As the price of Ethereum has been risen significantly recently (Jan 2021) more people are becoming interested in Ethereum mining. There are other crypto currencies that can be mined, but at the time of this writing, Ethereum is by far the most profitable. The only real requirement is a modern, AMD or Nvidia video card with more then 4GB of video ram.
Here are the steps to start mining Ethereum.
1. Create a Ethereum Wallet. The first step is to setup a Ethereum wallet to store your Ethereum coins. There are a number of choices available. You can setup a software or hardware wallet you would save locally. Alternatively you can store your crypto on a cryptocurrency exchange or mining pool. There have been a few cryptocurrency exchanges and mining pools that have shut down (usually because of fraud or theft) so there is always some risk in storing coins on exchanges and pools.
One of the safest method is to use a hardware wallet which reduces the risk of theft and hacking because your wallet will be offline when not used. The most popular hardware wallet is Ledger's Nano hardware wallet https://www.ledger.com. Unfortunately Ledger's customer database of address was stolen and leaked online in 2020.
An alternative to a hardware wallet are a software wallets and there are many to select from like Exodus, MetaMask and Guarda Wallet. See this website https://blockgeeks.com/guides/7-of-the-best-ethereum-wallets for the pro and cons for each one.
2. Select a Ethereum Mining Pool. Mining solo is very difficult because there are so many miners and very few rewards. As a result, most individual miners join a pool and when a miner in the pool solves the "cryptographical puzzle", the Ethereum coin rewards are distributed to all the miners in the pool based on their hashrate (more on hashrate later) contribution.
There are a number ETH mining pools to select from. The top five in order from highest combined hashrate as of this writing is Sparkpool, Ethermine, F2Pool, SpiderPool and Nanopool. Sparkpool, F2Pool and SpiderPool are Chinese based pool so lets skip them.
For now I am just going to cover how to mine with Nanopool. I am going to update this article with how to mine with Ethermine in the future. Nanopool instructions can be found here: https://eth.nanopool.org/help/
a) Download ETH mining software from https://github.com/nanopool/nanominer/releases
b) For AMD video cards user:nanominer-windows-<version>.zip
For Nvidia video cards user: nanominer-windows-<version>-cuda11.zip
c) Extract the zip.
wallet=YOUR_ETH_ADDRESS
algorithm=Ethash
coin=ETH
rigName=YOUR_WORKER
email=YOUR_EMAIL
pool1 = eth-us-east1.nanopool.org:9433
pool2 = eth-us-west1.nanopool.org:9433
pool3 = eth-eu2.nanopool.org:9433
pool4 = eth-eu1.nanopool.org:9433
pool5 = eth-asia1.nanopool.org:9433Where:
- YOUR_WORKER - simple short worker name (like worker01). Optional.
- YOUR_EMAIL - your email address for notifications. Optional.
Don`t forget to set wallet, worker and email address to correct values.
Change the pool order so the closet pool server is higher on the list.
d) Execute nanominer.exe
NOTE: Windows Defender and other anti virus software may detect nanominer.exe as malware as there are is a malware that mines crypto on unsuspecting users computers. Add an exception to your anti virus/anti malware software.
3. Optimize your video card (aka GPU) settings with MSI Afterburner. Running your GPU almost 24/7 will use up a lot of power. When playing games you will want maximum power to get maximum frame rate, but when you are mining, you do not need max settings. The goal is the maximum hashrate for the least amount of power. The most important values to change is the Memory Clock, typically you want to make this value as high as possibly while keeping your system stable. The second most important value to change is Power Limit. You want to make this value as low as possible while still maintaining a high hashrate. The Core Clock does not really matter when Ethereum mining. This is something that varies from GPU to GPU and you need to tweak settings to find your max.
Below is the settings for my on my 3080. Memory Clock is +829 and Power Limit is 70%.
Note: I stop mining when I am gaming, all other times I am mining.
4. Check your power usage and temperatures.
When you execute nanominer.exe it will open a window. In addition to your hashrate, this window will display the GPU temperature and power usage. As seen below my GPU temp is 59C. Obviously the lower the better, but if it higher then 80C you need to look to improve your cooling.
The default power rating for the 3080 is 350W but using the power limit reduces it to 237W. This will result in significant $$$ savings in the long run.
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5. Check your hashrate. The higher the hashrate, the more money you will make. This page has rough hashrate estimates depending on the video card. https://whattomine.com/gpus
Below are numbers friends or myself have achieved with Ethereum.
GTX 1080 - 22-24 MH/s
RTX 2080 SUPER - 40 MH/s
RTX 3060TI/3070 - 51 MH/s stock, 63 MH/s tuned
RTX 3080 - 85MH/s stock, 94 MH/s tuned
AMD 6800 - 59 MH/s stock, 61 MH/s tuned
You can also use a Ethereum mining calculator https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/eth to estimate how profitable Ethereum mining would be. Enter your hashrate, power consumption and pool fees. In the example below, mining with a RTX 3090 would yield $321.13 US a month (on Jan 8th, 2021) with a 1% pool fee and not including the cost of power.
6. Check Nanopool to see if your "shares" are being accepted. Go to https://eth.nanopool.org/ and enter your Ethereum address in the field in the top right. If everything is working, you should see your hashrates, shares and current balance.
Note: Nanopool mines 1% of the time for itself and that is how they get paid. There has been debates whether this works out to more then 1% and whether Ethermine pays out more. Most people think they seems to pay out roughly the same amount.
By default Nanopool sends the balance to your Ethereum address when it reaches 0.2 ETH. You can decrease the transfer fees, but there is a fee associated with doing so.
7. ETH1 vs ETH2
With ETH2, they are moving from proof of work to proof of stake at which point when they are completely converted you can no longer mine ETH1.
Right now we are in ETH 2 phase 0 which is a hybrid in which both ETH1 and ETH 2 chains co exist. In ETH 2 phase 1.5 the proof of work chain will be abandoned and ETH1 can no longer be mined. All ETH1 will be converted to ETH2. No one knows when this will happen, as when devs find issues in phase 0 and 1 they need to be resolved. I think it is safe to say it will be after 2021. Once it happens though everyone would then need to switch to another coin to mine but currently none are as profitable.
Personally I would check https://whattomine.com and pick the most profitable altcoin and then convert it to BTC or ETH. The alternative is selling your gear (and you could buy ETH2 with that money).
Thanks for this great post, i find it very interesting and very well thought out and put together. I look forward to reading your work in the future. crypto mining tools
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