So about a week ago I decided I wanted to chronicle my adventure around crypto mining. From building my first cloud mining rig to actually building a physical mining rig. So while I talked last week about using my Cloud at Cost developer cloud system resources as a source of free mining, this week I wanted to talk about changing up my pool choice.

Issues With Minergate

I had been going with Minergate as my mining pool because it was easy to get started and I liked the ability to mine multiple currencies.  I had started by mining Monero (XMR) and Fantomcoin because with Minergate you can dual mine those two currencies on a basic CPU.  Now, like I said in my last post, I never expected to get rich off of this.  I am doing it more to learn about how mining works.  I had made about .0005 XMR which is really nothing at all.  Since then I had done some research and read a lot about different mining pools and there were a lot of complaints about Minergate and how their hashrate may not be accurate and there was a possibility of them skimming.  So I decided to research some other mining pools to see what else was out there.  I stumbled upon moneropools.com which is a pretty awesome website that details many of the public mining pools out there.

After looking at all of them I finally landed on supportxmr.com because it had the lowest fees and a 0.3 XMR payout limit.  The other thing I really liked about the service is that I didn’t have to register with them.  I just had to provide a Monero public address to pay out to when I reach the threshold.  So I got myself a Monero wallet and set out to mine.

New Mining Software

Now the problem I had, was that I was using Minergate because of the ease of it.  They had a pre-compiled .deb file of their miner and that was really easy.  But I now had to go out and find a different mining application. In searching for that I came across XMR-stak-CPU which is an application that is specifically compiled for mining the CryptoNight algorithm which is what Monero uses to secure its blockchain.  The thing I found interesting is that the XMR-stak-CPU application is specifically designed to use the AES hardware acceleration that is present on some CPUs.  So I figured I'd give it a try and see if I can get a better hash rate out of it.

The issue was this application had to be compiled.  Now I consider myself a fairly strong Linux user.  But when it comes to compiling code from scratch, I have the absolute worst luck.  I typically shy away from applications that are not pre-compiled or part of an APT repository.  So I did some more research and found another GitHub project that was providing a modified version of xmr-stak-cpu that was precompiled called XMRig.  So I figured I’d give it a shot, and after taking a look at the config.json file it seemed pretty straightforward.  I added my pool information and it was as simple as running the command ./xmrig.  I was up and running and mining at my new pool.

Final Thoughts on New Pool and New Miner

So after about a week of mining, I am really liking the new pool.  I feel like I’m generating a lot more XMR at supportxmr.com verses at Minergate.  After about 2 or 3 weeks of mining at Minergate I’ve only generated about .005 XMR but this new pool I’ve generated double that in less time.  I really think that’s because they have smaller fees and because there are fewer miners active on the pool the reward per miner is greater when the pool adds a block.  Again, I know what most people would say, this is basically a waste of time because there is no way that I will make any real money off this.  But this is just the beginning of my mining journey, I realize that right now I’m not going to make any money, but I’m already thinking about building a mining rig of my own so I consider this just the cost of learning.

I want to hear from others out there, what are you mining and why did you choose that coin? Also, any feedback on my posts and mining journey would be greatly appreciated.

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This blog was cross posted on my personal wordpress blog here.