-XMR-Stak
This with having My XMR-Stak Task being named NoUAC-XMR-Stak and with my OverdriveNTool.exe being located in my C: Drive.
So this is how I am mining and I hope this will teach you how to setup how mine monero.
Have Fun Mining!
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