How to Minimize Steem in Windows
About Steem
Steem is a blockchain social media platform where anyone can earn rewards by contributing quality content and rating of published content by others. You can also mine it using a dedicated CPU miner, if you have some free processing that you want to dedicate to support the network. The information regarding Steem is still highly fragmented and you need to spend a lot of time to figure things out, although they do not seem to be so complicated. We spent some time trying to get things to work and we were able to successfully start mining Steem, so we've prepared a little guide to help you get started mining in Windows.
The first thing you need to get started before you proceed with the actual mining is to register an account on the website steemit.com. Note that registering currently requires you to have a Facebook or Reddit account to use as a means of verification for your record. Once you register, you can also earn Steem by posting quality articles (like this.sic!) On the site and interacting in the community in general, and then you can also start extracting using the guide below.
Start by downloading the latest Wallet Steem Windows and Miner for Windows
The binary miner is compiled for 64 bit windows, so it will not work on 32 bit architectures
Extract the steem-win-x64-012-2.zip file to a folder on your computer (which has plenty of disk space) and run steemd.exe
The first time you run Steem Daemon, it will create a witness_node_data_dir directory and inside this folder will generate some additional files and folders
Go into the folder witness_node_data_dir folder and open the config.ini file with notepad
Start by adding some Steem Node to connect, just paste the following list of P2P nodes to connect at startup:
seed-node = 52.38.66.234:2001
seed-node = 52.37.169.52:2001
seed-node = 52.26.78.244:2001
seed-node = 192.99.4.226:2001
seed-node = 46.252.27.1:1337
seed-node = 81.89.101.133:2001
seed-node = 52.4.250.181:39705
seed-node = steemd.pharesim.me:2001
seed-node = seed.steemed.net:2001
seed-node = steem.clawmap.com:2001
seed-node = seed.steemwitness.com:2001
seed-node = steem-seed1.abit-more.com:2001
Under the name of witness add your username steemit.com (you need to register before mining starts), eg: witness = "UserNameSteemIt"
Under the name of miner and your private key add your username steemit.com and a private key, eg: miner = ["UserNameStaemIt", "YourPrivateKeyWIF"]
If you are not sure where to get the private key, simply go to your steemit.com account, go to your profile and then to the Permissions tab. Here you need to click Show the private key to Activate (you may need to re-watch first). Note that the public key is shown by default, you need to show the private key and use the private key in the configuration!
Under the number of threads add mining-threads = 1 or a larger number, depending on how much of your CPU you want to use for mining, more threads results in greater hashrate.
Now you are ready to start mining, just run steemd.exe again and wait for the blockchain to sync, it may take something like 1 to 2 hours or more (depending on your internet connection)
Steem's blockchain is over 3.5 million blocks already, but the size is not that big yet, it's about 3.3GB in size so you'll need more free space on your HD.
In our tests with an Intel Core i7 5820K CPU (6 cores, 12 threads) running on 12 threads configured in the config.ini file, we are getting about 44390 HPS (hashes per second) as hashrate or about 31-33 KHS with only 6 active threads.
Note that mining apparently requires lots of RAM, we have about 3GB used by 6 threads and about 5GB used by 12 threads for mining, you have to have enough RAM in the computer (8GB or more is recommended)
All you have to do now is wait for your miner to find a POW block and then put him in the queue of Miner witness until you get your turn to confirm a block in order to receive your reward in your steemit.com account.