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.
