Saturday, July 20, 2013

Idiots guide to renting a VPS to mine primecoin for a mere 3 cents per hour at 1500 PPS

I've spent the past day and a half learning to use ubuntu to write this guide and fixing the mistakes other people made in their guides that were written to a much higher level of understanding. Up until yesterday i'd never used ubuntu in my life and I got this to work, so anyone who is remotely computer proficient should be able to get through this with minimal hand holding by following these steps
Also, for 3cents for 1500pps, this is almost as cheap as owning the hardware yourself and paying the electricity cost (which is about 50 cents a day for me)
For the purposes of this post, I'll be using digitalocean, but any vps with ubuntu 13.04 will do. I'm not going to try and dupe you into some referral link. If you'd like to hook me up for helping you out, I'd gladly accept any XPM here: ASRtmbRbSHnwDFtto64qLSKnUUqKKgffha
Step 1: Get a VPS, I chose digitalocean. I paid $5 via paypal which works out with one vps to be about a solid week of mining. With them, I recommend the 2cpu option as I've found that they are throttling the smallest droplets. At 3cents per hour i'm getting 1500pps. Create the droplet, and name it whatever you wish. Be sure to pick ubuntu 13.04 64bit.
Step 2: Download putty, you can get putty here:http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html[1]
Step 3: When you created your droplet, you were sent an email with the login information. Open putty, and input the ip address, you may wish to name this VPS and click save. Connect to the vps, use the username "root" and the password you were provided.
Enter the following lines of code one at a time, don't include the numbers.
1: sudo apt-get update
2: sudo apt-get install bzip2 git git-core subversion checkinstall build-essential libssl-dev libboost-all-dev libdb5.1-dev libdb5.1++-dev libgtk2.0-dev
4: (you should be still in root, if not, you can type "cd .." until you're in root, if by some chance your vps downloads to a /downloads directory you can type "dir" to list all directories and cd directorynamehere)
5: tar jxvf primecoin-0.1.1-hp5.tar.bz2
6: cd primecoin-0.1.1-hp5
7: cd src
8: make -f makefile.unix USE_UPNP=-
If step 8 gives you an error, your vps does not come with a necessary library. You need to type this:
Step 8 if needed: apt-get install libgmp3-dev
pre Step 9: cd .. (until back in root)
Step 9:
mkdir ~/.primecoin
echo "rpcuser=yourusernamegoeshere
rpcpassword=yourpasswordgoeshere
gen=1" > ~/.primecoin/primecoin.conf
(Pre step 10, cd yourself like before back to the src folder inside the primecoin directory, again, this is "cd primecoin-0.1.1-hp5" "cd src"
Step 10 : ./primecoind --daemon
This will start primecoin. Like any coin, it will need to sync and download the blockchain. Once it does this, it will automatically start mining.
from the /src folder, you can check the status at this point by typing:
Step 11: ./primecoind getmininginfo
Once you see PPS, you know its working, from that point you can do this:
Step 12: watch -d -n 5 './primecoind getmininginfo && ./primecoind getdifficulty && ./primecoind listtransactions "*" 1 0'
Every 5 seconds it will update, if you get a block, it will appear as a transaction. Should you wish to wish to get those coins into another wallet, you simply need to right click the putty top blue bar and click duplicate session. Log into the terminal, then type this from the src folder:
./primecoind sendtoaddress <primecoinaddress> <amount> [comment] [comment-to]
(you don't actually need the <> when you type this in).
Thats pretty much it, 1500pps for 3 cents an hour.
If you have any problems, please post in the thread and i'll try and figure out where you went wrong. If you find a block, feel free to send me a coin!
ASRtmbRbSHnwDFtto64qLSKnUUqKKgffha

- Gwen

So have you heard about Primecoin?

The altcoin community is abuzz this week with news of primecoin, a new altcoin.

Primecoin is different from other bitcoin clones as instead of being a standard hashcash type of coin Primecoin's miners are calculating prime number chains to find blocks.

Primecoin has risen to a peak of .015 BTC per XPM and currently sits at about .01 BTC per XPM.

Primecoin is currently traded on most alt exchanges like coins-e and cryptsy (down at the time of this post). You can learn more about it at Reddit Primecoin which is an active community or download the latest and fastest wallet at this Sourceforge.net for linux and This one for windows