Start Mining

This document describes a quick running guide for Miner

Generating account

Skip this section if you have a pre-created account in an external wallet. Please see this link for a guide to creating an account on Metamask.

You can improve account security by utilizing Clef, an external account management tool. See the Security topic for details.

Generating new account:

> personal.newAccount(YOUR_PASSWORD)

returns data that looks like:

INFO [08-06|21:33:36.241] Your new key was generated               address=0xb8C941069cC2B71B1a00dB15E6E00A200d387039
WARN [08-06|21:33:36.241] Please backup your key file!             path=/home/hskim/Documents/geth-test/keystore/UTC--2019-08-06T12-33-34.442823142Z--b8c941069cc2b71b1a00db15e6e00a200d387039
WARN [08-06|21:33:36.241] Please remember your password! 
"0xb8c941069cc2b71b1a00db15e6e00a200d387039"

Be careful not to forget your password!

personal.newAccount("YOUR_PASSWORD") returns your wallet address. The example above returned the wallet address "0xb8c941069cc2b71b1a00db15e6e00a200d387039".

You can check the list of currently added wallet addresses via the eth.accounts command.

> eth.accounts
["0xb8c941069cc2b71b1a00db15e6e00a200d387039"]

Mining

Check account's balance

Before mining, To calculate the amount of WLCs mined, you have to check current balance of miner's account. You can check the balance by the eth.getBalance("YOUR_ADDRESS") commands.

> eth.getBalance("0xb8c941069cc2b71b1a00db15e6e00a200d387039")
0

Or use

> eth.getBalance(eth.accounts[0])
0

First we have to set miner's address. For this, we will use 3 commands

• miner.setEtherbase(address)

  • It sets miner's address. Mining reward will be sent to this account

• miner.start(number of threads)

  • Start mining. You can set how many threads you will use. I will use 1 thread

  • If your CPU has enough core, you can use higher number. It will work faster.

• miner.stop()

  • Stop mining

GPU mining is not supported yet :(

Setting miner's address:

> miner.setEtherbase("0xb8c941069cc2b71b1a00db15e6e00a200d387039")
true

Starting mining:

> miner.start()
null
INFO [08-06|21:42:38.198] Updated mining threads                   threads=1
INFO [08-06|21:42:38.198] Transaction pool price threshold updated price=1000000000
null
> INFO [08-06|21:42:38.198] Commit new mining work                   number=1 sealhash=4bb421…3f463a uncles=0 txs=0 gas=0 fees=0 elapsed=325.066µs
INFO [08-06|21:42:40.752] Successfully sealed new block            number=1 sealhash=4bb421…3f463a hash=4b2b78…4808f6 elapsed=2.554s
INFO [08-06|21:42:40.752] 🔨 mined potential block                  number=1 hash=4b2b78…4808f6

.
.
.

INFO [08-06|21:42:56.174] 🔨 mined potential block                  number=9 hash=2faebb…8be693
INFO [08-06|21:42:56.174] Commit new mining work                   number=10 sealhash=384aa6…cb0596 uncles=0 txs=0 gas=0 fees=0 elapsed=179.463µs

Stopping mining:

> miner.stop()
null

After mining, check the amount of mined WLCs:

> eth.getBalance("0xb8c941069cc2b71b1a00db15e6e00a200d387039")
45000000000000000000

Exactly wei, not ether that 10^18 wei is equal to 1 WLC. wei is small unit of WLC like satoshi of bitcoin. In order to show the balance in ether use the below command.

> web3.fromWei(eth.getBalance("0xb8c941069cc2b71b1a00db15e6e00a200d387039"), "wlc")
45