Ethereum mining guide

Ethereum is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies in the world. People who became acknowledged with it often embrace the idea of earning Ethers through mining. This guide is to help you to join miners community from scratch. You’ll learn how to earn Ethers in the most simple way with MinerGate. 

What is Ethereum?

Before we begin, let’s introduce some basic things about Ethereum, i.e. what it is and why we focus on it. Ethereum is a young and very promising blockchain platform and cryptocurrency, developed from scratch and released on July 30th 2015. Ethereum provides Solidity – a programming language that allows for creation of decentralized apps (DApps). DApps support so-called smart contracts. Smart contract is a protocol which is designed to robotize the execution of contracts, thus reduce the price of certain services. For this reason, Ethereum has focused almost all attention of cryptocommunity, investors and startupers. Learn more about the project on its official page.

Ethereum mining

Just like Bitcoin, Ethereum uses a blockchain technology and can be mined through the power of your computer. The mining represents producing of blocks and checking them for validity. Ethereum mining is difficult as it contains a lot of complicated calculations in order to prevent attacks and spam. There are several types of mining.

Solo mining. It is the hardest way of mining, the only profit from which this is that you don’t have to share your reward with other miners. The difficult thing is to create a competitive mining rig that would be capable to send enough hashes by solving the provided equations.

Cloud mining. The process when you mine Ethereum using the power of huge data centers called farms. Farms conclude a contract and connect you with their mining machines. Sounds nice, but the contract is temporary and payable. Some consider this method non-profitable.

Pool mining. Your computer joins the net of other computers, thus uniting their power to make calculations. The reward for each block processed is shared between miners. MinerGate is one of the most convenient and easy way to start mining Ethereum as it has simple user interface. This solves the problems of beginners, especially when one is not tech-savvy.

MinerGate pool

If you go solo mining, your computer must be superpowerful to accomplish computing operations. And if you want to upgrade it just for mining, it is unlikely to be repaid. With MinerGate, your odds for Ethereum reward are dramatically increased even if you are using average hardware. Although the reward is shared among pool users, it’s way more profitable than going solo. Now, we came to the core part of our guide. Here are your gates to Ethereum mining with MinerGate (pun intended).

Download and install

To begin with, go to our Downloads page to download the GUI-miner. It’s available for all popular operating systems and automatically suggests you the proper version.

As soon as MinerGate is downloaded, create an account. Only three fields to fill out and you’re all set.

Here is a handy and comprehensive interface. Now you can start Ethereum mining. To do this, go to the ‘Miner’ tab and click ‘Start’ next to Ethereum.

Here you may regulate the number of CPU cores and the intensity of GPU for better results.

CPU and GPU

MinerGate supports CPU and GPU mining.

Many newbies wonder which one of those is faster for Ethereum mining. The answers is GPU. That’s all about speed. A GPU executes 3200 32-bit instructions per cycle, whereas a CPU does only 4. So, the faster your graphic card is, the more coins you earn. While GPU mining, the DAG file required for this process overloads the chip. As the file size is about 1,5 GBs and is constantly growing, graphic cards less that 2 GBs are not supported. 

Tech requirements for graphic cards

Currently, we support NVidia cards with CUDA version 7.5, compute capability >2.0 and AMD cards with OpenCL starting from 1.1. Please note that your card should have latest official drivers installed.
If your card meets these requirements, but our software cannot determine it as suitable, don’t hesitate to send us the logs of the app, so we can work on your issue.To see these logs, click on MinerGate’s menu bar>Logs>MinerGate.

Hashrate

While mining, you see hashrate, wich is the measure of your computer’s power. That’s the number of hashes processed per second. Your hashrate, together with the hashrate of other MinerGate’s users form the pool hashrate. Current pool and world hashrate, as well as the information on the blocks found by our pool can be found on the Pool stats page.

The better your hardware is, the higher hashrate you get, and, yes, the more Ethereum you earn. To calculate how much ETH your computer can mine with MinerGate, see our Calculator. Please note that the longer period you check, the more accurate calculations you will get. 

DAG-file

Another thing you may have noticed is the DAG-file, mentioned above. It gets prepared when you start mining Ethereum.

DAG is a file containing fixed data which is used for a proof of work calculation. Every 30000 blocks DAGs change, and they depend on the block’s height. It takes 4-7 minutes to get this file prepared.

DAG requires disk space. If it’s not enough, you’ll see this message:

Just provide enough space on your hardware to fix the issue.

MinerGate and Ethminer

MinerGate supports Ethminer, the official Ethereum client. Read the instructions here if you want to use it with our pool.

Exchange rates

After you get accustomed to Ethereum mine some Ethereums, you might want to exchange them to other crypto coins or just check the current rate to choose a perfect moment for making a withdrawal. You can always do it at Changelly.com and top up your wallets with any coins you want.

FAQ and support

If you have found some questions unanswered, you may look them up in Frequently Asked Questions section of MinerGate. 

For troubleshooting, please contact our support team.