Step by step guide on how to mine Ravencoin using Ravenminer.com and Nanominer

A lot of people were asking me to provide info on my mining set up so I thought it would be easier to just post a walk through vs. responding individually. Before I dive in, I want to point out that Ravenminer.com has the lowest payout threshold vs. all other mining pools I have mined with (will get into more detail later). I also would recommend that you only mine on a desktop pc with at least a 4gb GPU, though 8gb and up provide better hashrates. Mining on a laptop can completely destroy the computer because of the power consumption and heat mining generates on the graphics card. It will fry the internal components. I am not going to talk about laptop cooling methods here because I don’t want to be responsible for equipment damage if it doesn’t work but will just caution to mine at your own risk if using a laptop. First, here is what you need to start mining and more specifically with Nanominer/Ravenminer.com. The whole process below should take a total of 10-15 mins to do.

1.) The very first thing you will need is a wallet that supports Ravencoin. I personally use Atomic Wallet, which was really easy to set up and free from the iPhone App Store. Once you download and install the wallet, set it up and obviously make sure you take note of your seed phrase in case you ever need to recover your wallet (say if you lost your phone or get a new one).

After you set up your wallet (using Atomic wallet), search for Ravencoin on the wallet tab. If you tap on RVN, it should bring you into your Raven wallet and from there you can find your “receive” address by tapping on the “RECEIVE” button at the bottom. This address will be important later. I recommend copying the address (just tap on it and it auto-copies) and emailing it to yourself so you can just copy and paste it without error later on when we get to setting up Nanominer.

2.) Next step, go to Ravenminer.com. At the top menu bar of the website, go to the “How To” tab first and just get quickly educated on the payout structure and other basic overview. From there, go to the “kawPow” tab and click the link for nanominer (should be second link). This will bring you to the bitcointalk.org site. In the list they have towards the top of the page, click the link next to “Download version for Windows” (or Linux if that is the OS you are running) and this should start the download for the program to your PC.

3.) We are almost fully ready to go just a couple of quick final steps to finish out. Ok, so now that you have downloaded nanominer as a zip file, you need to open the folder. If for whatever reason the folder didn’t automatically open after downloading, go into your windows explorer folder, then to downloads, and you should see it there. You may have to turn off anti-virus software in order to download this because it is technically considered malware even though it isn’t. As far as I know, you aren’t going to get any viruses or trojan zombie miners on your machine.

After you open the folder, you will need to extract the files to be able to use them. Before you extract, I recommend creating a new folder on your desktop called nanominer so when you go to extract the files, you can set the extraction point to that new folder for easy access. Ok, almost there… Now that you have extracted everything, right click on the file called Config. This is the brains of the program and tells the .exe file what to mine, where to mine it from, where to send the payouts from your mining activity, and if you want to get really technical there are other settings you can code in if you wanted to for memclock etc. but that isn’t relevant for the purposes of this tutorial.

Focusing on the Config file and the necessary inputs you need to get mining…So right click on the config file and select “Edit”, which will open it as a .txt file (it is really an .ini file but notepad is the editing program you need to be in). The file is going to have a readme that you can ignore and there will also be a random wallet address hanging out there. Put a semi-colon (;) at the beginning of that so the program ignores that address otherwise it could confuse the program with where the payout needs to go. You can also just delete it. From there, here is the code info you need to add under the readme comments (can just copy and paste exactly as-is):

noLog=true memTweak=0 [Kawpow] wallet=PASTE THE WALLET ADDRESS THAT YOU EMAILED YOURSELF HERE coin=rvn rigPassword=pps rigName=worker1 pool1=stratum.ravenminer.com:3838 webPort=-3333

Here is the key difference for mining PPLNS vs mining PPS on Ravenminer. Notice the “rigPassword” line has pps. If you were to exclude the “rigPassword=pps” command, then you will automatically mine with the collective pool. But by adding this, you effectively are solo mining and with that you will see a payout hit every 10 minutes. Ravenminer.com has a minimum payout of 5 RVN so once you accumulate at least 5 RVN the coins will be sent to your wallet that you input and then it resets until you hit at least 5 RVN over the next cycle. They also have a payout countdown clock so if you hit 5 RVN, you will be able to see when you can expect the coins to be transferred to your wallet.

Ok, last and final step, save the file (DO NOT RENAME IT JUST SAVE) and close out of it. Now, find Nanominer towards the bottom of the folder and click it to start running the miner. It should start up and begin mining. It usually takes a minute to fire up the GPU and start flashing shares found (will be a green line of text letting you know a share was found and if it was accepted). This is how you know it is working. It will also give feedback on your mh/s as well as fan speed and GPU temp. Before, I mentioned you can add in other commands to the above config inputs…they would show up with these reads if you had a need to drop that stuff in. You can find out more about those in the readme at the bottom of the main folder you are housing the nanominer files in. From there, go back to Ravenminer.com and on the “Pool” page there is an address search field on the left hand side where you can drop your wallet address into. Give it about 10 minutes and the pool should recognize your address and display your rig dashboard including your mh/s averages, payout details, pending payouts, and then payout totals accumulated for the last 90 days. If you are mining PPS, then all of your payout details will be towards the bottom right side of the page. If you are pool mining, your PPLNS info will be right above that section. Good luck and let me know if you have any issues!