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I just installed bitcoin-qt wallet on Ubuntu 14.04 and have synced with the bitcoin network. How do I install a mining program that will enable me to join a mining pool?

user276292
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2 Answers2

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To mine bitcoins use cpuminer (click here) and avoid any graphical application: a console application is faster and doesn't need much memory. This may be the reason why bitcoin-qt wallet has dropped the official support for bitcoin mining.

You should compile cpuminer from the source code to obtain optimal performance. Binary packages are not optimized for your system and therefore are often slower. To execute the cpuminer installation + compilation procedure on Ubuntu, follow this askUbuntu topic.

WARNING: don't use cpuminer or any miner software on remote hosted machines, it's considered as an abuse of common resources and can be treated as an attack to the hosted system.

NOTE: Bitcoin mining is very time consuming and you need a very powerful network of server machines to obtain even a small result (less than a bitcoin in most cases). This is due to the fact that you are competing with people and organizations running highly specialized hardware (ASIC miners, FPGA devices etc.) which does nothing but compute BTC block hashes 24h a day.

Please don't hesitate to ask by commenting here if you have more questions and don't forget to press the left UP arrow if I'm of any help.

If you earn a coin, please consider the Free Software Foundation BTC donation page.
Good luck.

Community
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Lorenzo Ancora
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    This needs updated to reflect that CPU/GPU mining is obsolete now. – Thomas Ward Dec 13 '15 at 13:22
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    @ThomasW. thank you for your comment; any modern system can perform CPU/GPU mining, of course with small results if compared with specialized miners. You only need an higher number of machines and dedicated pools to obtain the same result, but it is not technically obsolete. I strongly encourage the use of specialized machines, to reduce the costs (generic hardware can be damaged easily) and increase the number of mined coins. Have a nice day. – Lorenzo Ancora Dec 15 '15 at 23:51
  • How can a system or someone tell that you are on a remote hosted machine if it is a dedicated server? – Vassilis Mar 02 '16 at 12:10
  • @VassilisGr hello, nice question. A remote dedicated server is in general in the cloud or on "bare metal". The former can be monitored thanks to the virtual machine that allows upgrade/downgrade and recovery of the service. The latter uses specialized hardware sensors. Both of them are monitored at least from the network router (a switch) of the provider. In general, specialized net nodes monitors the traffic to the router and sends a local warning email to the network administrator. Then (if the contract says so) you may receive a service termination email for network/resource abuse. – Lorenzo Ancora Mar 02 '16 at 19:11
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solution for Asic Block Erupter miner using cgminer

https://github.com/equivalent/scrapbook2/blob/master/bitcoin-mining.md

# run all commands are under su or sudo

# step 1
apt-get install autoconf gcc make git libcurl4-openssl-dev libncurses5-dev libtool libjansson-dev libudev-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev

# step 2
cd /usr/src/
git clone https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer.git

# step 3
cd cgminer
./autogen.sh --enable-icarus

# step 4
make

# step 5
# Plug your ASICMiner Block Erupter USB’s into the USB ports of your device.

# step 6
./cgminer -o http://your.pool.com:8332 -u username_worker -p yourpassword
equivalent8
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