Sia-GPU-Miner

A GPU miner designed for mining siacoins. This miner runs in a command prompt and prints your hashrate along side the number of blocks you've mined. Most cards will see greatly increased hashrates by increasing the value of 'I' (default is 16, optimal is typically 20-25).

How to Use

1. Build the miner by running make.

2. Make sure you have a recent version of Sia installed and running.

3. Run the miner by running ./gpu-miner. It will mine blocks until killed with Ctrl-C.

Configuration

You can tweak the miner settings with five command-line arguments: -I, -C, -p, -d, and -P.

• -I controls the intensity. On each GPU call, the GPU will do 2^I hashes. The default value is low to prevent certain GPUs from crashing immediately at startup. Most cards will benefit substantially from increasing the value. The default is 16, but reccommended (for most cards) is 20-25.
• -C controls how frequently calls to siad are made. Reducing it substantially could cause instability to the miner. Increasing it will reduce the frequency at which the hashrate is updated. If a low 'I' is being used, a high 'C' should be used. As a rule of thumb, the hashrate should only be updating a few times per second. The default is 30.
• -p allows you to pick a platform. Default is the first platform (indexing from 0).
• -d allows you to pick which device to copmute on. Default is the first device (indexing from 0).
• -P changes the port that the miner makes API calls to. Use this if you configured Sia to be on a port other than the default. Default is 9980.

If you wanted to run the program on platform 0, device 1, with an intensity of 24, you would call ./sia-gpu-miner -d 1 -I 24

Multiple GPUs

Each instance of the miner can only point to a single GPU. To mine on multiple GPUs at the same time, you will need to run multiple instances of the miner and point each at a different gpu. Only one instance of 'siad' needs to be running, all of the miners can point to it.

It is highly recommended that you greatly increase the value of 'C' when using multiple miners. As a rule of thumb, the hashrate for each miner should be updating one time per [numGPUs] seconds. You should not mine with more than 6 cards at a time (per instance of siad).

Notes

• Each Sia block takes about 10 minutes to mine.
• Once a block is mined, Sia waits for 144 confirmation blocks before the reward is added to your wallet, which takes about 24 hours.
• Sia currently doesn't have any mining pools.
• Windows is poorly supported. For best results, use Linux when mining.