How to Start Mining: Grin

TL;DR: Mining on Luxor flow

1. Register for an account
2. Verify email
3. Update your miner config
4. Start Hashing!

What’s Grin and MimbleWimble?

Grin checks all the boxes. Grin is a community-driven cryptocurrency that advocates for privacy, aims for scalability and stays decentralized. Resembling Bitcoin, Grin has an independent and active dev-community. Moreover, there will be no ICO or foundation tax, aiming to be a true decentralized cryptocurrency that’s not driven by the work of only one entity.

Grin was built based on the MimbleWimble protocol, a completely new blockchain protocol that will result in a paradigm shift. It’s a scalable blockchain due to its innovative design that reduces required data storage. In addition, privacy is built-in from the ground up.

Like Bitcoin, Grin uses classical Nakamoto consensus (Proof-of-Work) but with a completely different mining algorithm called Cuckoo Cycles which is known for being ASIC resistant as it’s memory intensive.

Learn more about Grin in our detailed Medium Article.

What you’ll need to start mining …

Grin doesn’t have wallet addresses, therefore, miners must register a Luxor user account.

The available mining software isn’t fully optimized for the Cuckoo Cycle PoW which means that the computing power requirements are high. As more miners join the network and devs keep making efficiency improvements, lower capacity GPUs and CPUs will be able to find valid solutions to the PoW.

As of January 2019 a GPU with at least 4 Gb of memory is required to mine the secondary PoW (Cukaroo) and 11 Gb are required to mine the primary PoW (Cuckatoo).

Currently there’s no wallet support for Windows, however, it’s being developed here. If you want to receive immediate pool payments you will need to setup a Grin Node and Wallet in a Linux VPS or VM or MacOSX instance. Otherwise, you can HODL your Grin in Luxor’s pool until Windows is fully supported.

You can find an in-depth Guide on how to setup and operate Grin’s Linux/MacOSX implementation here.

Available Mining Software

• Bminer (NVIDIA & AMD, at least 6G RAM)
• GRINGoldMiner (NVIDIA & AMD, at least 6G RAM)
• MinerOS (NVIDIA & AMD, at least 4G RAM)
• Miner Master (NVIDIA, at least 6G RAM).

Setting up Bminer on SMOS

If you mined with SMOS before you’ll find setting up Grin at Luxor straightforward. You will need to pick the Stratum you’re closest too and update your miner string as follows:

• US Stratum

-uri cuckaroo29d://username.workername:password@grin-us.luxor.tech:3000

• EU Stratum

-uri cuckaroo29d://username.workername:password@grin-eu.luxor.tech:3000

• Asia Stratum

-uri cuckaroo29d://username.workername:password@grin-asia.luxor.tech:3000

Mining on Windows

GrinGoldMiner (GGM) is the only Windows miner available that is compatible with Nvidia and AMD GPUs. However, it doesn’t support CPU mining, so if you want to mine with a CPU you’ll need to run Linux for now.

Once you download the latest version available, run the GrinGoldMinerCLI file and you’ll be asked the following information:

• Pick one of the Stratum nodes below (ensure it is port 3000), and type in the pool setting as follows (set your nearest location):

URL: stratum+tcp://grin-us.luxor.tech
URL: stratum+tcp://grin-eu.luxor.tech
URL: stratum+tcp://grin-asia.luxor.tech

• Port: 3000
• TLS Support: N We’re working to enable TLS soon. Keep an eye on our Discord to get notified 😏.
• Same pool login details as the worker created in our website.

Then just press enter to start hashing!

Mining on Linux / MacOS

After you download the Linux / MacOS version of Grin Miner you will to unzip the tgz file. After, navigate to the grin-miner.toml file and edit the following parameters:

1. Stratum, mining address

Pick one of the Stratum nodes below (ensure it is port 3000), and type in the pool settings as follows (set your nearest location):

stratum_server_addr = "grin-us.luxor.tech:3000"
stratum_server_addr = "grin-eu.luxor.tech:3000"
stratum_server_addr = "grin-asia.luxor.tech:3000"

2. Login details

Set your stratum login details with your Luxor account username. Worker name and password can be whatever you want.

stratum_server_login = "username/workername"
stratum_server_password = "workerpassword"

3. TLS

stratum_server_tls_enabled = false

We’re working to enable TLS soon. Keep an eye on our Discord to get notified 😏.

4. Configuring your mining hardware

• CPU

Start by navigating to the grin-miner.tomlfile. In order to activate CPU mining, you will need to comment in the following lines:

[[mining.miner_plugin_config]]
plugin_name = "cuckaroo_cpu_compat_29"
[mining.miner_plugin_config.parameters]
nthreads = 4

Change the number of threads according to your CPU specifications.

• Nvidia

Start by navigating to the grin-miner.tomlfile. In order to activate the GPU mining plugin, you will need to comment the following lines:

#[[mining.miner_plugin_config]]
#plugin_name = "cuckaroo_cpu_compat_29"
#[mining.miner_plugin_config.parameters]
#nthreads = 1

• Proceed, by commenting in the following lines (remove#):

[[mining.miner_plugin_config]]
plugin_name = “cuckaroo_cuda_29”
[mining.miner_plugin_config.parameters]
device = 1

If you have multiple GPUs you’ll need to copy those four lines for each card and change the device number.

• AMD

Start by navigating to the grin-miner.tomlfile. In order to activate the GPU mining plugin, you will need to comment the following lines:

#[[mining.miner_plugin_config]]
#plugin_name = "cuckaroo_cpu_compat_29"
#[mining.miner_plugin_config.parameters]
#nthreads = 1

• Proceed, by commenting in the following lines (remove#):

[[mining.miner_plugin_config]]
plugin_name = "ocl_cuckatoo"
[mining.miner_plugin_config.parameters]
platform = 1
device = 0
edge_bits = 31

If you have multiple GPUs you’ll need to copy those six lines for each card and change the device number.

You can find an in-depth guide for Grin-Miner here.

Monitoring revenue and miner performance on Luxor

Once you’ve started hashing, grab yourself a beer! It’ll take about 5 minutes for your worker to appear on our stats page. To find your user, simply go to mining.luxor.tech and login into your user account at the top of the navbar. You should see something like this:

Miner Dashboard

You can also view details through Grin’s block explorer.

How to withdraw funds

This guide will delve deeper into how request a payment from Luxor’s Grin Pool. We started by implementing IP withdrawals since most exchanges only support IP, however, we’re going to add file and keybase transactions in the up coming weeks.

Start by navigating to your dashboard. Then go my account, find your GRIN account and click on withdraw, you should see something like this:

If you’re requesting a payout to self-hosted node, make sure the node is active, listening by running the following command grin wallet -e listen and ensure that the wallet is listening to IP:3415. You can make sure your wallet is reachable using CanYouSeeMe.org.

Click on the withdraw button, the following window will pop up on the page:

Fill in the field with your exchange HTTP or HTTPS address and request the payment by clicking on the Payout button. It might take a few minutes before you see your balance credited in your account which depends on the amount of network confirmations your exchange requires.

Happy Hashing!

Luxor is building infrastructure to support the next generation of digital assets. Learn more about us 👉 here.

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