How to mine Zcash

Mining
43

You’re right. But this is the lesser of two evils.

Botnet-resistance and and ASIC resistance are at odds with each other.

Any coin that can be profitably mined by anyone on their personal machines (aka “ASIC-resistant coins”) are necessarily botnet friendly.

I think most people agree at this point that ASIC-resistant (and therefore botnet friendly) PoWs are needed to keep mining decentralized.

And interesting thing to note about Equihash in particular: since the bottle-neck is memory bandwidth, an infected machine running a zcash miner will be very unlikely to remain undetected – as the infected machine will become virtually unusable by the owner while mining is taking place.

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44

Same can be said for every other CPU intensive PoW… 8GB memory requirement will keep most of the botnets off, can anyone confirm this is a requirement (it is not now, i mine just fine with 1Gb ram)

45

Something else to consider is that the current difficulty is probably very much lower than can be expected for mainnet. My guess is that botnet operators would need to be rather careful to avoid their victims quickly realising the detrimental effect to their computers.

46

Botnets don’t mine while the system is in use, only when idle…

47

Same can be said for every other CPU intensive PoW

Yep.

8GB memory requirement will keep most of the botnets off…

Any requirement that will keep most botnets off will also keep most users off. Botnets are just collections of users’ machines. Botnet resistance is user resistance.

…can anyone confirm this is a requirement (it is not now, i mine just fine with 1Gb ram)

IIR @zooko et al aim to keep that max required ram around 1Gb. The hope is that even smartphone will be able to mine.

48

Botnet operators are going to get rich if this coin takes off… We will probably see over one million machines mine at launch…

49

In other news: The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

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50

Shh, don’t give them any ideas!!

51

Are there botnets with millions of Linux machines?

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52

It is just matter of time until someone release a standalone miner for Windows. I bet some people are working on it already.

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53

Has Zcash thought about contacting this person? http://solo.ckpool.org Here is another link to his work [∞ YH] solo.ckpool.org 2% fee solo mining USA/DE 255 blocks solved! and I do believe he set up litecoin and doge coin solo pools, I posted the same post in another thread

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54

Hey there, no nobody has contacted that mining pool dev to my knowledge. Why don’t you reach out to him and ask him if he’s interested in Zcash? :slight_smile: You can report back on this forum.

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55

KI posted the same idea as in the solo mining thread and someone reached out to him with out an answer back. I don’t know him, only his work. I’m sure there is nothing I can say as an outside observer with absolutely no progaming knowledge. I’m almost positive he wrote cgminer for Bitcoin, and thought that if Zcash wanted they could contact him about an optimized mining program. But I think I’m stepping outside of my boundaries as an observer and supporter of Zcash I look forward to your progress and hope to see a Windows wallet soon. Hopefully by the time somebody like me can buy some on an exchange. Cheers and good luck with your endeavours

56

The guy you’re talking about may have got everything he wanted out of being a bitcoin early adopter…

57

I finally had some time to put together a tutorial for those of you who aren’t familiar with Linux.

Please have a look and let me know what you think, any suggestions or feedback are welcome :slight_smile:

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58

This is great! I think it should have its own thread so it gets more visibility.

59

It’s not like Powerball as there is no “overhead” being “taxed”. If your system is 5x less efficient to operate as a professional miner, and the miner gains 10x his electrical expenses, then over the long haul, you should expect 2x return on your electricity expenses. But since it appears there will be no other way to gain Zcash coins in the beginning other than mining, a miner might be expecting 100x his electrical expenses. But if there are a lot of miners expecting this, then there will be a flood of miners attempting it, pushing their actual returns down to (a wild guess) 10x. So someone using their phone or PC to boot might be just for fun and games, if miners jump on this project like I would if I were a miner. Zcash could crush bitcoin since it’s the same, except more efficient and anonymous, and miners are ahead of the curve in understanding cryptocurrency ideas

Since Zcash is anonymous, the people primarily interested in it will not want to liquidate out of it as there will be a loss of privacy in the liquidation, so there might be a shortage of it on the exchanges, driving the price up beyond what miners would expect. But this also drives up the desire to mine as mining yourself prevents a banking connection “on the front end” going from curerncy to Zcash as well as the “back end”, going from Zcash to currency.

For example, using the following parameters:

  1. you use $100 of electricity to mine Zcash in 1st 6 months (which is about 2 good computers running 24 hr per day)
  2. miners ramp up so much in competition that their cost to get 1 coin is $5 of electricity
  3. you are 5 times less efficient
  4. miners sell when exchanges offer $50 per coin

Result: you have a 50% chance of gaining 2 coins at a cost of $100 that are worth $100 on the exchanges.

60

Thanks a lot for your tutorial. I have Ubuntu installed on a USB and am trying to follow along with the steps you’ve outlined. When I attempt to run the following command, I get an error message that says it is unable to locate package libgtest-dev. Do you have any suggestions?

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install \

build-essential pkg-config libgtest-dev libc6-dev m4 \
g++-multilib autoconf libtool ncurses-dev unzip git python \
zlib1g-dev wget bsdmainutils

Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Note, selecting ‘libncurses5-dev’ instead of ‘ncurses-dev’
E: Unable to locate package libgtest-dev

61

I’m not sure why you are seeing that error, I just double checked the codes on my site against the official guide and they appear correct.
I have not tested the install and compilation with a live Linux distribution before, I have just set up my machine as a dual boot or only Linux. What’s your host OS?

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62

I have Windows 10 installed on both a desktop and a laptop. When I tried to install a VM on my desktop Ubuntu wouldn’t recognize my WIFI driver, So I installed Ubuntu on a USB so I could try it on the laptop and possibly switch back if I could resolve my WIFI driver issue. It seems to run fine on the laptop. I continued with your instructions even after I got the error hoping it wouldn’t matter, but of course it had errors when I tried to compile.

Thanks for double checking the codes, I’ll continue to experiment with it and will post the explanation if I figure it out.

1 Like