How to mine AURA on your CPU

UPDATE: Solo CPU mining is no longer viable as the network hashrate quickly increased. I plan on posting a short guide on how to mine using your GPU and joining a mining pool in the next few days.

The following steps are for Windows. MacOS and Linux users will have a similar experience, with a few differences outlined at the end of this article.

Download aura_1.7.3_win64.zip and extract the zip file to your favorite destination

Open a command prompt and navigate to the downloaded folder, and enter the command

aura.exe console

If a firewall message pops up, select “Allow Access”

This starts a new aura node and starts the console

EDIT: If there is too much logging text scrolling in the console, open a new console window, navigate to the downloaded aura folder, and type ‘aura.exe attach’ to get a clean log free window to enter the following commands in.

Create a new wallet/account

With the aura console running, type

personal.newAccount()

and press enter and create a new password.

Make sure you choose a strong password, and write this password down somewhere. If you lose the password, you will not be able to access your account. Also, back up your wallet keystore file. On Windows 7 this is located in “C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Aura\keystore” and the filename will look similar to “UTC — 2018–01–08T01–25–32.102009000Z — 649e8f946a0f63113518c513c9f7919cbe4453cf”. You need this keystore file AND your password to unlock your account.

Now that you have an account, you can start CPU mining. Simply type

miner.start(1)

into the aura console and press enter. If you want to use more threads, change the 1 to a bigger number. To stop mining, type

miner.stop()

or close the command window.

After mining for a while, you can check your aura balance by entering

web3.fromWei(eth.getBalance(eth.accounts[0]))

For more information about all the available aura console commands, see https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JavaScript-API#web3js-api-reference

While CPU mining may be viable initially, eventually you’ll have to switch to GPU mining to have any chance at winning a block, and join a mining pool to get partial rewards. GPU mining typically requires a bit more configuration, and varies depending on your graphics card.

Keep an eye out for the AuraWallet to be released soon so you won’t have to learn javascript just to use aura :)

For Mac

Download aura_1.7.3_mac.zip and extract the zip file for your system to your favorite destination

Open a terminal and navigate to the downloaded folder, and enter the command

aura console

The rest of the instructions are the same as for windows, except the keystore folder on macOS is located at “~\Library\Aura\keystore”

For Linux

There are no prebuilt binaries so you’ll have to build from source by following instructions at github

Once you’ve built the aura binary, open a shell and navigate to the build/bin folder, and enter the command

aura console

The rest of the instructions are the same as for windows, except the keystore folder on linux is located at “~\.aura\keystore”

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