There has been a lot of talk on Primecoin lately, and given it's potential I decided to give mining Primecoin a try and share what I have done so far.
[Note: this is about altcoin mining, so I do not know if posting this here is the best choice, but it certainly gives this more visibility]
What is Primecoin? Simply put, It is the first coin that does not depend on hashing (SHA256 or Scrypt) for proof of work. It searches for prime numbers instead, which is useful. It is the first currency whose mining helps more than just making money. Finding prime numbers has has enough practical utility that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is offering $550,000 worth of prizes for finding prime numbers more than 1 million, 10 million, 100 million and 1 billion digits long.
https://www.eff.org/awards/coop .
For more information - Here's a paper on Primecoin written by it's developer -
http://ppcoin.org/static/primecoin-paper.pdf and nice article I found on it that made a lot of sense -
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/primecoin-the-cryptocurrency-whose-mining-is-actually-useful/.
The pre-release and the release announcements can be found here -https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=245953.0 and here
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=251850.0.
How valuable is Primecoin[XPM]? At the time of writing, the current rate for 1 XPM is 0.0082 BTC or about $0.85. And from what I have read around, people are speculating that it may go up to 0.02 BTC very soon. A lot of people are adopting it.
Vircurex, mcXNOW and Crypsty is trading them now it seems.
How to mine it? First off, the mining speed is measured in primepersec(pps) instead of Hash/s. A month ago when it was released, mining on weak CPUs was worth it - but I am not so sure now. I have a crappy i3 core laptop, So I decided not to try it. if you guys want to try it ..Here's a well written tutorial from a month back on how to mine with the official client -
http://www.ppcointalk.org/index.php?topic=316.0. But there is a high performance client that runs a few times faster -
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=255782.0.
Please share the results (how much pps you get) if you try this..
Mining on Digital Ocean VPSSince my crappy laptop is not an option, I tried to mine it on a Virtual Private Servers. First of, I will start with DigitalOceanVPS, since that's the first one I tried and it can be done for $5/month.
Step 1.: Sign up for
Digital Ocean VPS. (Note: This is a referral link - if you want to give it a try use my link. If you do not want to use it ..Just Google DigitalOcean.) The important thing is to make sure that you create a droplet that runs on
Ubuntu 13.04 x64. One one account, you can run up to 5 droplets ( I am running 4 at the moment). But remember ...that if you run 4 droplets, $5 would be charged in a week and not a month. One droplet costs $5 for the month.
Once you have signed up and logged in ....Click "Create Droplet" and pick the following options ...
Use the default options for the rest. It takes 1-5 minutes for the droplet to be created.
Step 2 Get Putty ->
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html or any other SSH client. I am a noob, so I use putty.
Step 3 Check your email for the root password for the node you created in Step 1. Sign in using putty! Host name is the IP address.
Step 4 login as "root" and the password sent to your email. In putty, a simple right click pastes the password in the client. The password does not show up - so do not worry.
Then change the default password once you have logged in using the "passwd" command. The password fields will not show up like before.
Step 5 There are many ways to go about from here ..Like this one ->
http://www.ppcointalk.org/index.php?topic=336.0or this one ->
https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/895-mining-primecoin-using-digitalocean-vps-instructions/ >
But I chose gigawatt's tutorial -
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=261179.0He wrote an automated script that makes life easier for newbies like me ...Here's the link of it on pastebin. -->
http://pastebin.com/T19PrHcfCopy his automated script, and at the top of the script ..where it says:
PRIMECOIN_USERNAME="" ...choose a random username of your choice for the primecoind mining package to work. Then pase the entire modified code in putty and press enter.
It takes up to 15 minutes for the script to complete. Once completed, it shows -
Step 6 Wait for 2 minutes and use the command ./peek
You should get a output that will look like this:
Stats: {
"blocks" : 106610,
"chainspermin" : 1,
"chainsperday" : 0.06027353,
"currentblocksize" : 1000,
"currentblocktx" : 0,
"difficulty" : 9.61051136,
"errors" : "",
"generate" : true,
"genproclimit" : -1,
"roundsievepercentage" : 30,
"primespersec" : 450,
"pooledtx" : 0,
"sievepercentage" : 10,
"sievesize" : 1000000,
"testnet" : false
}
Confirmed Balance: 0.00000000
Immature Balance:
Immature TX: 0
Connections: 9
Recent:
2013-08-09 02:47:35 primemeter 1713829 prime/h 34181614 test/h 0 5-chains/h 0.064032 chain/d
2013-08-09 02:48:35 primemeter 1774660 prime/h 35486417 test/h 0 5-chains/h 0.066250 chain/d
2013-08-09 02:49:35 primemeter 1743582 prime/h 34467992 test/h 60 5-chains/h 0.063947 chain/d
2013-08-09 02:50:35 primemeter 1743033 prime/h 35014669 test/h 60 5-chains/h 0.065385 chain/d
2013-08-09 02:51:35 primemeter 1621506 prime/h 32404140 test/h 120 5-chains/h 0.060274 chain/d
Averages:
Prime/h: 1672911
Test/h: 33406043
5-Chain/h: 80
Chains/day: 0.06297
If you do not, use the command , "./start-primecoind" , wait for a minute and try "./peek" command again.
As long as primespersec field is showing an output..
.you are mining!!!. For me the speeds are varying from 450-550 pps.
Step 7 I do not think 450 - 550 pps is enough at the time of writing... so cloned the droplet 3 times (Bringing the total number of droplets to 4)...which gives me mining rate of 1800- 2200 pps.
[Note : running 4 droplets would cost more than $5/month. DigitalOcean charges you on hourly basis...and after about 12 hours of playing with the droplets, I owe them $0.34]
To clone a droplet,
- Select the droplet you want to clone from the list of droplets https://www.digitalocean.com/droplets
- Login to the droplet through SSH with root as username and the password you changed to earlier in step 4.
- Power off the Digital Ocean droplet from command line using "poweroff" command
- Now back on the Digital ocean website, select the "Snapshot" Tab from the droplet GUI interface and take the snapshot. It will take a few minutes.
Step 7 Create a new droplet using the following option..
The rest of the options are same as Step 1.
Step 8 login back to the original droplet that you cloned using SSH, and start back the miner with ./start-primecoind command
Step 9 For the new droplet, check your email for the password and the IP address. Then, log in to the droplet..change password using "passwd" command and start the miner if ./peek command does not give positive results.
Step 10 You can create up to 5 droplets in one account using the same snapshot. Since they are clones of each other..they will share the same wallet.
This is where I will stop for now ...
You can merge the VPS wallets with the wallet on the client on your PC. That is what I am trying to figure out now and will post as soon as I can successfully do it. It cannot be done by the methods shown by gigawatt until a block is minted..and I have not minted a block so far. I have also found this resource..
http://www.primecoiner.com/how-to-combine-multiple-wallets-into-main-wallet/But I am yet to do it successfully. Updates to Follow.
Mining on VPS is still borderline viable, but as as soon as GPU mining for Primecoin shows up, there would be no point. So I would suggest running multiple nodes for a month and move on to GPU ( which is under development).
Short Linode Turorial Sign up for
Linode VPS (Note: this is a referral link)
It is very similar to the Digital Ocean setup. And I will refer to the steps from the tutorial on DigitalOcean.
Pros : The VPS has 8 cores instead of just 1 in Digital Ocean
Cons : Unlike Digital Ocean, You have to pay up front! It is not charged hourly! and costs $20/month. You also cannot clone a node easily.
The first thing to do after setting up a Linode is make sure the Linode is "Running" if it says "Powered off" under the Server status , Press the Boot button.
Now you can finally connect to it via the SSH like
step 3. The access (node ip address) is given here ..
While setting it up, there was an option select the password so you can
skip Step 4!
The follow
steps 5 and 6 once you are logged in via the terminal.
To make different nodes, you have to repeat the process and each node will make you pay upfront. My linode has been hashing away at ~2300 pps mostly. But I have seen it change anywhere between 1700 pps to 3000 pps.
My current stats for one node is
Stats: {
"blocks" : 107773,
"chainspermin" : 2,
"chainsperday" : 0.29794305,
"currentblocksize" : 1000,
"currentblocktx" : 0,
"difficulty" : 9.63507777,
"errors" : "",
"generate" : true,
"genproclimit" : -1,
"roundsievepercentage" : 30,
"primespersec" : 2242,
"pooledtx" : 0,
"sievepercentage" : 10,
"sievesize" : 1000000,
"testnet" : false
}
