Note: Electroneum has forked on July 5, 2018 to reintroduce ASIC miners. Unfortunately, ASIC miners brought so much hashing power to the network that it is now nearly impossible for GPU and CPU miners to get a decent return. You’ll still be able to mine Electroneum with a GPU and CPU, but your payouts will be greatly reduced. Read more about it here.

Electroneum can be mined on a computer, similarly to how it can be mined with a mobile phone.

In this article, you’ll learn how to mine Electroneum on your computer using its CPU (Central Processing Unit) or GPU (Graphical Processing Unit, more commonly known as a graphics card).

Mine Electroneum Using xmr-stak

To get started, you’ll need the following:

A computer (running 64-bit Windows, MacOS, or some version of Linux)

An Electroneum wallet address where your mined earnings will be paid into

Mining software (we’ll use xmr-stak as you’ll see below)

We’ll be using xmr-stak – open-source mining software that runs on the command line and supports both CPU and GPU mining. If you’re not comfortable working on the command line, don’t worry. It’s pretty easy to set up.

Download the Mining Software

If you’re using Windows, download xmr-stak from their Github repository. You’ll see a link near the top of the page with the latest release, which will typically be a zip file called xmr-stak-win64.zip.

Mac users, use this download link for a ready-to-install Mac version. Linux users will need to compile it from the source code.

Google Chrome might flag the file as “harmful” and interrupt the download process. To get around this, click on Show All in the bottom right corner to view all your downloads (or click on the menu icon, and then Downloads). You’ll see the file at the top of the downloads list. Click on Keep Dangerous File and confirm the popup box.

Extract the zip file on your computer.

When extracting, your anti-virus program might flag the program as dangerous as well. This software is safe, so you can click Run Anyway or some similar message that will allow the program to run.

Configure the Mining Software

Open the folder that was unzipped, typically called xmr-stak-win64. Run the file called xmr-stak.exe and confirm any security warnings that appear. This opens a step-by-step system that will help us configure the miner for the first run.

The first question is “Do you want to use the HTTP interface?” This is for viewing mining statistics on a web interface but requires a bit of a setup, so we’ll ignore it for now. So type 0 (zero) to decline and hit Enter.

You will then be asked which currency (or algorithm) you would like to mine.

Enter cryptonight in lowercase letters and including the underscore. Don’t enter electroneum or cryptonight_v7 as these settings will mine according to the old algorithms and won’t work. Hit Enter.

For the pool address, you’ll need to enter the address of the pool you want to mine to. There are many pools which mine Electroneum, and you can see a list of the largest pools here. The largest pool is usually Nanopool, but I don’t recommend them to beginners due to their high payout threshold of 500 ETN.

I suggest you use Spacepools, since they have a low fee of 0.1% and a payout threshold of 10 ETN (meaning you’ll get paid after every 10 ETN you mine). Fairhash is another good one with a 1% fee and a 50 ETN payout threshold.

The URL that needs to be entered here is typically in the form of [URL]:[port] where:

[URL] is the URL of the pool.

[port] is a four digit number that tells your miner on which port to connect to the pool.

If you decide to use Spacepools, enter pool.etn.spacepools.org:3333 and hit Enter. There are other ports available which you can view here, but 3333 should definitely work. For Fairhash, enter pool.etn.fairhash.org:3333 or see their other ports here.

Next, it asks for your username or wallet address. Enter the wallet address where you’d like your earnings to be paid into. This can be either a paper wallet address or the address of your online wallet (login to view your public wallet address).

Wallet addresses are pretty long to enter manually, so it would be better to copy and paste them. But pasting in the command line requires a trick. Once you’ve copied the wallet address to the clipboard, move to the command window, right click on the title bar at the top, and select Edit -> Paste. Some command line interfaces allow you to simply right-click and select Paste.

Also, when copying the wallet address from your paper wallet, first paste it into a clean text file and remove the spaces so that the address is all on one line. Then copy and paste it into the miner software.

Hit Enter when you’re done.

No password is needed, so hit Enter to leave it empty.

Next, enter any name for the rig identifier such as “miner1”. When you have multiple computers mining to the same wallet address on the same pool, each machine will be identified by this rig identifier in the statistics. You can also just leave it empty and hit Enter.

At the question about TSL/SSL, type the letter n and hit Enter.

At the question about nicehash, type the letter n and hit Enter.

Finally, at the question about multiple pools, type the letter n and hit Enter.

Start Mining

The software is now configured! A new window will open that does the actual mining. You should see a load of messages followed by “Pool logged in”.

The miner is now running and sending hashes to the pool.

Messages will pop up one after the other as the miner communicates with the pool. Make sure the message “Result accepted by the pool” shows up among them. This will be the signal that your computer is mining successfully.

If you get a message saying “Result rejected by the pool” there is something wrong with your miner’s configuration. You have probably chosen the wrong algorithm. To correct it, open the pools.txt document in the same folder as xmr-stak.exe and make sure the line at the bottom reads:

“currency” : “cryptonight”,

View Your Mining Statistics and Earnings

To see how fast you are mining, press h in the miner window. This will display a table with the hash rates of your computer over the last 10 seconds, 60 seconds, and 15-minute interval.

Each CPU core is assigned a unique number in the ID column, and its corresponding performance is displayed next to it. A table for GPU is also listed, if available.

You’ll see a line reading Totals (CPU) showing the total hash rate of all CPU cores. There will also be a line reading Totals (GPU) for GPUs (if available), and a line for the combined total.

Checking your Earnings

You should be able to check your earnings on your specific pool’s website. If you’re using Spacepools as recommended above, you can check your earnings on their homepage here.

Copy your public wallet address into the field saying Your Stats and Payment History and press Lookup. You’ll then see a breakdown of your estimated hash rate, earnings, and payment history.

The Pending Balance is the number of ETN you’ve mined but has not been paid out yet. Once they reach the payout threshold (10 ETN for Spacepools), the ETN will be paid out to your wallet and will transfer to the Total Paid section.

Difficulty and Total Hash Rate

The number of coins you earn at any given time is also inversely related to the following two network parameters (updated after every block):

Difficulty – a measure of how hard it is to mine a block. As more miners join in, the difficulty is increased automatically to make sure that the network mines an average of 1 block per minute, and no more. As more miners stop mining, the difficulty will decrease again. A lower difficulty means you will mine faster.

– a measure of how hard it is to mine a block. As more miners join in, the difficulty is increased automatically to make sure that the network mines an average of 1 block per minute, and no more. As more miners stop mining, the difficulty will decrease again. A lower difficulty means you will mine faster. Total hash rate – the combined hash rate of all miners around the world. A lower total hash rate means you will mine faster.

You can view the current and historic difficulty and total hash rate in our statistics section.

Transferring Your Mined Coins

Once your coins have been paid out into your paper wallet, you can then view your paper wallet balance or import it to your online wallet.