Crypto for dummies

I decided to mess around with cryptocurrency mining for fun. I don't expect to make any money, and you shouldn't either, but if you want to know more about it mining is a good way to go. I hit a few snags along the way though, and this might help you get past them a bit faster.

Note: I have a 5850, and I get around 250 Kh/s. If you have a similar card you should expect to spend about a day mining at one location before you can withdraw coins. (I suggest DOGE if you are just playing around, as the coins have a lower value than LTC, which means you get a bigger number of coins which is more emotionally fulfilling.)

This information assumes that you have an ATI/AMD card and are running windows, and mining DOGE,  LTC, or some other scrypt coin.

If you have downloaded cgiminer and nothing happens after you open RUN.CMD please make sure that cgiminer is in the folder you are running RUN.CMD from.

Your antivirus may have quarantined cgminer because it thinks it is a virus. It may be a virus, I have no idea where you got your file from, but it may not be. An explanation is available here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51916.0

You can either compile the windows binary from the official 3.7.2 to be safe, ignore the antivirus warning, or download something that doesn't give you a warning.

https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer-binaries/blob/master/3.6.6/cgminer-3.6.6-windows.7z

Didn't trip my antivirus, but that doesn't guarantee it is safe.

So, now you have cgminer running (hopefully) and you are wondering what all these numbers mean.

In cyan, going from right to left, you have:

Your Kh/s, or your hash rate. If this number is less than 100Kh/s you might want to just give up.

If this number is in Mh/s, chances are you are not scrypt mining (This is what LTC uses) and you should use google to find your answer.

A: This is your accepted shares times the minimum difficulty of the share. For example, a share of 2500 with a minimum diff of 32 will increase your A by 32.

This is not the same as the shares you see on your mining pool's website. The shares on the website are the summation of the diff of every share you submitted divided by the value for that pool's share diff.

Lets say the site counts each share as a diff of 1024, the above submission would get you 2500/1024, or 2, shares from the pool's standpoint.

R: Rejected shares. Same as above, only you don't get anything from these.

HW: Hardware faults. This number should be zero, otherwise use google to find out what you did wrong.

In Purple: current diff required for cgminer to submit the share.

Red: best share: this is the diff value of our best share. Some places require you submit a share of at least some difficulty before you can get any shares. Big is good.

Yellow: This is how aggressive cgminer is being. Higher numbers mean more h/s but you are more likely to have HW faults and bad shares and stuff. This is set in the RUN.CMD file.