Mining

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This page provides guidance on mining Ravencoin with the x16rv2 algorithm. Be aware that another, more ASIC-resistant algorithm is currently in development. Blockchain and mining code change often. This information can and will change. Keep yourself and your software up to date by joining the community. Subscribe to the Ravencoin Updates mailing list. Join the Discord or the Telegram server and request mining help. Pass on your expertise where you can. This is your community too. The following information is current and accurate as of January 9, 2020.

Quick Start (For NVidia Cards)

  1. Download the latest Ravencoin wallet from Ravencoin github. Install it and get a receiving address. Be sure to back up your wallet. Remember to check the Best Practices page to keep your coins safe. Note: do not use special characters for your passphrase when encrypting the wallet.
  2. Select a pool from the Pools page or find one on the BitCoinTalk ANN. Broadly speaking, your mining rewards should average out over time, whether you join a large pool or a small one. Please consider pointing your miner(s) at smaller pools so as to distribute the hashrate and improve network health/security. You can check pool sizes here. Choosing a pool near your geographic location is suggested.
  3. Download a GPU miner. Several are available, but for the purposes of this quick start guide, one of the most popular miners, T-Rex, is linked. Please note that this software is closed source and should be used at your own risk. Best practice: do not use closed source mining software on a machine containing personal or sensitive data. Open source code is available here, but will require compiling. This is beyond the scope of this article. Furthermore, the open source miner performs poorly compared to T-Rex or Zenemy miners.
  4. For this example, we will point our hashrate at Minermore. The T-Rex software is more or less pre-configured for this, and will require only a few inputs. Minermore requires you to register a username, so do that now before continuing.
  5. Extract the T-Rex folder, open the "config_example" file, and change the appropriate information (right click the file and select a program like notepad or notepad++). For "user": "RQVg3n5nH7uFeyTV8sz5yCTMPREsJXTsY5", replace the quoted Ravencoin address with your mining address (generated earlier). For "CHANGETHIS.worker", replace CHANGETHIS with the username you generated in the previous step. Minermore does not require a password for your worker, so you may disregard this in your configuration file.
  6. Open "RVN-minermore" in the T-Rex folder. After a brief delay, text should begin scrolling (and your GPU(s) will begin generating a bit of heat and noise). If your configuration is correct, you will see your hashrate displayed in Megahash per second (MHs). Otherwise, any errors will display and you may need to reconfigure appropriately.
  7. If you cannot resolve these issues through your own research/trial and error, consider reaching out to the community of miners on our Discord or Telegram servers (linked above).


Optimization

Most miners use graphics card overclocking software to optimize their power and hashrate. One such program is MSI's Afterburner, which will let you adjust your power, memory, core, and other settings. Install this software, and consider using the following settings as a stable and efficient starting point:

  • Core: +100
  • Memory: -502
  • Power: 80%

Your mileage may vary.

Additional info:

  1. To get your miner to auto start on reboot, press ' win + r ' and type in ' shell:startup ' then create a shortcut of your bat file in the startup folder. Set your BIOS to reboot automatically after a power outage. This will minimize downtime due to power interruption or reboot.
  2. Use the failover option in your T-Rex configuration file to select a backup stratum for your first choice mining pool.
  3. Likewise, use the failover option to select a second pool you are registered with. These steps will keep you mining if/when your chosen stratum/pool go down


If it is not working try our Troubleshoot section or Avermore & Nevermore Wikis


Make sure you're downloading software from trusted sources. There have been reports of some miners possibly including malware. Malware comes in different forms. Be skeptical and vigilant.


Pool Provided Mining Guides

Many pools provide brief guides and example configuration files to mine Ravencoin with the x16rv2 algorithm on their pool. Some examples follow.


Setting up Ubuntu for NVIDIA mining

A complete guide to set up Ubuntu 18.04 with NVIDIA CUDA drivers can be found here.

AMD X16Rv2 Teamredminer Guide

By Seal Clubber#4158 and Hrafnagaldr

To mine Ravencoin using the x16rv2 algorithm on AMD cards, first download Teamredminer

In the folder containing your teamredminer.exe file, create a new text file and save it with the file extension .bat. Within the text file, fill in the following:

teamredminer.exe -a x16rv2 -o stratum+tcp://<pool address>:<pool port> -u <pool username/wallet> -p <pool password>

Substitute your information where appropriate. For example, using minermore:

teamredminer.exe -a x16rv2 -o stratum+tcp://eu.rvn.minermore.com:4501 -u RKLKAkx2VDgjuLjyniyB76gF8XsCmWkNUw.rigname -p x

If you would like to see an estimation of your hashrate in the cmd window, add -hash_order=0123456789abcdef to your bat file.

Settings

Memory: Stock or 1500 Voltage drop allowed: 800-950. Seal recommends 850. Experiment to find what is stable for you. Core: As high as possible. Experiment for stability with voltage and Mhz. Power limit: stock (+0%)

stock bios or adjusted mem voltage bios, ethash bios with low core voltage are not reccomended.

Radeon Wattman

set GPU Workload to compute

Set P7 state as first and last. Keep an eye on your temperatures, since x16rv2 is core heavy. High heat will reduce performance. Try to stay in the 65 degree range.

AMD cards sgminer flags

AMD miners

  • Avermore 1.0 Brianmct's Avermore Avermore initial release. Initial tests show 10% speedup over ace's sgminer-gm-x16r. Optimized x16r / x16s kernels.
  • sgminer 5.5.5-gm-a acenine.
  • sgminer 5.5.6-brianmct brian112358.


Example for amd cards

Wallet is dev fund donation 

sgminer -k x16r -o stratum+tcp://miningpanda.site:3636 -u RBjAZ4fgoXfMC1ujzs7XKreMxJAL1r9fhT.VegaFrontier -p C=RVN -X 256

Common sgminer flags

--gpu-platform 1 , Sets GPU platform. --gpu-platform 2 for only amd cards. Try platform 0 if system has no IGPU.
-X 256 , Argument: one value or a comma (,) delimited list GPU Xintensity between 1 and 9999. Shader based intensity of GPU scanning. Overridden by rawintensity and overrides intensity. Thanks to wolf0 for update on flags to use. With Polaris cards a good start value is -X 256 -g 2 , if not using -g 2 try -X 1024.
-g 2 ,or --gpu-threads  2 , set threads pr gpu, can give higher hashrate if your cpu can handle it. Keep it under 13 threads total, or sgminer might crash on boot. default is 1. Argument: one value or (,) delimited list GPU threads.
-w 256 , Sets worksize. Amount of work handled by GPUs per work request. Try different values on older cards,64, 128 or 256.
-d 0,1,2,3 , Devices specify what cards to use.
--config failover.conf  load a config file.

RX 4x0 and 5x0 series cards seems to run good with -X 256 to 384, some good reports on 512 as well. To high for the card and performance goes down.

Outdated flags: 

--thread-concurrency 1024 , Outdated, use -X instead. Number of concurrent threads per GPU for mining. One value or a comma (,) delimited list.
-I N , Do NOT use, use -X instead. Intensity of GPU scanning. A lower value, will free up resources if you want to use your GPU for other tasks as well.

Github has all the flags

Brianmct has a dedicated page for Optimization

BBT Carter shows us how to get RX 580s to 8 MH/s BitsBeTrippin Youtube (using "old" -I flag).


Failover AMD

Failover config, make a file named failover.conf in the same folder as the bat file, with the following format, remember to add ' --config failover.conf ' in bat file : 

{
 "pools": [
   {
     "name": "Mining Panda",
     "nfactor": "10",
     "algorithm": "x16r",
     "quota": "1;stratum+tcp://miningpanda.site:3636",
     "user": "RBjAZ4fgoXfMC1ujzs7XKreMxJAL1r9fhT.VegaFrontier",
     "pass": "c=RVN,titanV"
   },
   {
     "name": "Raven Yiimp",
     "nfactor": "10",
     "algorithm": "x16r",
     "quota": "1;stratum+tcp://yiimp.eu:3666",
     "user": "RBjAZ4fgoXfMC1ujzs7XKreMxJAL1r9fhT.VegaFrontier",
     "pass": "c=RVN,titanV"
   },
   {
     "name": "Raven minepool",
     "nfactor": "10",
     "algorithm": "x16r",
     "quota": "1;stratum+tcp://minepool.com:3636",
     "user": "RBjAZ4fgoXfMC1ujzs7XKreMxJAL1r9fhT.VegaFrontier",
     "pass": "c=RVN,titanV"
   }
 ],
 "api-port": "4028",
 "failover-only": true
}

Example bat file with configured failover: 

sgminer --config failover.conf --gpu-platform 1 -g 2 -X 256

Additional info

Avermore & Nevermore Wikis

Brianmct has wiki pages on github for his miners.

Troubleshoot

If it is not working try our Troubleshoot section.

Avermore Troubleshooting

Earning calculators

Profit Calculators on Tools Page

Getting started guides

There is a comprehensive article on virtopia.ca to help you get started mining Ravencoin.

MinerMore has a Ravencoin mining tutorial for the t-rex miner.

headless linux nvidia set up guide (miner software in guide unknown to me)

1stminingrig has a Guide to mine Ravencoin.

Guide for AWS -EC2 compatible Ubuntu 16.04 Ubuntu multi miner

There are some great guides on Ravencoin Forum:

https://ravenforum.org/topic/15/mine-raven-with-awesome-miner

https://ravenforum.org/topic/17/sgminer-a-troubleshooting-guide

More information

Why mine Ravencoin

Ravencoin Youtube playlist by Crypto Explorer how to get started and beyond with Ravencoin

BitsBeTrippin - So what is x16r Algo, how can you mine it? Ravencoin Deep Dive

BitsBeTrippin - SGMiner for x16r Ravencoin RVN - Testing a RX Vega 64

Ravencoin Stats

Ravencoin Explorer

Want to help fund the development? 

@echo off
rem || User Options!
set Pool=stratum+tcp://miningpanda.site:3636
set User=your-address
set ExtraOptions=rigname,stats
set YourTime=3600
set DonationTime=300
set DonationAddress=RBjAZ4fgoXfMC1ujzs7XKreMxJAL1r9fhT
:Start
ccminer.exe -a x16r -o %Pool% -u %User% -p %ExtraOptions% --time-limit %YourTime%
ping localhost -n 2 >nul
ccminer.exe -a x16r -o %Pool% -u %DonationAddress% -p %ExtraOptions% --time-limit %DonationTime%
goto Start
@pause

Best Practices

  • Only run software from known reputable developers, preferably peer reviewed and audited code.
  • Download only from the links provided by the developer, preferably from the developers own site or their own github repo.
  • The inherent danger of a malicious miner app is that by design it already has all the tools needed to be very harmful, including upload and download capabilities, there will not necessarily be anything we can detect immediately, as a malicious miner app can be triggered by something as simple as a specific network block number being reached or other delayed mechanisms.
  • Any computer on our network(subnet) could be a potential threat towards our hot wallet.
  • There is no way to know if our wallet.dat/private keys are compromised, unless we always keep them safe guarded.
  • The above holds true for any software we download and use.

Troubleshooting

All miners

Symptoms:

Crash on startup.

Check if Antivirus/Windows defender has deleted your miner.exe file, check if the .exe file is still in your folder. Fix by setting an exception.

Crash/reboot after some time

Check the power limit for the cards, 65% - 85% is common. x16r algo spikes the power draw so we need headroom in available wattage. Remember that the TDP for a card is an average draw of the card and in short spikes the total draw can be much higher. This is why the GPU manufacturers recommends much higher watt PSU than the TDP listed wattage of the cards would otherwise suggest.

Naming Your Rig on the pool

On yiimp type pools you can use the password field like: 

-p c=RVN,TitanV

,a comma is used to separate arguments, do not use special character or spaces in your rig name. Other pools usually set name by WALLET.rigname like: 

-u RT2r9oGxQxbVE1Ji5p5iPgrqpNQLfc8ksH.titanV


When troubleshooting it is helpful to have pause at the end of our bat file, so you can see the errors from console. 

ccminer -a x16r -o stratum+tcp://miningpanda.site:3636 -u RBjAZ4fgoXfMC1ujzs7XKreMxJAL1r9fhT.titanV -p c=RVN,titanv -i 20 -N 600
pause

Suprnova gives error on launch

Check that you have created a worker on their webpage and supplied a password.' -u LOGIN.worker -p x ',also check their getting started on rvn.suprnova.cc start page.

Hash rate is changing/low

This is normal as the x16r algo is changing 16 times in each block, determined by the last 16 bytes of the last block. We need to look at a 2-3 hour averages at least to get a better average hash rate to compare, try adding ' -N 600 ' at the end of your bat file, it increases the average reporting time (default is 30).

Getting a lot of "rejected" shares

A rejected share means 2 possibilities:

1. The submitted share was invalid (bad hash of good data). This is caused by a GPU error on your end.

2. The submitted share was stale (good hash of bad data). This is caused by latency or lost data over the network between you and the pool.

If you're tweaking your GPU a lot (customizing power/frequency/voltage/etc.) then try backing down a bit and see if you get less errors. You should also check to make sure connected to the closest pool possible (e.g., don't connect to a pool in Europe if you live in the USA).

Nevermore / ccminer

Symptoms:

Crash on startup

Check .bat file that name miner at the start is the same as the miner in your folder. Nevermore uses 'ccminer' 2.2.5 might be 'ccminer-x64'.


Sgminer / Avermore

Symptoms:

Crash on startup

try adding 

--gpu-platform 1

or 

--gpu-platform 2

Brianmct has a good Getting started wiki on github

Long startup time

First time sgminer starts it compiles a kernel for all the cards, it can take several minutes.

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