Dogecoin (DOGE) Mining Guide Version 1.10.0

Started as a meme to other coins, Dogecoins have become a serious contender in the cryptocurrency coin markets are worth mining. With its own mascot, the Shiba Inu, Dogecoin bills itself as the fun and friendly digital currency.

Get a wallet:

Your wallet is where you’ll keep your Dogecoins. It’s pretty easy to set up, head on over to dogecoin.com and get the GUI wallet. Once you start the Wallet it’ll need to take a few minutes to sync. Give it time, this could take anywhere between 5 and 30 minutes. If your wallet syncs, move on to step two!

If your Wallet never syncs there might be something wrong. Close the wallet and navigate to C:\Users[YOUR ACCOUNT]\AppData\Roaming\DogeCoin and create a new file called dogecoin.conf. In that file you’ll want to put

rpcuser=doge
rpcpassword=wow
addnode=67.205.20.10
addnode=162.243.113.110
rpcport=22555
server=1
daemon=1

Once saved, try again.

Get an address:

Now that you have a wallet you’ll need an address so people (or pools) can actually send you Dogecoins. This is easy to do from your wallet. On the top bar click “Much Receive” and then on the bottom of the wallet click “New Address.” Give it a label and poof you’re done.

This 32-character string is how your wallet becomes public. You’ll use it for all transactions from here on out. Think of it as your deposit box.

 

Mining software:

Now you’re prepared to receive Dogecoin. Great! But now you need to actually mine it, which is a little harder and dependent upon your setup. What you decide to use to mine is dependent upon what hardware you’re running. If you’ve got a fancy AMD, you can use CGminer, if you haver a NVidia, you can use CUDAminer. If not, CPU mining is fine too. Once you’ve made your choice you’ll need to download the software itself.

Don’t have any hardware? Take a look at our mining guides. Purchase the necessary hardware and build a scrypt mining rig. A brief tutorial for cgminer would be: grabb any version before 3.8 like 3.7.2. Then go to your pool and make a new worker. Make a new file in the same directory as cgminer, call it something like wow_much_hashes.bat, and then use nano it to edit it. In the file put:

set GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100 
set GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=1
./cgminer --scrypt -o PoolUrl -u UserName.WorkerName -p Password -I 12

Save and close the file, then run it. Should be set. Take a look at these scrypt mining tips if you’re having trouble following this brief tutorial.

Mining Dogecoin with Linux or a VPS

Alternatively, if you prefer Linux or you don’t own any hardware you can rent out some from a VPS provider and follow these instructions:

1- Create a VPS account: then create a trial instance of 512 MB / 1 CPU with Ubuntu 13.04 (x64).

2- You will be emailed an IP address and password with instructions on how to SSH into your new instance. Setup putty then login via SSH with your VPS login credentials.

3- First thing to do once you’re logged in is to change the root password into something you can remember:

passwd

4- Being logged in as the root user is not recommended for various reasons so we will create a non-privileged user, follow the prompts after issuing the command, only username and password are necessary, you may leave the other fields blank if you wish:

adduser <USERNAME>

5- Add the new user to the ‘sudoers’ file to be able to execute root privilege level commands as that user:

echo '<USERNAME>    ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

6- Change into the new user user:

su <USERNAME>

7- Relocate into the home directory of the user you have changed into.

cd

8-Create a swap file:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=64M count=16
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

9- Update apt:

sudo apt-get update

10- Install git:

sudo apt-get install git build-essential autotools-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev autoconf automake

11- Clone cpu miner:

git clone https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer.git

12- Compile the source code:

cd cpuminer # changes to the cpuminer folder
./autogen.sh   # only needed if building from git repo (which we are) 
CFLAGS="-O3 -Wall -msse2" ./configure
make

13- Install screen:

apt-get install screen

screen

Join a Dogecoin Mining Pool

You can technically start mining on your own but I don’t recommend it. There’s not a particularly good chance of you getting anything done any time soon and I’ll explain why in a later section. So what you’re going to do instead is join a collection of other miners called a “pool.”AikaPool or EOBOT or Litecoinpool. As you can see, different pools have different rules and features, some include fees on your earnings, some offer automatic payout when you reach a certain amount of dogecoin, some offer manual payout at your leisure, some have payout fees, etc… The differences are mostly negligible in all honesty, I’d recommend joining something that doesn’t have too hefty a withdrawal fee and has plenty of other workers. The choice is truly yours!

Once you’ve picked your pool you’ll want to actually get set up. Head to your pool’s homepage and create an account. How you do that will vary, look for “sign up” or “registration.” MPOS-design pools often have this on the left-side navigation.

If your pool’s website asks for your wallet up-front you’ll want to be sure to get that part right. Head back to your wallet and go to the “Much Receive” tab. Click on your address. On the bottom of the page click “Copy Address.” Your address is now saved to your clipboard for convenient pasting into things like, say, an account registration page. If your pool’s website does not ask for that part up-front you’ll want to find where to enter this. It’ll likely be under “Edit account” or similar.

Once you have your account you’ll need to set up a “worker.” On an MPOS-design pool, you’ll navigate to “My Workers” on the left-side navigation to do so. Set up your worker with a name and password you can remember–you’ll need this later!

Change your ./minerd (Linux):

./minerd --url stratum+tcp://server:port --userpass worker.name:password
  • In order to keep your sessions alive, use the command ‘screen’ before running ‘./minerd’.
  • When logging back again to restore your session use ‘screen -r’.
  • You can specify a particular number of processor cores to use with the ‘-t N’ option where N is the number of cores you wish to dedicate, this may be useful if using your home computer to mine. Leaving out the ‘-t’ option uses all available cores by default.

 

Set up your batch file (Windows):

Starting your miner requires some configuration details that you don’t want to have to remember. For this reason we’re going to set up a batch file that launches your miner for you. In the same folder as your mining software make a .bat file. Edit this file with notepad (or similar) and input the command-line command that runs your miner of choice. This should be documented on your miner program’s release page but I’ll go ahead and post a few examples below:

Mining with CUDAminer and NVidia GPU

cudaminer.exe -o stratum+tcp://[your pool's domain]:[your pool's port] -O [your username].[your worker's name]:[your worker's password]

Mining with CGminer and AMD GPU

cgminer.exe --scrypt  -o stratum+tcp://[your pool's domain]:[your pool's port] -u [your username].[your worker's name] -p [your worker's password]

Mining with Minderd and CPU

minerd -a scrypt -t 4 -s 6 -o stratum+tcp://[your pool's domain]:[your pool's port] -O [your username].[your worker's name]:[your worker's password]

 

Start mining:

Launch your .bat file as an Administrator of your computer. If this works, great! Some users will have trouble running these batch files; if you’re one of them head to your Control Panel and enter “UAC” into the search bar. Turn this feature off. Scripts are our friends right about now!

At this point if your tool of choice spits out any output you’ll probably see some initialization text, maybe some syncing, or maybe “stratum from pool 0 detected new block”. That’s fine, this is all normal. Let your miner do its thing and enjoy the doge that it brings you! Head to your pool’s website to track your worker’s progress if you like.

Congrats, you’re finished!

So where are my Dogecoins?

Dogecoins are only paid out after each block is found. Each block is worth a random number up to one million Dogecoins. Your pool will automatically take those Dogecoins and pass them out to each member of the pool based on the number of shares they earned. Shares are earned by contributing to the pool. If you contribute lots of computing power to the pool, you’ll get a lot of shares; if you contribute only a little computing power to the pool, you’ll only get a few shares. This keeps everything fair–those who do more will get more. You can track the computing power you’re contributing by tracking your hashrate. The pool’s hashrate is usually tracked too, it’s a good metric of everyone’s work combined to find the next block. The higher the pool hashrate, the quicker you’ll find that block, and the quicker everyone will get paid.

Blocks get more and more difficult to find. It’s good to get started early! Your pool likely tracks this estimated difficulty. Do note that the difficulty isn’t a perfect tell of how long it’ll take to find the block. Mining is very random: sometimes you’ll find a block right off the bat with only 5% of the estimated shares distributed and sometimes you’ll spend ages mining a block with 500% of the estimated shares distributed. That’s part of the fun! Think of mining as playing the lottery as a group where we all play and all agree to share the money if one of us wins. Tadaa!

Your pool will likely take a bit to verify the block after it has been found. Be patient! Give your pool some time before you try to cash out.

 

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