How to mine Merit, the world’s friendliest digital currency on HiveOS.
I came across Merit a few months ago and watched the project grow, and the more I spent time in the Discord, the more I saw the potential with this coin.
Merit is a unique cryptocurrency in that you must be invited to mine or use the coin. It offers standard mining rewards through Proof of Work, but also includes Proof of Growth rewards, which reward users for growing their community and holding coins. With the recent launch of PoG2 at block 334750 they have added more balance to the distribution of rewards and users with small balances but healthy networks are rewarded quite frequently instead of just those users who hold large amounts of Merit.
You can find more information about the coin with the following links:
Discord — GitHub — Website
With HiveOS’s introduction of ‘custom miners’ they made it easy to use any new miner that comes out and get full stats and reporting as if you were using any of the included miners.
Update for using zjazz cuda miner:
zjazz GitHub
zjazz-0.96 custom miner package can be found here.
If you are using the zjazz package (up to 20% faster)
You will not need to install the updated libstdc++6 package below but you will still need nvidia 396+ drivers.
However, you will need to install Cuda 9.2 libs which can be done with the following commands (which can be ran from the web, if you make it all one line).
cd /hive/ccminer/;
wget -q http://situationcritical.net/hive_cuda.tar.gz;
tar zxf hive_cuda.tar.gz;
rm hive_cuda.tar.gz;Flight Sheet for zjazz:
The above config shows -g 2 which is 2 threads per GPU, and may not work well on all systems. Please review the Merit Guide on zjazz’s GitHub for all options you can include under Extra config arguments
zjazz -> Merit Guide
I have compiled the latest merit-minerd, version 0.5, into an easy to use custom miner package. However, you must have the latest nvidia drivers (396+) installed before you can run the miner. There is another guide for that process located here. (Note: if you update to HiveOS 0.5–71, you no longer have to do a manual driver install, you can update to 396.54 with ‘nvidia-driver-update’
The link for the package is here. As always, you should download the package manually, inspect it’s contents, before plugging it into your mining rig configuration.
Note: The above link is for libmeritminer 0.5, but the same host also has 0.2, 0.3, and 0.4 if you prefer a different version.
Before using the miner, you will need to update the libstdc++6 package with the following commands:
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common -y;
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test -y;
sudo apt-get update;
sudo apt-get upgrade libstdc++6 -y
Use suggested answers, it asks if you want to update a couple files, and you need to say no, to keep the existing custom versions.
To use the package you will want to create a wallet with your Merit address and then use the following screenshots to create the Flight Sheet.
Once you create the Flight Sheet, you want to set the Miner to ‘Custom’ and then click ‘Setup Miner Config’ .. Remember that you must save the miner config and then click ‘Update’ to save the settings on the Flight Sheet.
Use the above screenshot to configure the merit miner for your rig, the important thing to note is that in the ‘Extra config arguments:” you must set the number of GPU’s you have in the rig. The example provided is for 6 GPU’s but if you had 8 you would use --gpu 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 --cores 0 The use of --cores 0 is very important so that the miner does not use your CPU to mine.
The Merit miner itself is very CPU intensive so if you have many cards and a weak CPU such as an Intel Celeron G3930 you may see that your cards do not mine at their full potential, but most have better luck with more cards on Linux versus Windows.
One thing to note, is that the package is setup for 6 cards by default, and since the merit-minerd doesn’t report individual hash rates, I simply divided the total cycles/s by 6 to get individual rates, I have also noticed since Hive 2.0 they do not seem to be accurate on the web stats panel. If you wish, you could edit the h-stats.sh file located in /hive/custom/merit and modify it accordingly.
Lastly, if you are ready to try out mining Merit, you can request an invite from me here. Feel free to contact me on the Merit Discord if you have any questions or trouble getting the miner package to work and I will be happy to assist.
If you are already mining Merit and found this package helpful feel free to send a small donation to me at @ocpanda :)