Solo Mining
Solo mining is an alternative to mining via a collective pool like PAI Coin Pool. When you solo mine, your device or server locally constructs valid blocks until it finds one with a hash that meets the PAI Blockchain’s difficulty target (i.e., a “lucky hash”). Once found, it broadcasts the block to other peers for acceptance across the network.
The main implication of solo mining is that, if and when your device finds a valid block that’s accepted by the network, you get to keep the entire portion of the block reward reserved for mining. On the other hand, you will not earn anything from mining if your device never finds a valid block.
Solo mining is in contrast to pool mining, where block rewards are shared proportionally among all contributors to a pool, regardless of which individual contributor actually found the valid block with a lucky hash. Simply put, within certain bounds, solo mining is likely to result in relatively bigger rewards paid out less often, while pool mining usually results in smaller rewards, but paid out more often. For blockchains with a very high overall network hash rate, solo mining will be infeasible for miners will relatively low computational power.
Solo mining is beneficial to the PAI Blockchain because it further decentralizes the network by distributing the sources of mining out from one or a few large mining pools (e.g., PAI Coin Pool), which can pose a central-point-of-failure risk to the network.
Table of Contents
- Setting up a full node with a wallet
- Building and installing the solo mining software
- Running the solo miner
- References
Setting up a full node with a wallet
NOTE: If you wish to store your mining rewards in a command line wallet on the same machine doing the mining, set up a full node with a wallet according to the steps below. If you wish to store your mining rewards elsewhere (e.g., in a PAI Up mobile or web wallet), you should skip this section and set up a full node according to this guide.
Execute the following commands to build a full node with a wallet.
First, install some necessary dependencies.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install autoconf autogen automake make gcc libcurl4-gnutls-dev build-essential libtool autotools-dev pkg-config libssl-dev libevent-dev bsdmainutils python3 libboost-all-dev
Next, fetch and compile Berkeley DB 4.8, which is necessary for the wallet.
wget http://download.oracle.com/berkeley-db/db-4.8.30.NC.tar.gz
echo '12edc0df75bf9abd7f82f821795bcee50f42cb2e5f76a6a281b85732798364ef db-4.8.30.NC.tar.gz' | sha256sum -c
tar -xvf db-4.8.30.NC.tar.gz
sed -i 's/__atomic_compare_exchange/__atomic_compare_exchange_db/g' db-4.8.30.NC/dbinc/atomic.h
cd db-4.8.30.NC/build_unix
mkdir -p build
BDB_PREFIX=$(pwd)/build
../dist/configure --disable-shared --enable-cxx --with-pic --prefix=$BDB_PREFIX
make install
Now, configure and build PAI Coin Core.
cd
git clone https://github.com/projectpai/paicoin.git
cd paicoin
./autogen.sh
./configure CPPFLAGS="-I${BDB_PREFIX}/include/ -O2" LDFLAGS="-
L${BDB_PREFIX}/lib/" --disable-tests
You should see:
Options used to compile and link:
with wallet = yes
with gui / qt = no
with zmq = no
with test = no
with bench = yes
with upnp = auto
use asm= yes
debug enabled = no
werror = no
target os = linux
build os =
CC = gcc
CFLAGS = -g -O2
CPPFLAGS = -I/home/ubuntu/db-4.8.30. NC/build_unix/build/include/ -O2 -DHAVE_BUILD_INFO -D__STDC_FORMAT_MACROS
CXX = g++ -std=c++11CXXFLAGS = -g -O2 -Wall -Wextra -Wformat -Wvla -Wformat-security -Wno-unused-parameter -Wno-implicit-fallthrough
LDFLAGS = -L/home/ubuntu/db-4.8.30.NC/build_unix/build/lib/
ARFLAGS = cr
Lastly, compile:
make
Then, you should see:
CXX stake/libpaicoinconsensus_la-votebits.lo
CXX libpaicoinconsensus_la-uint256.lo
CXX libpaicoinconsensus_la-utilstrencodings.lo
CXX support/libpaicoinconsensus_la-cleanse.lo
CXX libpaicoinconsensus_la-sync.lo
CXX libpaicoinconsensus_la-fs.lo
CXX libpaicoinconsensus_la-random.lo
CXX libpaicoinconsensus_la-utiltime.lo
CXX libpaicoinconsensus_la-util.lo
CXXLD libpaicoinconsensus.la
make[2]:Leaving directory '/home/ubuntu/paicoin/src'
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/ubuntu/paicoin/src'
Making all in doc/man
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/ubuntu/paicoin/doc/man'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for 'all'.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/ubuntu/paicoin/doc/man'
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/ubuntu/paicoin'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for 'all-am'.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/ubuntu/paicoin'
Once successfully compiled, create the ~/.paicoin directory, and inside, create a text file called paicoin.conf at least containing the following (set the rpcuser and rpcpassword values to whatever you prefer):
daemon=1
rpcuser=user
rpcpassword=password
Finally, launch the full node by running ./paicoind in the paicoin/src directory and wait for it to sync. You can see the progress of the sync by running paicoin-cli getmininginfo or viewing ~/.paicoin/debug.log and checking the local block height. The sync is complete when the local block height matches the blockchain height as seen, for example, on https://paichain.info.
You can use your PAI Coin wallet with commands like paicoin-cli getbalance, paicoin-cli sendtoaddress, and paicoin-cli getnewaddress. A full list of possible commands is available by executing paicoin-cli help.
Building and installing the solo mining software
Install a dependency:
sudo apt install libcurl4-gnutls-dev
Clone the cpuminer repository and configure the build.
git clone https://github.com/projectpai/cpuminer.git
cd cpuminer
./autogen.sh
This should output:
configure.ac:9: installing './compile'
configure.ac:4: installing './config.guess'
configure.ac:4: installing './config.sub'
configure.ac:6: installing './install-sh'
configure.ac:6: installing/'./missing'
Makefile.am: installing './INSTALL'
Makefile.am: installing './depcomp'
Then, execute:
./nomacro.pl
Lastly, run:
./configure CFLAGS="-O3"
This should output:
Compilation............: make (or gmake)
CPPFLAGS.............:
CFLAGS...............: -O3
LDFLAGS..............: -pthread
LDADD................: -lcurl compat/jansson/libjansson.a -lpthread
Installation...........: make install (as root if needed, with 'su' or 'sudo')
prefix...............: /usr/local
Finally, compile the software.
make
Running the solo miner
With paicoind running, executing the following command in the cpuminer directory will launch cpuminer.
./minerd -a paicoin -o http://127.0.0.1:8566 -u user -p password --coinbase-addr=paiaddress --no-stratum &> ~/cpu-miner-output.log &
In the above command, you should replace user and password with the rpcuser and rpcpassword values that you specified in your paicoin.conf file. The paiaddress value should be set equal to the PAI Coin address you want to use to collect any block rewards you may earn from mining.
You can check the cpu-miner-output.log file to assess the performance of the miner.
References
Some tips for installing Berkeley DB 4.8 were found here:
https://gist.github.com/danieldk/5700533
Download your copy of the Solo Mining Guide here:
Solo Mining.pdf (157.0 KB)