CPU Miner
The quai-cpu-miner should not be used for the Iron Age Testnet. CPU mining should only be used in local testing environments.
Here, we'll be installing quai-cpu-miner, the Go implementation of a Quai Network CPU miner. This tutorial is focused for Linux Distributions and MacOS systems. Running quai-cpu-miner on Windows is not currently supported.
Here, we'll be installing quai-cpu-miner, the Go implementation of a Quai Network CPU miner. This tutorial is focused for Linux Distributions and MacOS systems.
To run an instance of quai-cpu-miner, you'll need to have installed and configured a Quai node. The prerequisites to install and run the miner are the same as a node.
Now that we've installed the base dependencies and configured our node, we can go ahead and clone the quai-cpu-miner repo.
To install quai-cpu-miner and navigate to its directory, run the following commands:
git clone https://github.com/dominant-strategies/quai-cpu-miner.git
cd quai-cpu-miner
This command will install the main branch to your local machine.
Simply copy the configuration template file
config.yaml.dist into a local configuration file named config.yaml. This can be done by navigating to the config directory and running:cp config.yaml.dist config.yaml
The default configuration will suffice for the duration of this tutorial. For more advanced users, the config file can be used to set up a connection to the Quai stratum proxy.
Before continuing, make sure to navigate back to the quai-cpu-miner root directory.
Similar to the node, we'll need to build the source to run the miner. To build the source via Makefile, run:
make quai-cpu-miner
Prior to running the miner, you must connect to a fully synced node, either local or remote. Once you've connected to a synced node, you can spin up an instance of the miner.
Similar to a base node, a miner mines a "slice" down the network hierarchy that includes prime, one region, and one zone chain. To start the miner, you'll need to specify the region, and zone chains that you'd like to mine. Region and zone indices are 0-indexed and range from 0-2.
To start the miner, select a region and zone index and run:
# run in terminal
make run-mine region=0 zone=1
# run in background, save log output
make run-mine-background region=2 zone=1
When choosing which contexts to mine, there are a few important things to consider:
- Block difficulty in each context (lower difficulty = higher chance of finding a block)
- Peer connection latency (related to geographic distance from peers)
Optimizing for latency drastically decreases the chance of finding an uncle block for which a decreased block reward is awarded. Miners who select contexts with the lowest block difficulties in tandem with minimizing peer latencies will generally be the most successful. Our team has provided a guide to inform optimal context selection based on your geographical location for miners.
Depending on whether or not the miner is running in background, logs will be viewable in different locations.
If you're running in the terminal, logs will be piped directly to the terminal and will not be saved. If the miner is running in the background, the miner output will be piped to a mining location specific .log file with the path
logs/slice-R-Z.log. To view the last 100 lines of log output in Cyprus-1, run:tail -n 100 logs/slice-0-0.log
You can also easily view miner logs via your favorite IDE, we recommend using this method. Logs are the best way to verify that your miner is running correctly and view information on efficiency and blocks mined.
A miner that is actively mining should have log outputs similar to:
2023/01/11 12:51:23 Mining Block: [16 22 78] location [0 0] difficulty [29209917 7353733 1913341]
2023/01/11 12:51:25 Zone block : [16 22 78] 0x0000086297dd6d1f635b01e3dc3d0c27d0ed9a571ae4e3e22ba89e876e71e398
2023/01/11 12:51:25 Mining Block: [16 22 79] location [0 0] difficulty [29209917 7353733 1914275]
2023/01/11 12:51:30 Zone block : [16 22 79] 0x000007c8d5b6ce6e7958eef2e3d12524538602400d1291744358efc43f57f266
2023/01/11 12:51:30 Mining Block: [16 22 80] location [0 0] difficulty [29209917 7353733 1915209]
2023/01/11 12:51:31 Zone block : [16 22 80] 0x000008094cf87697189620a51357b54827828fb9a693cc1e082b36736a406fcd
2023/01/11 12:51:31 Mining Block: [16 22 81] location [0 0] difficulty [29209917 7353733 1915209]
2023/01/11 12:51:33 Zone block : [16 22 81] 0x000006fb38aa98adddc3a6b0e5b887a55ea21065f05a5801ddca6aca0deba290
2023/01/11 12:51:33 Mining Block: [16 22 82] location [0 0] difficulty [29209917 7353733 1916144]
2023/01/11 12:51:34 Quai Miner : Hashes per second: 734038.5899168133
The miner logs provide the current block being mined, block type, the hash/second of your machine, and a number of other useful pieces of data.
You should stop the miner anytime you plan to pull an update, stop your node for any reason, or are shutting down your machine. A miner instance running the in background can be terminated by running:
make stop
If the miner is running inside your terminal, you can use CTRL+C to kill the process.
Making sure your miner is running correctly is crucial to being successful as a miner and the network as a whole. There are a few ways to verify that your miner is running smoothly.
Prior to updating your miner, make sure to kill any instances of
quai-cpu-miner using the stop command above. After stopping your miner, pull any new code by running:git pull origin main
Rebuild the source using:
make quai-cpu-miner
After completing the steps above, you can restart the miner and continue mining.
Starting the miner update process while the node or miner are running could cause issues. Make sure to stop all processes before updating.
Last modified 2d ago