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Posted by on 15th January, 2014

Cloud mining Datacoin

Cloud mining Datacoin

I missed the boat on buying hardware mining equipment but still wanted to try mining for myself. Besides the initial cost, the financials of electricity costs with diminished returns, it just didn’t seem profitable at the time, and even less now.

Now, without owning any hardware, one can still mine with cloud hosted solutions; whether it is Azure, or any other cloud service, you just create a Virtual Machine, install the wallet software for the crypto-coin you want to mine for and let it run for days on end. Just come back after a while to check on your balance. On Digital Ocean, you can run a single instance for about US$5 per month.

I picked a coin that is not very popular with low difficulty, so I could get some decent amount of coins in return for experimental purposes and not necessarily to make money.

I picked Datacoin [datacoin.info] and here are the steps I followed for mining this coin:

Go to digitalocean.com and create an account. Once you fund your account, you can create a droplet, a single instance of a Virtual Machine.
Create your first instance.
Give it a name
Select any option. I chose the cheapest to try for only USD$5 per month.
pick your geo-location region
pick the OS version
Create your droplet
We have a basic droplet created; now we need to download the Datacoin miner source code and compile it. Access the droplet through the console with the username (usually root) and the password provided to you via email.

run one line at a time (except comments starting with #)

#  
# installs dependencies
# -------------------------------------------------------
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential m4 libssl-dev libdb++-dev libboost-all-dev libminiupnpc-dev git
 

# installs GMP
# -------------------------------------------------------
cd
rm -rf gmp-5.1.3.tar.bz2 gmp-5.1.3
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/gnu/gmp/gmp-5.1.3.tar.bz2
tar xjvf gmp-5.1.3.tar.bz2
cd gmp-5.1.3
./configure --enable-cxx
make
sudo make install

# create swapfile, reqquired if you have 1GB RAM or less)
# -------------------------------------------------------
cd
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=64M count=16
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

# install Datacoind.exe
# -------------------------------------------------------
cd
git clone https://github.com/foo1inge/datacoin-hp
cd datacoin-hp/src
make -f makefile.unix
sudo cp -f datacoind /usr/local/bin/

# create config file
# -------------------------------------------------------
cd
mkdir -p .datacoin
echo 'server=1
gen=1
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
addnode=108.161.145.29
addnode=162.243.111.195
rpcuser=DatacoinMiner
rpcpassword=[PASSWORD_CHANGE_ME]' > .datacoin/datacoin.conf
You are now ready to start mining with this droplet. However, if you want, you can create more copies of this instance, so you can mine with multiple instances. If so, shut off the droplet, so we can make a snapshot of it.
Once the machine is turned off, you can create a snapshot of that machine, that you can then, in turn, use as an image for any new instances. Any new droplet from this snapshot is ready to go and ready to start mining.
Now, when you create another new droplet, select from image and pick the snapshot you created above.
Each instance is ready to go, but you will need to start the miners on each. Log back into each instance/droplet and run the following code:

run miner

# start mining
# -------------------------------------------------------
datacoind --daemon
Come back a day or two later to see if how many coins you have reaped. Log in and check your balance with this:

check balance

# get collected balance
# -------------------------------------------------------
datacoind getbalance
And to send the funds collected to your own Datacoin wallet address:

send funds to address

# send funds from miner to your address
# -------------------------------------------------------
datacoind sendtoaddress xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx amount
Enjoy!