Mining with Bitcoin Gold (BTG)
Bitcoin Gold — one of the more contentious forks for the Bitcoin community this year. It was coming, then it wasn’t then it was again but there was no replay protection so it could be an attack on the network. Drama, drama, drama.
Well, folks, as of November 19th — it has officially been listed on the Bittrex exchange and picked up Trezor support. So it’s a thing. I think…
Kidding. It looks like they finally solved one of the major cruxes of the alt coin: Replay protection (https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/issues/51).
So now you can freely spend your Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin without having to worry that malicious actors would double spend your coins (note: if you’re not familiar with double spends, check out this thread on reddit).
What’s So Special About BTG?
When Bitcoin first came out it was incredibly simple to mine transactions on the network with a normal computer. You set up your mining software and then let it sit there. The “doorbusters” who entered the space first were able to mine thousands of coins with minimal effort.
As time went on, though, this became more and more difficult as more miners came on the network. Good for the network, bad for individual profitability.
Then came the ASIC miners in early 2013. These miners are extremely efficient at performing a specific task (hashing) as they were developed for the sole purpose of doing so. Normal GPUs couldn’t keep up.
This was great for the first folks who could get their hands on this equipment. However it presented another problem — if end-users (miners) were solely dependent upon manufacturers of these devices to be able to participate… the entire notion of being decentralized goes out the window. The manufacturers run the game. Don’t believe me? Look at what’s happening with Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash right now.
Enter Bitcoin Gold
Bitcoin gold was developed as an attempt to fight the centralization of Bitcoin mining by giving the power back to individual miners. It can be mined using the Equihash algorithm (same as ZCash, Hush, Zencash and others) on a normal GPU.
Alright, alright. Now to end the history lesson: how to actually mine BTG.
Mining with BTG
I looked through a few forum discussions and it took me a little to find a reliable pool. There were a few out there but I’m always a bit wary of what sites I access.
After looking at a few I ended up going with Suprnova. I’ve used them before and it’s large enough to where my worries are relatively hushed.
To get started simply go to: https://btg.suprnova.cc and register for an account. Once you’re in you’ll want to go to “My Account” on the left-hand navigation and select Edit Account.
Once you’re in, simply set up your payment address. I ‘d recommend Bittrex for ease of setup here as they allow mining deposits.
Once that is done, you need to make sure you go to “My Workers” and set up the individual Worker (mining machine). Relatively simple process.
Download & Configure Miner
Now that you have a mining pool to work from, you simply need to download the proper software. I would recommend the BBT Multi-miner as it’s the easiest to get up and running with (which comes packaged with CCMiner 2.2 which you’ll need): https://steemit.com/mining/@bitsbetrippin/bbt-multi-miner-5-5-release-over-20-bundled-miners-10-tokens-to-mine.
If you’re new to this: simply download the zip file (Source code (zip)), extract it and then open the folder.
Within that download you’ll see the ccminer-2.2-skunk folder. Within that folder you’ll see: RUN-DNR-YIIMP.bat. We’ll need to make a copy of this file and then rename it RUN-BTG.bat.
Now right click on the file, edit it and use the following mining string:
ccminer-x64 -a equihash -o stratum+tcp://btg.suprnova.cc:8815 -u username.workername -p password
pause
Of course you’ll need to change out the username, workername and password with your own.
Last thing: save the file (note: you may have to open notepad in Administrator mode in order to change this file. I recommend using Notepad++ to edit *.bat files). Now open ‘er on up and you’re all set!
You should start to see solutions coming through pretty quickly. I’m currently running a 1080 TI at minimal power/cpu settings and getting 387 Sol/s. Mileage may vary as I’m running mine concurrently as I use the computer.
Hope this helps!
