What cryptocurrencies can I mine on Shark mining rigs? + Siacoin (SC) Ethereum (ETH) + Decred. I have received the package with my mining rig, what should I do.

If you’ve followed and successfully set up your own rig, you may have noticed that the Claymore mining software we’re using supports a dual-mining mode. The premise of dual-mining sounds great: mine another altcoin alongside ETH, ostensibly for free. Sounds like an easy way to increase profitability without any downside, so shouldn’t we all take advantage? Read on for the pros and cons of dual-mining with Claymore, and instructions to guide you through enabling it.

What’s this dual-mining mode? Claymore’s miner (the mining software you’re already using if you followed ) supports mining one of several altcoins (,,, or ) while simultaneously mining ETH. When properly configured, the impact on Ethereum mining speed is nearly negligible. The upside to dual-mining is obvious: you earn some extra cryptocurrency, and gain some diversification.

Sounds great—is there a downside to dual-mining? In short: yes—you’re going to earn a tiny bit less ETH, and you’re going to consume significantly more power (which in turn is going to cause your rig to generate extra heat & fan noise). Enabling dual mining mode in Claymore immediately increases the developer’s usage fee from 1% to 2%.

So right off the top, you’re losing 1% of your mined ETH to the additional fee. The additional workload of dual-mining will reduce your ETH hashrate by another 1% or so, when properly configured (eg: dual-mining intensity set to have minimal impact on ETH). So in total, dual-mining will cause you to earn about 2% less ETH compared to ETH-only mining mode. 2% doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t—but it’s not completely negligible either., so losing 2% of that amounts to roughly $22 monthly. Increased electricity consumption is the other downside, and one that people often overlook. My own tests with a indicate that enabling dual-mining mode uses another ~30 watts of power per GPU (so nearly 200 watts across a 6-GPU rig). Earn Money ZClassic ZCL Mining. At $0.10/kWh, in electricity.

Don’t forget that the additional power consumption will increase the heat generated by GPUs, which in turn makes GPU fans work harder. Additional power usage might also cause system instability if your undervolt settings were already near the limit, so be aware.

Between the loss of mined ETH, and the increased electricity usage, enabling dual mining “costs” roughly $40/month. The next obvious question: are the dual-mined altcoins worth that much? How much are these altcoins worth?

I’m going to focus on for the rest of this article, because of the four options available to dual-mine, I think it’s the most interesting. Numbers for the other three altcoin options will vary, but my guess is that they’re all pretty similar at this point. When configured in the manner that I outline in the next section, a 6-GPU rig will hash Siacoins at about 2000 Mh/s in dual-mining mode, which is enough to earn roughly 10,000 SC per month. Each, which means dual-mining earns about $130 in siacoins every month. If we subtract out our $40 in additional dual-mining “expenses” (outlined in the previous section), that means dual-mining can potentially net us another $90/month! Probably worth it for most people, unless you pay an abnormally high rate for electricity, or put a premium on keeping your rigs as cool and quiet as possible.

So how do I actually enable dual-mining? It’s pretty straightforward: first, you’ll need a wallet address for whichever altcoin you’ve decided to dual-mine. For Siacoin, that means, and using it to create a wallet address. You can do this on any computer (it doesn’t need to be on your mining rig). Make sure that you follow proper precautions and securely backup your wallet key file in multiple offline locations, just as you (hopefully) did with your ETH wallet key. Using to hold your wallet keys, and storing at least one of them offsite with a trusted friend (or bank deposit box, etc) is a good practice. Once you’ve generated a wallet address, you’ll need to edit your mining script to enable dual-mining mode, specifying your new wallet address as the destination for mined coins.

If you followed, you’ll need to edit the mine.sh file that you created in step 6. You can make a backup of your current mine.sh first by typing “cp mine.sh mine.sh.bak” in case you want to undo your changes easily later. If you followed, you’ll need to edit the mine.bat file that you created in step 10. You can make a backup of your current mine.bat first by highlighting it in Windows Explorer and then pressing CTRL+C followed by CTRL+V.

In either case, you’ll need to edit the line of the script that starts with “ethdcrminer64”. On that line, find “-mode 1”. We’re going to replace that “-mode 1” switch (eg: delete the “-mode 1” text, inserting the text below in its place—leave everything before and after intact) with the following: -dpool stratum+tcp://sia-us-east1.nanopool.org:7777 -dwal [address] -dcoin sia -dcri 16 Replace [address] with your own Siacoin wallet address (without the brackets). If you have multiple rigs, then you should specify multiple workers like this (eg: replace [worker name] with Rig01, Rig02, etc): -dwal [address]/[worker name] I’ve used as my mining pool here, though you can of course substitute any pool that supports Siacoin. Assuming you stick with nanopool, you can check on your mining progress by visiting this URL (wait at least 10 minutes after you start mining): wallet address] The -dcri switch specifies dual-mining intensity—a higher number will improve Siacoin hashrate at the cost of decreasing Ethereum hashrate.

I’ve found that 15-16 appears to be the sweet spot for me: the impact to ETH mining is nearly negligible; increasing it beyond this point started to noticeably decrease my ETH hashrate. Feel free to experiment if you notice a drop in your own ETH mining speed. That’s all there is to it—save your changes and restart your miner.

If you’ve done everything correctly, you’re now mining ETH and SC together! These guides are killer! 1th Decred DCR Miner.

Love ’em thank you so much. I do have a question: I wanted to play around with SIA mining a bit before firing up my rig for dual mining, so I installed a SIA miner (Siamining with “Marlin” on my home desktop with a standard dell nvidia graphics card.

I don’t know the exact specs, but after about 6 hours of mining with a hashrate of around 80mh/s I have roughly 2.5 SIA. I started my rig up this AM, right now it’s just 2 1060’s (more on the way) and I followed your guide using nanopool this time and I’m getting around 210mh/s however, I don’t seem to be getting shares nearly as often as I am with my basic card on my desktop.

Any thoughts? A question for everyone – For those mining ETH, how long on average does it take to actually earn the 3 ETH reward or to discover an Uncle?

Some details – For a school project, my son (with a little help) recently built a 6 GPU rig (Nvidia 1070oc – getting consistent 189 mh/s) mining with v10 of Claymore on Nanopool. His rig has been running for about a month. He has earned a little over $200 USD in ETH thus far.

Any idea what the expectation should be on getting the reward? No way to tell? Is $200 – $250/month the new average for this type of rig – this is obviously a far cry from $1,100 mentioned in the post! Appreciate any education! Hi, I just purchased a ‘cluster’ OR 8 of these little USB ‘dual-miners’ & have them pluged into an Anker 10port hub.

I am trying to mine ETH & SIA but every video I have found seem to only refer to GPUs from AMD & NIVIDIA I have no idea what classification these, little ‘thumb drive’ sized rigs are called, (they are Blue iin color and have both Bitcoin&Litcoin symbols on front), Additionally I have no clue as to the manufacturer the individual I purchased them from told me that they are Dual Miner 20131211v1.1 whatever that means, IDK? Please help if possible. Hi, I just purchased a ‘cluster’ OR 8 of these little USB ‘dual-miners’ & have them pluged into an Anker 10port hub. I am trying to mine ETH & SIA but every video I have found seem to only refer to GPUs from AMD & NIVIDIA I have no idea what classification these, little ‘thumb drive’ sized rigs are called, (they are Blue iin color and have both Bitcoin&Litecoin symbols on front), Additionally I have no clue as to the manufacturer the individual I purchased them from told me that they are Dual Miner 20131211v1.1 whatever that means, IDK? Please help if possible. Hi – Just started mining since Dec2017, so very much still learning!!

I have used the guides here so far and they have been great. Rig Details: B250 Mining Expert motherboard 500 SSD 4 GB Ram Celeron CPU 6 off GPUs (4 x Rx580, 4 x Rx570) OS = Ubuntu 16.w Power Unit Using Nanopool just now to Pool Mine Just using the GPUs as they came “out the box” and getting 142.6 Mh/S, rig very stable, no issues! I know i can overclock and do other clever stuff, but due to my inexperience, I am still a bit nervous to do so. Great guide but I struggled to get ETH and SIA to dual mine, so I have reverted back to mining ETH only. In addition, I am using Exodus as a wallet so as I continue on this mining learning journey, I would like to be able to mine another cryptocurrency that I can store in Exodus.

So 2 questions if ok. 1-What would be the best coin that Exodus supports to dual mine with ETH? 2-Could you provide a guide as to how I do that?

Lastly, a big shout out and thanks to all the other experts on this site. Us newbies really are grateful for your expertise and guidance.

Hi Martin When I first started mining using CBs guide, I was getting total circa 142MHs, with the 6 GPUs getting roughly 24MH/s average each. I hadn’t changed any of the settings yet as still fairly new to mining so still learning. However about 4 weeks ago, the average moved down to circa 18MH/s for the GPUs so ended up with circa 108MH/s.

I wasn’t sure why this happened and couldn’t find a reason on any site to help. Anyway, I am in the process of installing Windows 10 on my MacBook Pro so I can have a go at trying the GPU BIOS tweaks shown in CBs guide – section 4. I hope to increase the “clock” and lower the “wattage” of each GPU, one at a time using my MacBook. That way I can leave my Linux Rig running 24/7.

I will post and let others know how that goes. Cheers Peter.

What do you mean with solo vs pooled? If you mean mining one coin vs two simultaneously, of course if you dual mine, some hashrate is taken by one of the two, leading to less results than if you mine only one coin. If you mean mining to find the new block in the block chain (solo mining) vs with a pool of people to find the block chain: solo mining with one AMD card is dwarfed by dedicated PC's for mining. Therefore, it will take you years, maybe decades until you find a block and get a reward.

The chances are next to nothing. I think that pool mining is more profitable in your case.