CGMiner v4.11.1: Download – Setting up the miner – Features and requirements

CGMiner is a program that provides data management during mining. This “miner” works on a special NeoScrypt algorithm, which helps to “accelerate” the profits received in the process of mining cryptocurrency. CGMiner is created in a console shell and is designed for advanced computer users. In the software, you mine “digital money” using the full power of an AMD video card. The main disadvantage of this software is the graphical environment, which does not contain a window interface, that is, it is console-based.

If you are an inexperienced computer user, then you will have to spend a lot of time setting up the miner. You configure all the configurations and options that are needed for full-fledged mining manually. The user enters data about the connection to the pool, load level and other parameters into the configuration file.

Features of the program

The software uses the NeoScrypt algorithm. This allows you to increase mining profitability by generating excellent hashrate.

The developers created Cgminer when mining was carried out mainly on cards with a chip from AMD. Therefore, the program does not have the functionality to work with the later popular CUDA technology from NVidia. The software can only work with video cards of this type using OpenCL technology. This method is less effective, so NVidia holders most often choose other applications.

Pros:

• Free and open source software;
• The developers do not require a commission for using the software;
• A huge number of parameters for settings for any equipment;
• Productive mining with the right settings;
• Overclocking video card cores and regulating coolers.

Minuses:

• Few mining algorithms available;
• The latest versions of the program do not support mining on video cards and processors;
• The lack of a graphical interface makes the setup process difficult for inexperienced users.

Choosing a mining method

Earning digital money involves several different methods, each of which is carried out using specialized equipment. Possible devices include a personal computer, FPGA modules, ASICs and video card farms. The best option in terms of price and performance is definitely the latter. It is he who most often turns to users who decide to start mining cryptocurrency. The main components of the farm are almost the same as those of a regular PC:

1. Motherboard. Must have top-end specifications and have at least 4 PCI-e slots.
2. CPU. In the case of mining coins using the Scrypt algorithm, there is no need for a powerful CPU, and therefore the most budget-friendly one is selected.
3. RAM. The total volume should not be less than 4 gigabytes.
4. HDD. Doesn't matter much. It is only needed to initialize the operating system and install electronic currency wallets.
5. Power unit. It keeps the entire farm running, so its purchase should be approached with care and scrupulousness. You need to choose a power supply with a reserve of at least 200 watts. At the same time, it is worth remembering the energy consumed by the remaining components of the system.
6. Video card. The most important component of the farm, which carries out all computing operations.
7. Cooling system. It is distinguished by competent design of ways to remove heated air. To do this, the gap between graphics devices must be at least 8 centimeters. In addition, it is quite possible to use a water-based system. This type of cooling does its job better and does not make as much noise as the classic version. However, it is more labor-intensive in terms of technical implementation.

Technical requirements

Best of all, as practice has shown, CGMiner works under Windows 7 64 bit. On Windows 10 or 8, performance is lower by an average of 3-5% (depending on the encryption used). The program allows you to mine cryptocurrency simultaneously on 8 workers (that is, 8 video cards per base station). There is no official website for the miner as such, but a forum where you can discuss any questions about the program, its functionality and settings is located at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.0. It is worth noting that the application does not work under 32-bit operating systems (due to low system performance and the 2 gigabyte RAM limit). And experienced miners also claim that the so-called Ccminer is better suited for Radeon video cards than Nvidia. Their approximate performance using the Scrypt algorithm is as follows:

Since CGMiner is more optimized for Scrypt, it is best to mine Litecoin with its help. Only from version 3.7.2. support for the more popular SHA-256 algorithm has been added. It is important to note that Cgminer divides multi-chip video cards into 2 workers (in the case of 2 processors). Accordingly, when using such devices, the maximum limitation is up to 4 adapters per station.

This application will not work for Asic.

CGMiner 3.7.2 – AMD GPU+ASIC+FPGA miner

What is ASIC?

These are application-defined integrated circuit devices and provide the highest performance per unit of power because they are designed for only one purpose. They are currently the only meaningful way to mine Bitcoin.

Help, I launched cgminer and it says zero!?

Welcome to BTC mining. Your computer by itself cannot mine bitcoins, no matter how powerful it is. You must purchase special mining hardware called an ASIC to connect to your computer. See ASIC question below.

I have multiple USB drives but can't get them to work right away?

Very few USB hubs deliver the promised power required to run any number of devices if they are all USB powered.

I have connected my devices to a USB hub but nothing is showing up?

RPi and Windows have incomplete or non-standard support for USB3, so they may never work. You can make a USB3 hub work by connecting it to a USB2 hub. When choosing a hub, it is preferable to use USB2 hubs whenever possible due to better support from all sides.

Can I mine on servers from different networks (eg xxxcoin and bitcoin) at the same time?

No, cgminer keeps a database of the block it is working on to ensure it doesn't work on stale blocks, and having different blocks from two networks will invalidate it.

Can I configure cgminer to mine with different credentials or pools for each individual device?

No.

Can I put multiple pools in a config file?

Yes, check the example.conf file. Alternatively, configure everything either on the command line or via the post-launch menu and select settings->write config file and the file will be loaded on every startup.

The build fails and gcc is unable to build the binary.

Remove the "-march=native" component of your CFLAGS, since your version of gcc does not support it. Also -O2 is a capital o 2, not a zero 2.

Can you implement function X?

I can, but time is limited and people who donate are more likely to get their feature requests completed.

Does work continue on my backup pool even if my primary pool hasn't failed?

Cgminer checks for conditions under which the main pool is falling behind, and under these conditions it delegates some work to the backup servers. The reason is to do everything possible to keep devices working on something useful and not risk downtime. You can disable this behavior using the --failover-only option.

Is this a virus?

Cgminer is packaged with other Trojan scripts, and some antivirus programs falsely accuse cgminer.exe of being a real virus and not what it is packaged with. If you installed cgminer yourself, then there is no virus on your computer. File a complaint with the antivirus software company. They seem to now even flag cgminer source code as viruses, even though the text source files themselves can't do anything.

Can you change the mapping to include more of one and less of the other in the output, or can you change the quiet mode, or can you add another output mode?

Everyone will always have their own view of what is important to track. The default values ​​are very reasonable and I have very little interest in changing them further. There's a lot more detail in the API output than can be reasonably displayed in a small console window, and using a frontend like miner.php is much more useful for configuring with many devices.

What are the best parameters to pass for the X pool/hardware/device.

Almost always, the DEFAULT settings give the best results. Most custom settings result in poor performance.

What happened to CPU and GPU mining?

Their efficiency makes them irrelevant in the Bitcoin mining world today, and the author has no interest in supporting alternative coins that are better mined by these devices.

GUI version?

No. The RPC interface allows someone else to write it.

I have a problem. What debugging information should I provide?

Run cgminer with your usual commands and add -D -T --verbose and provide the full run output and a summary of your hardware and operating system.

Why don't you provide builds for win64?

Win32 builds work everywhere, and the 64-bit Windows build offers absolutely zero benefit.

Is it faster to mine on windows or linux?

It doesn't matter from a performance standpoint. It all comes down to choosing an operating system based on its various features and your comfort level. However, Linux is the main development platform and is almost guaranteed to be more stable.

My network gets slower and slower and then dies for a minute?

Try the --net-delay option if you are on a GBT server. This does nothing for strat mining.

How do I set up for p2pool?

It is also recommended to use --failover-only since the operation is similar to other blockchain and does not include --no-submit-stale. When mining with the BFL (fpga) mini-game, it is worth adding the --bfl-range parameter.

I'm running PHP on Windows to access the API with miner.php example. Why doesn't it work if php is installed correctly but I only get messages about sockets not working in the logs?

https://us.php.net/manual/en/sockets.installation.php

What is PGA?

Cgminer supports 3 FPGAs: BitForce, Icarus and ModMiner. These are field programmable gate arrays that have been programmed to mine Bitcoin. Since the abbreviation must only have 3 characters, the "Field-" part was omitted.

What is a stratum and how to use it?

Stratum is a protocol designed for federated mining to minimize network communications while still scaling to any speed hardware. In cgminer versions 2.8.0+, if a pool has tier support, cgminer will automatically detect it and switch to support as advertised if possible. If you enter the stratum port directly into your config, or use the special prefix "stratum+tcp://" instead of "http://", cgminer will ONLY attempt to use stratum protocol mining. The benefits of stratum for the miner are no delays in getting more work for the miner, fewer failures when changing blocks, and much less network communications for the same amount of mining hashrate. If you DO NOT want cgminer to automatically switch to the stratum protocol even if it is detected, add the --fix-protocol option.

Q: Why are the stats not summed up: accepted, rejected, outdated, hardware errors, Diff1 running, etc. when mining with more than 1 fraction of difficulty?

As an example, if you look at "Complexity Accepted" in the RPC API, the number of complexity shares accepted is usually not the same as the amount of work done to find them. If you mine difficulty 8, then you expect to find, on average, one fraction of 8 difficulty for every 8 individual fractions of difficulty found. However, the number is actually random and converges over time, it is an average, not an exact value, so you may find more or less than the expected average.

Does my keyboard input momentarily pause or repeat keys on Windows while mining?

Windows' USB implementation can be very unstable on some hardware, and every time cgminer looks for new hardware to hotplug, it can cause these kinds of problems. You can disable hot plugging with: --hotplug 0

What should my work utility (WU) be?

The usefulness of the work is a result of hashrate* luck, which only stabilizes over a very long period of time. Assuming all your work is valid, Bitcoin mining should produce a working utility of approximately 1 in 71.6MH. This means that at 5GH you should have a WU of 5000 / 71.6 or ~69. You can't make your machine perform "better" WU than this - it depends on luck. However, you can make it much worse if your machine throws a lot of hardware errors resulting in incorrect operation.

What should I build into the distribution's shared binary?

There are a number of drivers that are intended to be used on dedicated standalone hardware. However, the drivers that are designed to generally work with USB on any hardware are: -enable-avalon -enable-avalon2 -enable-avalon4 -enable-avalon7 -enable-avalon8 -enable-bflsc -enable-bitfury -enable- cointerra —enable-drillbit —enable-hashfast —enable-hashratio —enable-icarus —enable-klondike

How to use the --decode function to decode a pool's coin base?
You need to have Bitcoin with server functionality and pass the credentials to it as the first pool in your configuration, and also pass the address of the pool you want to decode as the second pool configured. Please note that bitcoind NEEDS the https:// prefix.

CGMiner setup and parameters

CGMiner is operated via the command line. To avoid having to configure all the parameters again every time you start or change cryptocurrency, it’s easier to create a .bat file and enter the settings there. This file is created in the folder with the miner as a text document (notepad), with the extension .bat. The main setting for the miner to work looks like this:

cgminer --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://east1.us.stratum.dedicatedpool.com:3351 -u user.1 -px

cgminer - points to the launch file

—scrypt — indicates to the miner the algorithm of the mined cryptocurrency

-o - after this the pool address tratum+tcp://east1.us.stratum.dedicatedpool.com is indicated: and port 3351. This data is indicated on all pools, in the “Getting Started” section.

-u user.1 - indicating the login on the pool and the name of the worker created there

-px — specifying the password for the created worker

What should you remember when assembling trusses?

During the installation of a farm, several calculations need to be made to determine the most suitable option. It is necessary to establish the total cost of all site components, and select them based on the best correspondence to the profitability/energy efficiency ratio. Also find out the amount of electricity consumed daily and calculate how much you will have to pay for it. Having collected all the figures together, summarize the payback time. To simplify this task, there are a whole lot of different applications: from primitive ones - taking into account only the price of an electronic coin and the power of the farm, to advanced ones - taking into account the cost of the currency, mining speed, electricity consumption and changes in mining difficulty.

How to start mining?

First you need to download CGMiner from the Bitcointalk web resource. The most current version of the application is always available here. In addition, anyone can participate in an active discussion of the project. Next, you need to select the pool on which mining will take place and perform a number of simple manipulations:

1. Register on his website.
2. Then, in the “Workers” tab, indicate the new equipment. Also come up with a name and password. If, for example, the user has 2 video cards and 4 laptops, then 6 workers should be entered under the name “Admin” and the code “qwerty”.
3. Then unzip the miner and create a batik file inside the opened folder. Activate it by double clicking and enter a number of necessary commands there.
4. All that remains is to save the bat and run it by clicking on it 2 times. If the actions are correct, the corresponding window will appear.

After a few hours, you can see the first mining results in your pool account. Using the steps described above, any beginner can start mining cryptocurrency without spending a huge amount of time on detailed setup of all systems.

Support for the CryptoNight protocol for mining Monero and Bytecoin

The main goal of CryptoNight is to reduce the gap between those who mine currency on personal computers and owners of special ASIC devices. Abadi and other developers have created incredibly RAM-sensitive protocols.

The key idea is to designate a massive block of information in RAM, including a randomly generated sequence. The node must be quite voluminous so that storing information becomes more productive than their constant mathematical determination. In addition, the protocol must eliminate parallelism, in other words, N-number of simultaneous data streams use N times more RAM.

One of the most common algorithms, Scrypt, also uses RAM, however, it does not completely eliminate the possibility of creating productive and relatively inexpensive specialized equipment for calculating its computational processes. In the situation with CryptoNight, each generated node directly depends on the previous ones. The improved protocol uses approximately 2 megabytes of RAM, which corresponds to the minimum L3 cash memory of modern CPUs. At the same time, this size of RAM eliminates the possibility of using ASIC devices.

Digital currencies such as Monero, ByteCoin, AeonCoin and so on are based on the CryptoNight protocol. The advantages of mining on such a protocol are obvious:

• gradually decreasing emissions;
• short time intervals between the creation of new blocks;
• using a combination of a central processor plus a video card to increase power;
• inability to mine cryptocurrency using specialized ASIC devices;
• fundamental differences from Bitcoin, which stimulates community interest in new types of digital money;
• the profitability of mining is significantly higher than that of many other decentralized sites;
• Graphics and central processors wear out less than when mining based on other algorithms.

Innovative solutions set CryptoNight-based coins apart from cryptocurrencies using older protocols.