Mining for Dogecoin Via CPU: A new Shibe’s Roadmap For Their Journey To The Moon!

Before you go any further, please note that this guide is a complete beginner’s guide for CPU mining. If you have experience in mining, or if you are interested in GPU mining, this is not the guide for you. Now then, For starters, go read up on the Wikipedia page about Dogecoin to get an idea of what it’s about, how it started, and some of the technical info, such as block difficulty, total amount to be mined, etc. the Wikipedia article is here; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogecoin Okay, so now that you know about Dogecoin itself, let’s get you some general knowledge about mining Mining is the process by which the currency is generated. I won’t go into any more detail than that, so if you are just totally unfamiliar with the concept, go check out the Wikipedia article on cryptocurrency, and get an idea of how it works. The article can be found here; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency Now let’s get mining! Actually, we need to cover a few things first. For starters, this (the image below) is the “dashboard” of a mining pool. Almost all of them look identical, so don’t worry if you work out of more than one and you think you went to the wrong one, they generally use the same format for all of them.

These two relate to the hashrate of everyone in the pool Your Hashrate

This is your navigation panel to get around the pool website

These are the stats for the round

Your hashrate – to put it simply, it’s how fast your computer is working on the calculations. The same goes for the two that refer to the “pool” hashrate, however this is collective for the entire pool. This matters to miners because the lower the net hashrate of the pool, the less productive that pool essentially is, and the less of a profit you stand to make.

Now onto the round stats section (the area boxed in green on the right side of the page) We’ll start from the top with the section titled “Round Shares” Est. Shares – this is the total amount of shares that are estimated for the current block, the percent done in parentheses next to that number is a percentage of how many valid shares there are versus estimated shares. So, in the picture we see an est. share of 10318244, and a Pool Valid number of shares of 43096. (43096/10319244)*100 = roughly 4.18% Pool Valid – the total valid shares submitted by everyone in the pool. Your Valid – the total number of valid shares that you have submitted. Pool Invalid – the total number of invalid shares submitted by everyone in the pool. Your Invalid – the total number of invalid shares that you have submitted.

Now let’s move on to the next section titled “Doge Estimates” Block – This is simply the amount that your work is worth before fees and donations are deducted. Fees – This is the fee that is deducted from your payout in exchange for being part of the pool. Donation – this is the amount that you are donating to the pool when you get a payout. This is not mandatory, and can be set in your preferences. Payout – this is the total that you will receive for your payout. This is derived simply by taking the Block number, and deducting both the Fees number and the Donation number.

Finally, we have the “Network Info” section Difficulty – this is exactly what the name implies, a measure of the difficulty of the current block. Est. Next Difficulty – what the pool software estimates the difficulty of the next block will be. Est Avg Time per Block – An estimate of how long each block will take to solve Current Block – The number of the block that is currently being mined by the Dogecoin community (not your pool individually, but rather Dogecoin as a whole)

Now that we have established some of the terms, let’s take a look at how to get started. If you didn’t get it from the title, and the first statement, I will reiterate, this guide is for CPU mining. I personally do not use CGminer, or any form of GPU miner, so it wouldn’t do you any good taking tips from me. Onward (To The Moon!) If you haven’t already, you need to head over to http://www.dogecoin.com and download the Dogecoin wallet software for your device (I personally store my coin on my mobile, but I have the wallet software on my desktop as well for the sake of the built in miner, though I prefer not to use it.) After you have installed that, head on over to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55038.msg654850#msg654850 and select the miner for your system. These are sorted out first by what type of system (windows, Mac, Linux) and then by 32 bit, 64 bit, etc. download and install the appropriate software for your system. For windows systems (because that’s what I use, and am most comfortable giving instructions on), if you plan to mine directly within the Dogecoin software, you need to extract the file to the same folder that you saved your Dogecoin software in, but actually in the Dogecoin software’s folder. For instance my path is C:\Users\Preston\Documents\dogecoin-qt-v13-Win. Wherever you extract this to, be sure and remember the path, because you will need it to start your miner. After you have done that, you are ready to join a pool and get mining. In order to find a pool, you should check out http://www.doktorrf.com/dogecoin/pools.html for a list of mining pools with some of their stats. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because you can join as many pools as you like, for now, just select one, and after you are more familiar with what some of that stuff means. For the purposes of this guide, I will be using my account on DogeChain. I highly recommend this pool because I have had pretty decent payouts for a beginner (I’ve only been doing this for 4 days) with a crappy computer (mining on my HP G62 laptop) making about 150 Doge or so in about 20 hours of mining, and the fee is pretty low (0.4%). Certainly not an amount that would be considered “profitable” by hardcore miners, and you aren’t going to get rich doing this on a crappy computer, but this is a beginners guide, not a guide on getting rich. After you have selected your pool, head on over to it, create your account, sign in, and then find the link on the left hand column that says “My Workers”. This is where you will create workers to log into your miner. For security purposes (you’ll understand why when you when you get there) I will not show a screenshot of my workers, but it’s pretty straightforward once you get there. You’ll just want to input the worker’s name, and password, and then click “add new worker”. On this page you can also edit existing workers simply by finding the worker you want to edit, editing the field you want to edit, and then clicking "update workers”. Additionally you can delete workers that you no longer want by clicking the little trash can icon under the “Action” column of your workers. Now that you have your software, your mining pool profile, and a worker, you are ready to start mining. For this process I am going to be using command line only, but if you choose to mine in the Dogecoin software, it’s all the same information, just a different view, and less options for running it. So, head on over to your command line (start > run > cmd > ENTER, or in windows 7, I just push start, and type cmd since it defaults to that little search field, and hit enter, it automatically finds and starts the command prompt.) Remember how I said to remember the path to where you extracted your miner? Well here’s where that comes in. in your command prompt you are going to move to that directory by typing: cd C:\Users\Preston\Documents\dogecoin-qt-v13-Win (this should be whatever directory your miner is stored in. This is just my example location from earlier) and

press enter. CD is the command for “Change Directory” This changes the working directory so that when you enter the command to start the miner, command prompt knows what you want it to do, otherwise you are just shouting commands at it that it doesn’t understand. After you have changed directories, you know you have done it correctly when the prompt reflects that directory. See below for example.

Now that you are in the correct directory, you will need to know the commands to start the miner. To do this, type in minerd --help (note, that is two dashes). After you have entered this command, hit enter and a list of additional options will populate (seen below). These are the options you will use to set the

parameters of your miner. Because this is a beginners list, I will just go into the very basics to get you up and running, and as you get more experience, feel free to play around with the other options.

-a is the tag you will use to specify your algorithm. Dogecoin is Scrypt based, and minerd uses Scrypt by default, so this tag is unnecessary for mining Doge. –o (note this tag is lowercase o, and not zero) this tag is used to specify the URL of your mining server. When you enter the URL, you also need to make sure you type in the port # as well. For instance, I am using stratum+tcp://pool.dogechain.info and the port is 3333 so when I type it in following the –o command, it should look like;

stratum+tcp://pool.dogechain.info:3333. The information regarding servers and ports can be found on your mining pools “Getting Started” page, which is a link located on the left column of the page. Next is the –O tag (note this tag is a capital O and not a zero) this tag specifies your login credentials for the mining pool. Make sure you pay attention to how this is entered, otherwise you will just be denied access. It follows this format; username.workername:worker password. So if your username for the mining pool (the one that you sign into the pool website with) is john1234, your workername is John, and your password is password (don’t be that guy), then you would enter: john1234.john:password Next is the –t tag. This tag is for the number of threads that you want to use on your processor. This starts to tread on territory that I don’t fully understand, I just know that I always use 99, and it always works. That’s all you need to know to get started. Below is a screenshot of me starting my miner (the login is made up, so don’t waste your time trying to use it.)

And here is what it looks like when it starts running (note that in the below screen shot, I have redacted the logon info, this is for my personal security. Following the –O tag, you simply enter your login info as previously discussed):

And that’s it! If you followed the guide correctly, you should now be mining Dogecoin. Thanks for checking out my guide, and if you would like to send me a tip, please feel free; DBXoDe2qrEswHbPucqoTupAYGU98FTucoG Thanks again, and enjoy your shiny new Dogecoins!