I didn’t quite believe that mining crypto currencies is viable as an individual, until I saw the news that AMD graphics cards were sold out because they’re good at mining Ethereum. To be convinced I tried to order AMD RX 570 from some online vendors, and they all cancelled my orders and refunded me shortly.

So even if I wanted to mine Ethereum I will have to wait indefinitely for the AMD cards to be re-stocked. At least I can buy some NVidia GTX 1070 cards and mine ZCash instead, before NVidia cards are sold out.

Here’s how to mine ZCash with NVidia cards on Ubuntu.

First, you need a wallet so I can receive payments, if there will be any.  It’s quite easy to install zcash on Arch Linux(because I run Arch on my laptop):

sudo pacman -S zcash
mkdir .zcash
echo "addnode=mainnet.z.cash" >~/.zcash/zcash.conf
echo "rpcuser=<your user>" >>~/.zcash/zcash.conf
echo "rpcpassword=`head -c 32 /dev/urandom | base64`" >>~/.zcash/zcash.conf

For other operating systems, see https://z.cash/download.html

Then you can download the bootstrap data with

zcash-fetch-params

It will download about 800MB, after finished, you can start your wallet with

zcashd

When it’s running, you can use zcash-cli command to create your wallet:

zcash-cli getnewaddress

There will be a long hash started with ‘t’, which is a transparent address, with which you can send and receive zcash. You don’t have to run your wallet and your miner on the same machine, but your miner will use the t address(you will get paid to your wallet).

Now onto your miner machine. You will need to install some dependencies for the miner:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-opencl-dev nvidia-375

System needs to be restarted to load the driver. You can load the driver without restarting too, eg. sudo modprobe nvidia-375. Then you can follow the post below to use the miner:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1707546.0

🙂