AIOMiner
Hello all!
My name is Bobby Roberts, and I am the creator of a small application called AIOMiner. (https://aiominer.com) For almost a year now I have been working hard along with the other developer here, Bobby Roberts Sr. (Yup, my dad). We have had a few long nights of putting together an application to help new and old users mine alt-coins, all for free. I wanted to post about the journey to get to thousands of installs, thousands of discord users, and being somewhat of an underdog in the mining community.
The Spark
The application started with a simple question, “What are the temperatures of my GPUs while I am mining”. It was a simple application that used nvidia-smi.exe to pull data back and give me information on the cards. Once I found out the kind of data it was giving me, I started to build an application around it. I could know which BIOS each card had, fan speed, temperature, and more. At this point in time, I had one GPU in a box in the garage, it was a 1080ti that I convinced my wife to let me buy because “Vertcoin is gonna moon” (it did, but I didn’t sell). It was running Windows 10 and a core-2-duo that I had laying around. This thing was a mangled, slow beast.
I remember building my batch files, and running them before I would go off to work. In hopes that when I got home it would still be running. I would do this every day. Wake up, Shower, Get a drink, Check the rig, go to work, come home, check the rig. And some days I would come home to a rig that rebooted, or the internet went out for a bit, or the power went out, or CCMiner froze. I got tired of it and I wanted something better.
I started to look around for applications that could manage my mining rig (1 gpu in the garage can be a rig right?). I found a few; NiceHash and WinMiner. I installed NiceHash and tried to find a way to get my Vertcoins but, NiceHash didn’t work like that. It wanted to benchmark my machine and give me bitcoins for a large fee. I thought, maybe I could do this and buy vertcoin. But I decided against it as I didn’t want to do the transfers with the fees and, really, it didn’t feel like I was mining. WinMiner felt the same way. It just wanted me to mine and magic money showed up. I wanted an application that could mine Individual coins.
MyMiner
I opened up the Visual Studio 2017 project called overclocker. (This is what I named the previous project where I just wanted to view the video card settings). And that’s how this all got started. I created a large rectangle of a form and just stared at it. For the next 48 hours my wife hated me. I worked hard to find out the best way to do three things. Start , stop , and restart mining. I created my first application that could mine two coins, ZCash and Vertcoin. I had no logo and many things were hard coded. It felt more like a lawn chair with a rocket on its back. I had to name this beast. So I picked the best name I could think of, MyMiner.
Letting others try it
I was happy about this application. I wanted to share it, just incase someone else was wanting to do something else like this as I looked and couldn’t find anyone building software like this, and not charging a fee. Also, other people could give me recommendations, make an application that I use better! It was free open to the internet criticism. So, I created a .zip and shared it with Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/gpumining/comments/7c24q0/myminer_alpha_need_testers/). I created something called a Discord Chat so that way I could invite people to test. Now, as you can imagine the largest issue was trust, as it should be. People were willing to install this horrible looking application, disable anti-virus, and run a .exe from this guy on the internet. The post got a few snags from some people willing to help, but most went away except for one guy. He insisted that MyMiner could be better and that I should change this, or when he hits button Y, X would occur. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could edit the pool after you saved it? He helped MyMiner work and he still didn’t trust me! He would only run it in a VM for the longest time. And slowly other people would trickle in; it started to get a following!
A few weeks in, I wanted to share this project on the internet and wanted people to be able to download it, as up to this point, you had to join the discord server and go to the releases channel to get MyMiner_Alpha2.zip and (HotPatch1.zip,HP2.ZIP, HP3.ZIP, HP4.ZIP, and so on). I decided it was time to register MyMiner.com. Bad news, the website was taken. Not only that but the application name of MyMiner was dragged through the mud. So, I went back to the 10 people in my discord and we had a vote. Submit a name where the .com was open and we would all vote on it. Crazy names stated to show up, things like WindowsUltimateMiner or MinerForYouAndMe. I started to ask, what is it that I wanted this application to do. I wanted to be able to mine any coin I wanted without the need of batch files and I wanted to make sure it was still running when I came home from work.. So, I came up with the name All In One Miner, and AIOMiner.com was open for the taking. No Google search came up except for a few applications that would automine coins in a video game or it was a bot for world of warcraft. And that’s how MyMiner became AIOMiner. But now I needed to back up what I called this application, All-In-One.
Taking it further
I had one rule with this application from the start. Don’t charge any fees. No matter how many people would approach me with “join our group, we can help you make money with AIOMiner!” I resisted, all of them talked about adding in fees and tracking users. Now, why in the hell would I want to do this!? I want an application that I would use to be free. I get it, developers work hard and I am lucky this is just a side project for me and not by bread and butter. If I wanted to buy any servers for this project and take it further it needed income. I was introduced to the now CEO of AIO Inc., Shane.
We talked and decided we both wanted the same thing. An easy to use miner, and a free one. But we needed to find some way to make money to support our goal. We found out that coins wanted a branded miner. Coins have a piece of software with a button and a watchdog that can mine their own coins that was made just for them. We agreed with a few coins. BitcoinZ, ZelCash, and GoByte. This helped us buy servers for at least a year. We can then add new features and still stick to our goals. But what were our goals really? We eventually came up with a few projects that could assist us with a constant stream of income and allow the projects to flow to us dynamically. But, we needed help from others.
I was adding in features that would create other bugs and once I fixed those bugs, more would show up. I needed another pair of eyes on this project, I only had time after 8PM on most nights as a full time job, and a family, and a hobby don’t leave much time. Shane and I wanted to find a seasoned developer that can help out, as it’s not a bad idea to not do all of the work yourself. But it needed to be someone who we could trust, I interviewed a few people for the non-paying-job and found a few who wanted to help but couldn’t really put time into it. I finally asked my dad if he could help out with a question I had, and it started a conversation about what it was I was doing. I asked if he wanted to join and he agreed. We have had some great nights and some nights where we just couldn’t talk to each other. After the release of alpha 8 we decided it was time we start to integrate a few servers to allow users to manage mining online.
Monitoring and Servers
We have servers, now what? While we are drawing up plans on what it is we are going to do with AIOMiner we needed to have a solid base of a server platform. Given my history I decided to go with a fleet of CentOS 7.x boxes. 2xLB, 4xAPP, 4xDB, 2xUtil. With us using Cloudflare in the front, with load balancing, this allows for us to “hide” our IPs from the world and help us drive products through the pipe with some stability. But with all of this you need to make sure of a few things. One of those is checking the health of the servers. I decided to go with a collectd/graphite/grafana setup as I was most comfortable with this setup. This allows me to know what kind of load and uptime the boxes are looking at, seeing if anyone out there is being a “jerk” with our APIs and a few other things. While it’s on my list, we still need to setup a repo to manage our puppet installs. If there is ever one thing i’ve learned while working in IT it’s that no matter what, something bad is going to happen. Another thing is having something people actually want. What we are working on now is looking pretty good for our users :)
Advertising/Partnerships/Growth
With all of the servers that we have in place we might as well find some way to keep them running. This is done through the use of advertisements inside of AIOMiner. With version 8.0 we released the ability to add two advertisements. One on the start of AIOMiner and one on the 5 Second delay when you hit stop to ensure you have actually stopped. So far, this has been a steady and reliable income and we have the ability to check for things like views and clicks with the graphite setup I mentioned earlier. We are still looking for new ways to keep AIOMiner free for our users, this is one of those ways. We have found ourselves pinning to large pools in favor of us pre-loading their site info, they just advertise AIOMiner. We recently signed up a partnership with BSOD.PW, this pool serves up to 10k customers and if you go right now you will see that AIOMiner is one of three partners. This is the same for any pool, we will support you, if you support us.
Why
This is a question we can all ask ourselves when we do anything. If I am going to spend my nights working on something, why did I pick AIOMiner? I wanted to do something that not many other people think about when it comes to crypto, at least from what I could see. I wanted to empower the new GPU miners, and I wanted to help out people who just took a leap and opened up that farm. AIOMiner is meant to be used by children, adults, and senior citizens. I will not stop making it easier and more powerful. Since I’ve started, tons of applications that mine crypto have shown up and they all have their great GUI’s and small fees, but none of them have a passion for this like the team at AIOMiner. And don’t get me wrong, we would all love to quit our day jobs and have AIOMiner be a multi-million dollar company, but that will take time,trust, and a ton of failures. We are always looking for help with either the application or the website side of things. So if you want to join a team like ours, please let us know. Again, big things are coming and we want passionate people that are willing to take a risk with us.
The Future
Ideas are on the whiteboard. We are currently in works on our website to allow users to manage AIOMiner from your cell phone or computer. We have new products coming out for those of you that want to hunt down profits vs coins. We want to make sure that AIOMiner, or AIO, is a household name. We truly have only scratched the surface with what we can do. I can tell you big things are coming and they are coming fast.
Thank you for reading what took me a month to write. Going back into time and seeing how all of this panned out, it’s been amazing. I can’t wait to look back on this post in a year and see everything that we have accomplished. We are here to empower you, the crypto miner and hobbyist. Let us know if we can make your hammer better in any way
