Cryptocurrency Mining

[Kendji]

Am wondering if anyone has experience mining Litecoin on Ubuntu, preferably CPU mining. There's alot of guides, and frankly some seem fake. I haven't mined before, so if someone could point me in the right direction to a solution that is viable.

[pushpop]

a desktop environment such as unity or gnome is completely unnecessary. bloatware like ubuntu is also probably the worst distro to use for your purposes. you probably don't need a graphics card either. however, if you are new to linux then you would probably appreciate all these things to make it easier for you to watch tutorial videos on the same machine that you are setting up at least while you are doing the initial setup. it can sometimes be useful to have more than one terminal window going at once on a single display.

the more common way and the better way would be to just start off headless and ssh into your box from your laptop or workstation. debian without the desktop environment would be preferable compared to ubuntu. there are other distros that may be better than debian. try arch linux. but be prepared to commit to the debian way or the arch way of doing things. the differences mean that you will eventually get good at one of them but be somewhat unfamiliar and frustrated when switching over to the other one.

hypothetically, if you were the expert and I was the noob, and I asked you if this mining operation was financially viable without telling you my hardware, my hash rate, the price of litecoin, or the price of power where I live... think about that. it is an impossible question.

asking someone, "hey, whats the best setup for mining litecoing?". think about that. what is best? what about noise? reliability? "best" is hard to nail down as an engineering requirement without knowing your requirements.

now that we have that out of the way, you mainly need to work at getting things in and out of the CPU as fast as possible. ram will affect the speed but not as much as cpu core count, clock speed, and L2 L3 cache.

you need to make sure no processes are running unless they are absolutely %100 essential to the operation of a dedicated litecoin mining machine. if you can't sort it out by uninstalling packages, building a distro, etc... then you must hack it by killing non-essential processes that you are sure you do not need. you will manually need to do this after the machine is rebooted every time unless you write your own script. if you make a mistake, you could damage your system or corrupt your disks here.

I would then put that machine behind a hardware firewall so that I don't have to choose between hashing power and security. you need to open only the ports required for litecoin and nothing else. you can experiment with more or less instances of the same mining app to see if that performs better than letting one instance manage threading and affinity automatically.

you may find additional improvements by doing some advanced memory management or maybe some fancy custom optimization of the litecoin software or the dependent libraries that it uses but that is probably not needed and not worth it.

[Elijah32]

I have not an experience in Cryptocurrency Mining, but I want to start Mining, can you guide me.

[phoronix_anon]

Long story short, it is neither practical nor profitable to mine on consumer hardware any longer, and this is coming from an early miner, 2011-2016. If you believe the price will go up in the future, it is best to just buy the coins. You may also be interested in proof-of-stake coins.

[Kendji]

I haven't mined, my current thinking is to do it on very low powered hardware and just leave it for a few years. Also in the process learning about mining.

[freespirit]

i'd like to learn it too

[nanonyme]

Long story short, it is neither practical nor profitable to mine on consumer hardware any longer, and this is coming from an early miner, 2011-2016. If you believe the price will go up in the future, it is best to just buy the coins. You may also be interested in proof-of-stake coins.

This. My understanding is most of the people who make money with cryptocurrencies are not miners but day traders.

[aht0]

I haven't mined, my current thinking is to do it on very low powered hardware and just leave it for a few years. Also in the process learning about mining.

Unless you do not have to pay for your electricity, it's no longer profitable in a way you want to do. Miners nowadays watch precisely what would be profitable and what not and "mine" accordingly, switching between currencies and algorithms often.

Low-powered hardware lacks also what you would need.. computational ability. It's a two-edged sword.