Beginners guide to TIPS mining on AWS
If you have come to this post, you must have heard of Bitcoin mining. The mining is a process of approving crypto transactions. However for folks like you and me it is no longer feasible to mine without an optimal hardware such as ASIC (Application-specific Integrated Circuit), which is designed to solve computational puzzles required to approve transactions.
However, if you are still interested in learning how to mine then this post will show you just that.
What is Fedoracoin (TIPS)?
From their wiki “Fedora is descended from early Bitcoin releases, evolving through Dogecoin and Feathercoin. The Fedora project was dormant for a number of years before a new community project took root in mid-2017.”
Fedoracoin aka TIPS is basically an open-source, anonymous virtual currency that allows users to thank each other by tipping one another. TIPS use scrypt proof-of-work algorithm.
Why use TIPS for mining?
Considering this is a fun post on mining, TIPS is an easy (& fun) to use coin and I have a few, that’s why I am using it in this post to show you how to mine a cryptocurrency.
Once you get comfortable mining TIPS using this post, you will be ready to mine any other coin that is available on Hash-to-coins mining pool.
Mining Setup
To mine TIPS on AWS, we will first need to create an account on Hash-to-coins website and setup worker for mining. Hash-to-coins allow us to mine using their pool rather than mining on our own.
Next step will be to install a miner on a Windows machine on AWS and join Hash-to-coins mining pool for mining. So here we go.
a) Hash-to-Coins worker setup
1: Signup to hash-to-coins website for pool mining.
2: Under My Account heading, select Workers option.
3: Enter name of your worker, password and select coin to mine. In this case it will be TIPS .Once done, click “Add New Worker” button. On completion, the worker is added to the Existing workers list as shown below.
This completes setting up of worker on the Hash-to-coins website.
Next step is to install miner application on Windows EC2 instance in AWS.
b) Install Miner on Windows EC2 instance
1: If you don’t have an AWS account then create one.
2: Create a Windows EC2 instance. For demonstration purpose and easy of learning, I have created a type 2 medium size Microsoft Windows Server 2016 (64bit) instance.
3: Once the instance is up and running, login into the instance. Download and install windows 64bit cpuminer from the following link.
4: Unzip cpuminer file. In the unzipped folder you will notice four files and one of them will be minerd application. We will be using minerd application for mining.
5: Disable Windows defender before starting up the minerd application else it will block mining traffic.
6: Using command prompt interface (run as an administrator), navigate to the cpuminer folder where minerd application reside.
7: Now we will startup the miner using the following command in command line.
minerd -o stratum+tcp://hash-to-coins.com:3333 -u worker.name -p worker.password
where
worker.name = hash-to-coin name that was created earlier. In our case it is “goblinbomb.goblinbomb”.
Note: You will need to append workername with your hash-to-coins username. In my case, my hash-to-coins username is goblinbomb and my worker name is goblinbomb too. Therefore my worker name is “goblinbomb.goblinbomb”.
worker.password =hash-to-coin password that was created earlier. In our case it is “tips”.
Note: For TIPS there is no need to pass algorithm parameter. The default algorithm is scrypt, which is TIPS algorithm too.
8: Once minerd is successfully running and mining, you will notice your worker information updated on the Hash-to-coins website with difficulty level and hash speed.
9: Finally go to wallets setting and specify TIPS coin address to receive payments. Also you can go to Balance setting to check your confirmed/unconfirmed TIPS.
This is it, you have mastered how to mine TIPS on AWS and now are ready to rock the world with this knowledge :)
Note: For more information on TIPS coin & mining, refer to the following links.
1: Fedora wiki
Disclaimer: I do not advocate you to use AWS for cryptocurrency mining. I have used it for demonstration purpose only.
If you enjoyed this post, feel free to send me a tip in TIPS, Ether or Litecoin!
TIPS address: EQqpdiLepSN2XDF5KdULPpdDuRwdugpdmg
Litecoin address: LSAnCdaPd1XvNQcBADWLokxstwjLRF1UWZ
Ether address: 0x031b17ed220a39ad540cc2102f057fde5c6191f7
Coins mentioned in post: