Digging for cryptocurrency: The newbie’s guide to mining altcoins

Play your cards right, and you could be swimming in Arscoins.

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A few weeks ago, whenour own "Arscoin" cryptocurrencywas first minted, it looked like Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson would control the majority of the coins. He started mining early, and he has a crowd of Linux servers sitting in his closet that can outrun the all-in-one desktops and power-sipping Ultrabooks most of us have on hand.

Send coins to a friend or buy a silly hat for the Ars Technica forums.

When our little experiment began, I knew enough about Bitcoin and Litecoin mining to know that there are more efficient ways to rack up coins than using the default miner, but I had never actually mined either of those currencies myself. Coingen.io, which we used to produce the Arscoin code, provides no explicit documentation and little post-creation support for newly minted cryptocurrencies, so it was up to me to feel my way forward. I couldn't out-muscle Lee's closet full of computers, but I've worked with him for long enough to know that I could outsmart him. (See me after class, Mr. Cunningham. -Ed.)

My research led me down a rabbit hole that ran through several wikis and dozens of half-helpful forum posts, but when I finally climbed back out, I knew enough to overpower Lee's computer closet using only a 2012 iMac. To save you from having to follow my dusty path, we'll walk you through the best ways to mine out Arscoinsand other altcoinswith your existing hardware.

A couple of notes before we begin.In these directions, we'll try not to assume any knowledge about mining on your part, but the most straightforward mining utilities use the Windows, OS X, and Linux command lines. We'll cover graphical utilities where appropriate, but you Linux users in particular should make sure you know your way around a Terminal window, especially if you intend to GPU mine. We will also require you to download some files from external siteswe haven't encountered any problems with any of the tools we're about to recommend, but we assume no responsibility for anything you do to your hardware or software while mining Arscoins or any other cryptocurrency.

Second, while you'll be able to mine plenty of Arscoins with your CPU and GPU (thereby securing yourself somesweet fake hats for the comment section), folks who are serious about actual Bitcoin mining have long since moved to dedicated mining devices like the Butterfly Labs ASIC box we tested out last summer. ASIC-based mining devices are much, much faster than CPUs or GPUs, and they use less power to boot. As of this writing, ASICs that can run the scrypt algorithm used to encrypt Litecoin, Arscoin, and other altcoins aren't in widespread circulation, but it's only a matter of time.

Finally, the Arscoin project is for those who want to experiment with digital currenciesand buy some fun hats and colored usernames along the way. In other words, it is for educational use only; we have centralized the system in order to prevent it from developing into a real-money economy.

Your wallet page will track your most recent payments, including deposits from the pool.

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Digging for cryptocurrency: The newbie’s guide to mining altcoins