A few weeks ago, when our own "Arscoin" cryptocurrency was first minted, it looked like Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson would control the majority of the coins. He started mining early, and he has a crowd of Linux servers sitting in his closet that can outrun the all-in-one desktops and power-sipping Ultrabooks most of us have on hand.

When our little experiment began, I knew enough about Bitcoin and Litecoin mining to know that there are more efficient ways to rack up coins than using the default miner, but I had never actually mined either of those currencies myself. Coingen.io, which we used to produce the Arscoin code, provides no explicit documentation and little post-creation support for newly minted cryptocurrencies, so it was up to me to feel my way forward. I couldn't out-muscle Lee's closet full of computers, but I've worked with him for long enough to know that I could outsmart him. (See me after class, Mr. Cunningham. -Ed.)

Further Reading Here’s how to spend your hard-earned Arscoins

A couple of notes before we begin. In these directions, we'll try not to assume any knowledge about mining on your part, but the most straightforward mining utilities use the Windows, OS X, and Linux command lines. We'll cover graphical utilities where appropriate, but you Linux users in particular should make sure you know your way around a Terminal window, especially if you intend to GPU mine. We will also require you to download some files from external sites—we haven't encountered any problems with any of the tools we're about to recommend, but we assume no responsibility for anything you do to your hardware or software while mining Arscoins or any other cryptocurrency.

Second, while you'll be able to mine plenty of Arscoins with your CPU and GPU (thereby securing yourself some sweet fake hats for the comment section), folks who are serious about actual Bitcoin mining have long since moved to dedicated mining devices like the Butterfly Labs ASIC box we tested out last summer. ASIC-based mining devices are much, much faster than CPUs or GPUs, and they use less power to boot. As of this writing, ASICs that can run the scrypt algorithm used to encrypt Litecoin, Arscoin, and other altcoins aren't in widespread circulation, but it's only a matter of time.

Finally, the Arscoin project is for those who want to experiment with digital currencies—and buy some fun hats and colored usernames along the way. In other words, it is for educational use only; we have centralized the system in order to prevent it from developing into a real-money economy.

Your online Arscoin wallet

If you've never mined any kind of coin yourself, it can be helpful to have some idea of what the "mining" process actually entails. Senior Business Editor Cyrus Farivar has covered the basics here, and once you've read through that piece, you'll have some idea what your computer is doing to "mine" coins, how cryptocurrency transactions are tracked and verified, and a little about "scrypt," the hashing algorithm used by Arscoin, Litecoin, and others.

If you want to mine and spend your own Arscoins, the first thing you'll need is a "wallet" where you can store them. These wallets match a unique, case-sensitive, alphanumerical address like 1HMdQtU9vgz5umTomCfVGdSeeNsk2tavcK (that one's mine—tips are welcome) to a private key used to verify that your coins actually belong to you. Many cryptocurrencies will let you use both online and locally stored wallets, but Arscoin's wallets are online-only. If you have an Ars Technica account for the front page comments and the forums, you can make a wallet for yourself automatically by visiting coins.arstechnica.com/store#wallet. You can use that page to see your Arscoin address, view your current balance, and send payments to other addresses. Other tabs will show your purchase history and the (fake) merchandise you can buy with your coins.

Once you have a wallet, most altcoins will let you mine in one of two different ways. "Solo" mining is exactly what it sounds like—you're mining for coins by yourself using only your own hardware. Solo mining is a high risk/high reward enterprise. If you happen to find a block, you get the entire payout for that block (in this case, 50 Arscoins). You're fighting against every other miner on the peer-to-peer network, though, and the more people mining at once, the smaller your chance is of successfully finding a block in the first place. Solo mining isn't an option with Arscoin, though, because we're not distributing the modified Arscoin mining clients.

Besides, there's a better way: join a mining pool. Pools accept connections from clients and then use those clients' combined computational power to work on the same hashes at once. Blocks discovered by a pool are then split up and distributed to pool members based on the amount of power they're contributing to the pool. If your hardware is doing 10 percent of the pool's hashes, you'll receive 10 percent of the total payout, and so on. We've already gone through the trouble of configuring a pool you can use, and we'll show you how to connect to it in this article. We'll be using Arscoin as an example, but the basic principles apply whether you're mining Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, or any of the others.

Sharing the wealth: Connect to the Arscoin mining pool

Setting up a mining pool isn't for the faint of heart, but Lee Hutchinson and Ars Lead Developer Lee Aylward got one up and running in a couple of days. Before you join the mining effort, you'll need to point your browser at coins.arstechnica.com and click Sign Up to create an account. The accounts on the Arscoin server are completely separate from your Ars account; your data will be handled according to the terms of our privacy policy (and its Ars-specific addendum).

You'll need two important pieces of information aside from the e-mail address and password you used to sign up. You'll need to remember the username you selected since it will be used to connect your mining app to the pool, and you'll want to remember the four-digit PIN since you'll need that any time you want to make changes to your account information.

The first thing to do once you've created an account and clicked the e-mail verification link is to point the mining pool at your wallet so that it can pay you for your contributions to the pool. Click the Edit Account link in the left-hand navigation bar and plug your Arscoin wallet address into the Payment Address field. You'll also want to put a value into the Automatic Payout Threshold box so that your coins are deposited into your wallet automatically ("10" is a safe default). Then enter your four-digit PIN and click Update. The pool will now be able to deposit coins into your account once you start mining—they'll show up in your transaction history on your wallet page.

Finally, you'll need to create some "worker" accounts, one for each computer you intend to connect to the pool at once. Click "My Workers," and then create as many unique workers as you want. The worker names need to be unique, but the passwords can all be the same if you'd like. A word of warning: our pool administrators (both the Lees) can see these worker passwords, so even though they're perfectly trustworthy, you shouldn't use the same password for your workers that you use for your account. By the same token, you shouldn't use a password here that you use for any of your other online accounts.

CPU mining

You have an account, and you've configured it to deposit Arscoins into your online wallet. You have some names and passwords for your workers. It's finally time to start mining.

CPU mining is relatively uncomplicated, and there's really only one game in town: CPUminer, also known as minerd (short for "miner daemon"). The source code and 32-bit and 64-bit binaries of the tool can be downloaded from the bitcointalk.org forums or from SourceForge. Download the version that will run in your operating system and then unzip all of the files into a directory that you can easily locate. In all of the code examples below, we'll keep all the files in a desktop folder labeled "cpuminer."

Windows

Open a command line window, either by finding it in your applications list or by typing "cmd" into Windows Search. Assuming that the starting path is C:\users\[your username], type out the following:

cd desktop\cpuminer minerd.exe --algo=scrypt --url=stratum+tcp://coins.arstechnica.com:3333 --userpass=[username].[worker name]:[worker password]

Replace [username] with the username you used when you created a mining pool account. Replace [worker name] with the name of one of your workers, and [worker password] with that worker's password. The miner will begin to churn, giving you periodic status updates about the hash rate and informing you when it has successfully found a block. As long as you properly plugged in your wallet address and auto payout settings, coins will begin appearing in your wallet after they've been confirmed.

By default, this will use all of your system's available CPU threads to mine. If you'd like to leave some CPU threads free for other purposes, add a --thread=X argument to your command, where X is the number of threads you'd like to devote to mining. A modern quad-core Intel CPU running at full-tilt will run somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 kilohashes per second (kH/s) with CPUminer.

OS X

Once you've downloaded CPUminer and extracted it to the folder on your desktop, open a Terminal window from the Utilities folder or by launching it from Spotlight. Assuming that the starting path is your Home directory, type the following:

$ cd Desktop/cpuminer $ chmod u+x ./minerd $ ./minerd --algo=scrypt --url=stratum+tcp://coins.arstechnica.com:3333 --userpass=[username].[worker name]:[worker password]

These instructions are pretty much identical to the Windows ones, excepting differences in how the operating systems' respective command lines work. The one extra factor is the chmod command, used to adjust permissions on the downloaded file so that you can actually execute it. If you're getting a "permission denied" error when you try to run minerd, that's the problem.

Linux

Download CPUminer, extract it to the folder on your desktop, and launch whatever Terminal program your distribution of choice uses. Assuming the starting path is your Home directory, type the following:

$ cd Desktop/cpuminer $ ./minerd --algo=scrypt --url=stratum+tcp://coins.arstechnica.com:3333 --userpass=[username].[worker name]:[worker password]

Unlike OS X, we encountered no strange permissions issues under Linux. Just make sure the command line's case-sensitivity doesn't trip you up, though this won't be a problem for most native Linux users.

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