Start mining Zcash

Now that you have your own TADDR, you are ready to start mining your own coins.

For beginners I recommend to you to start with nanopool.org since is very easy to setup and you don’t need to register, all you need is to download a miner client and your TADDR where they are going to deposit your coins and start the miner client. For people that doesn’t know what is a miner client, a miner client is the program that is use to mine in a miner pool, some miners are free and some are not (but it’s ok since are very low fees compared).

Before we start there a couple of notes or clarifications in case you have questions:

• You don’t need to have your node synchronized,  this only will be required if you want to move your money out of your wallet.
• You need to know which type of GPU you have if it is AMD or Nvidia, you need this because some miner clients only works with specific type of cards.
• Why we are mining using a pool instead of solo mining? Unless you have like a miner farm with (hundreds of GPU’s dedicated to mine) you won’t be able to mine a single coin in your life, you have to get into a group of miners which works in conjunction to mine the blocks together and spread the earnings among the group,
• Can I use a laptop which has a dedicated GPU? Yes, you can do and I only tested with GPU’s of minimum 2GB of ram.
• I’m assuming you are using Windows to start mining, for how to mine using Linux I don’t cover this now but later on I’ll show you how to do so.

Let’s start…

1.- Go to zec.nanopool.org

This is the home page where you can find useful information like:

• Number of people that is mining in the pool.
• Zcash current market price.
• Notifications from twitter.

2.- Download the miner client, here zec.nanopool.org/help you can download directly the miner that fits your situation or expectation. Also they give you explanation of how to use them etc.

Now here is my suggestion: I recommend to you to use either Claymore (for AMD GPU’s) or EWBF (For Nvidia GPU’s), these two miner clients have a fee of 2% which is not much I can tell you, why don’t use other miners? even that they are free you will get a very low mining hash rate, so the optimized miners I suggesting you are the best bet.

3.- Once you have your client in your pc, let’s see what is the closest Nanopool server to mine. In my case I’m located in the east side so I’m using zec-us-east1.nanopool.org.

Also you have to use a number port which its going to be 6666.

At this point you have everything you need to start mining, they only one thing left is that you need to configure and tell the miner client about your address, server etc.

I will show you how to mine using EWFB (since I have a nvidia), also using a laptop, of course if you have a desktop with a powerful GPU like GTX1080 you will see a huge difference of the mining hash rate. My laptop has a hashrate of 33H/s average.

I’m going to use a pre-configured miner clients from here github.com/cryptoadm/cryptodownloads which were downloaded originally from nanopool, then:

1.- Download the miner client:

2.- You will need to unzip the files, for this you will need 7zip which you can get it here 7-zip.org/download.html

Before you do this make sure you create the folder which you want to extract the files, in my case I created a new folder “D:\minerclients\zcash”.

Then specify where you are going to extract this and do the following:

After you are done, go to the location you extracted the file.

3.- Extract the miner client.

4.- Open the folder of the miners, and you will see the files that are shown in the image below.

We are going to focus on start.bat only, before you edit I recommend to you to make a copy/backup of it just in case you mess up something.

Do right click on “start.bat” and select “Edit”.

5,- Here you have to update the file with you data:

• Enter the closest server and port which is 6666
• Enter your wallet address along with the worker name (which is whatever name you want) and email, make sure you use a valid email because they send you notifications for example if your worker stop working.
• Leave the other things as it is.
• Here is an example of what you will enter:
  • miner –server zec-us-east1.nanopool.org –user your_address_goes_here.worker_name/your@email.com –pass x –port 6666

4.- Start your client miner by executing “start.bat”, you will see something like this.

If you want to stop it, just close the window.

Enjoy!