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How does one program a Cryptocurrency Miner? Like XMRig XMR-Stak MinerGate etc.

preston
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You would first need to have a understanding of the concept of PoW. Simply put PoW is hashcash - a miner hashes the block they have created, incrementing a random "nonce" (number used once) until the resultant hash fulfills the "difficulty" requirements. The difficulty is a number that is calculated based on the time between the blocks over the last 2 weeks, it changes to keep blocks being made every 10 mins (ish). For a block to be accepted its hash must be under the difficulty value (and the block must be valid of course). Solo mining software works by polling the coins daemon for the block template (this contains all the highest fee transactions in some cases, in others you have to add them yourself) creating a "coinbase" transaction (a transaction which will pay you the reward once you find a valid block, this is appended to the top of the list of transactions) updating the merkle root of the transactions to include the new coinbase transaction and adding a nonce, you then hash this block - check if the hash fulfills the difficulty and if it doesn't then increment the nonce. The miner keeps doing this until: 1) The miner finds a block - in which case it sends the block to the daemon 2) A block is found by someone else, in which case the miner starts again (getting the new block template bla bla bla).

However most miners are pool miners - in this case the miner connects to a pool via the stratum+tcp protocol and requests a "job", a job is just a string the pool wants you to hash - the pool does the jb of creating the block to be hashed then splits up the task of hashing over all the miners connected. For example the pool might tell alice to hash the block with nonce 0 up to nonce 15,000 and bob to hash with nonce from 15,001 to 30,000, and so on. The pool miner then submits the result of the work. Once a miner finds a solution they tell the pool and the pool sends the block to the pools daemon, it tells the other miners to stop and start work on the new block. It then splits the reward to the miners based on how many jobs they completed - though the way in which this is done is out of the scope of this answer).

TLDR; You need to have a understanding of how PoW works, a understanding of what method you want to mine with (solo or pool), (if pool) you'll need to understand the tcp+stratum protocol and (if solo) you will need to understand the rpc of the coin you want to make a miner for. I would start by reading through basic and simple solominers, and then building one of your own. Then you can consider moving onto pool miners which are considerably more complicated. If you want your miner to work with GPUs (and most miners do) then you will need to understand common GPU interfaces for both NVIDIA (eg CUDA) and AMD.

I hope this helps and the best of luck and wishes regarding your adventure into the cryptoverse! Leo Cornelius

Leah Cornelius
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