A mining pool is where a group of miners work together for mining coins. In this approach, multiple people contribute to the generation of a block, and the reward is split as per the contribution of the processing power. It is obviously better to go for solo mining, but pooled mining is a more realistic and faster approach. It is basically pooling the resources together and sharing the hashing power. The following is the step by step guide to create a mining pool and start earning.
What Do You Need To Get Started?
To create a basic mining pool, you need large disk space. The minimum requirement is around 20GB. Besides, you need to use Windows 10 based PCs. Moreover, you need the usual Putty, VPS with at least 1GB RAM and WinSCP, Ubuntu Server. Furthermore, you should have enough knowledge about Linux to use the commands properly as and when required.
Steps To Create The Mining Pool –
Step 1 – VPS Setup –
Once you have the VPS with you, you need to setup it up whereby you need to putty up and update Linux.
To update Ubuntu, you need to go for the commands ‘apt-get update’ and ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’.
Then you have to opt for swap setup as this setup is generally not done on VPS by default. If you have a limited memory space, this step is necessary to perform. The common swap size is 4GB which is used for VPS for mining pool. You can find the command for the swap setup online. Once it is done, remember that you can change the size in the future. Apart from these, you have to install the required packages initially. There are commands available online for the same. But this is not all as you may have to add more packages in the future as per the demand of the mining.
Step 2 – User Creation –
You have to create a user as a root type using the command ‘adduser usernameof yourchoice’. Put a rather easy username that you can remember as you will need it forever. But do not make it too simple for the security purpose. After this, you will be prompted for a password, and there are other data to be entered which you can leave blank if you want to. Make sure the password you enter here is different from the root password. Finally, give your VPS a reboot with the command ‘reboot’.
Step 3 – Setup Coin Daemon –
It is time to set up Litecoin daemon, and for that, you need to boot up putty and login with the new user credentials. Then you have to execute the following commands.
‘cd’ followed by ‘git clone https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin.git’.
Then you need to compile litecoin, and you can find the commands to do so online. Be aware of the fact that the compile process will take a long time especially if you have a smaller VPS with one or two cores. So, you can take a break in the meanwhile. Once it is done, you can go ahead and run litecoin, and this will create the directory litecoind in the home directory. You can do so using ‘cd src’ and ‘./litecoind’
You will be getting the message saying that there is no config file. The followings are the steps you have to take to setup the config file.
Step 4 – Setup Config File –
In the beginning, we said that you need WinSCP. This is because you can add or edit files and that is what we are going to use. Some people prefer nano, gedit or vim instead. But WinSCP is better due to its graphic interface. Therefore, install WinSCP, and in the login screen, you have to select New Site, File Protocol to be SFTP, Hostname to be VPS IP, Port number will be your SSH port number and the username and password will be that of the root credentials.
Once the screen opens, go to home/username/.litecon and inside it, right click and go to WinSCP>New>File. Give the name to the file as litecoin.conf
In the file, you have to put the configuration settings, and you need to check the internet and edit the settings as per your settings. Once done, you need to go back to putty, and you will get the message that the server is starting.
Step 5 – Setup Mining Pool
This is the last step, and you need to use uNOMP for this. You must have Putty and WinSCP running and make sure that you are logged on Putty with the new username and on WinSCP as root. Then all you have to do is download and update uNOMP and do the main configuration is available online. It should be followed by the pool configuration.
Then you need to start your mining pool using ‘cd’, ‘cd unomp’, and ‘sude node init.js’ commands. Congratulations, you have your mining pool to start mining and earning rewards.