The following step-by-step tutorial was created to help æternity users start mining on the æternity Testnet and be ready to quickly switch to the Mainnet, once it launches. We are grateful to our Chinese æmbassador Zen (imae.one) for preparing this.

I. Preparation

1. Download the epoch release package and decompress it.

2. The epoch version of this guide is 0.22.0

Access the latest release here.

II. Generating the beneficiary account

As an example here we show the installation and use of the Python SDK’s command line tool to generate keys for the beneficiary account. This requires Python 3:

pip install aepp-sdk (venv) newby@stink:~/projects/aeternity/tmp/aepp-trader-service$ pip install aepp-sdk==0.25.0.1b1^C (venv) newby@stink:~/projects/aeternity/tmp/aepp-trader-service$ aecli account create ACCOUNTNAME Enter the account password []:

<account>

Address ___________________________________________ ak_bFYnkanC8utbxRnG8VN1fXFkWMnm4pUCMxjWuv8MVQArzi5hy

Path ______________________________________________ /home/newby/projects/aeternity/tmp/aepp-trader-service/ACCOUNTNAME

</account>

In the example, replace ACCOUNTNAME with whatever you want your account to be called. The password can be blank.

III. Configuring the beneficiary account

Create an epoch.yaml file in the “node” folder, enter the following configuration info. In the beneficiary field — enter the public key you just generated.

2. Use the epoch script to check if the configuration is valid or not:

./bin/epoch check_config epoch.yaml

3. Start the epoch node by execute this command：

ulimit ‐n 50000

./bin/epoch start

Important: The daemon must not be run through Ubuntu’s ‘root’ account. It will not work. Before you run the epoch node, switch to another Ubuntu user.

4. Check the mining log.

After running the epoch node, several “log/*” files will be generated in the “node” directory. You can try to find them by using related keywords. The log will contain information about new blocks that you have mined.