Mine against the world [Challenge Accepted ] (EZ mining BTC Solo setup)

I am feeling STOKED right now because it’s meeh against the WORld!!!  I finally got around to converting my block erupters to lottery mode aka mining solo on a full bitcoin node.  Hoping to secure the network through proof of work consensus and win a lottery someday soon.

All I did was:

Bitcoin Wallet installed (required for solo mining)

1. 1.Press WindowsKey + E to bring up My computer
2. 2 type %appdata%\bitcoin into the windows explorer:
3. 3 Right Click-Edit bitcoin.conf (or create using notepad) and include the following:

4. rpcuser=yourusername
   rpcpassword=somethinghardbutmemorableforu
   rpcallowip=192.168.1.*
   rpcport=8332
   daemon=1
   server=1
   gen=0

5. 4 Save Close Bitcoin wallet if open and restart it (use a desktop shortcut or even have it set to run on startup using the startup folder)

Miner Setup

(if for whatever reason you decide to solo mine be sure to include a backup pool if you can.  To do this,

1. 1 make a config file  or use of mine as a template save it as whatever you’d like, I’ll call it  solo.conf
2. 2. Go to the directory where you have Bfgminer
3. 3 Save the Config File like bfg.conf using notepad.exe and saving as (all-files) not Txt document.  Do this AFTER modifing it to match your own settings
4. 4 Close and restart your bitcoin wallet, close and restart BFGminer.  To load your conf file into bfgminer use the following command in your batch file or the command prompt (now you no longer have to specify addresses nor settings in the prompt because they are stored on the conf file!)

5. c:\path\to\your\miner\bfgminer –conf=solo.conf

Interesting Facts:

I am running an Erupter setup with it mainly running solo – aka lottery 2.0  Seriously, that would be a million times better than actually buying lottery tickets many times over. As a bonus, I could use a rollover setup within another config file I’ve made for you so that it is easy to switch over every so often – using my sample file  which utilized the “rotate” : command  you can mine bitcoin as a solo attempt for 6 hours then switch to either a pool or even another sha altcoin if you wanted (repeat the same steps above for that coin’s version of the conf file and create another address – and make sure to keep it running!).  If you had only one backup pool listed then you could solo mine for 12 hours per day back and forth.  Another way is to split your power between pools using the quota modifier.  Taken Directly from the Bfgminer readme file:

Writing configuration files with quotas is likewise supported. To use the above
quotas in a configuration file they would be specified thus:

"pools" : [
        {
                "url" : "poolA:portA",
                "user" : "usernameA",
                "pass" : "passA"
        },
        {
                "quota" : "2;poolB:portB",
                "user" : "usernameB",
                "pass" : "passB"
        }
]

All in all this guide should help you get off the ground and running with solo mining.  Solo mining is definitely a risky endeavor as you could do everything right and still never yield anything – I feel that my block erupters are really a drop in the bucket and so I’m willing to sacrifice their earning power (even on mining alt-coins) to chance at a 25 BTC block reward.   If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them and I’ll shoot you a reply!

UPDATE:  I just read an interesting note on bitcointalk about compatibility issues using bitcoin .9.0.1 because of issues with the getwork protocol being removed/depreciated from the wallet.  I noticed that I myself am using an older version of armory with the older bitcoin QT base.  Perhaps this will be fixed in the future, I will keep readers updated with anything I find.