Garlicoin has recently gone crazy on Reddit thanks to the meme and a user called DigitalizedOrange stating he’d create a coin if his post got enough upvotes. That was last month and this week Garlicoin went live.
I fancied mining some of the coin, more for shits and giggles than anything. I mined BTC long ago, then Dogecoin with GPU and ASIC miners, and when that all turned non profitable I stopped and got into margin trading the BTC on various exchanges. I look back on the days of mining Doge with fondness since the community rallied together to sponsor various projects, including getting the Jamaican Bobsled team to the 2012 Sochi Winter Olympics. We also sponsored a Nascar (the Dogecar) driven by Josh Wise, and we bought socks for the homeless. These were good times, Doge had value, was easy to mine, and much fun was had. Unfortunately since the merging with Litecoin Doge is pretty much unprofitable to mine and doesn’t have a huge value on the exchanges. So when Garlicoin came along I thought I’d start mining again, with such fond memories of Doge.
I fired up my old I5 gaming rig, barely used for three years since I bought an XBone and proceeded to set it work to mine garlicoin.
Firstly I needed a wallet, so set up Garlium. I never have trusted online wallets and Garlium is based on the popular Electrum BTC wallet, with a simple phrase you can backup and restore your coins.
Download Garlium in either zipr or installer from here and install. I struggled with installing on a Mac so settled for my Win10 machine. Enter a password for your wallet, write down your seed, and I mean write down, not copy/paste/screenshot. Re-enter your seed.
The wallet should connect and start syncing, if it doesn’t then click Tools – Network – Server. Untick the “Select server automatically” and enter electrum.garlicsoup.xyz and 50002, tap enter.
Reopen Tools – Network – Overview, right click on the electrum.garlicsoup.xyz address and click “Use as server” then click close. Next close and restart Garlium and it should start to sync.
So now to mine. Firstly, I’m mining with GPU in a pool. My pc is pretty crap by mining standards so I’m not expecting much and just doing it to support the network and earn a few coins for shits and giggles.
Pool mining or solo mining you ask! There’s an easy way to describe the differences. Imagine buying a lottery ticket, just one. You’ve got that tiny margin of winning. So in mining terms your solo miner is trying to mine a block, and if it does, it wins a reward. But if you and all your mates buy a lottery ticket each and go in together, then the likelihood of one of you winning is higher. This is the same analogy as pool mining. Your miner works collectively with a shed load of other miners and if one of you mines a block then you all share the reward.
So with that in mind I’m using GPU mining on a pool and as my CPU is fairly shit I’m mining that solo. So if I find a block happy days, if not then I’m not wasting much hashing power.
Setting up SGMiner for AMD GPU pool mining. If you have an Nvidia card then follow this instead.
Download sgminer from here and extract to somewhere like c:\garlic. Right click on the GARLICOIN.bat and click edit.
Enter this into your .bat file. Changing the address to an address from your Garlium receiving tab.
@echo off color 02 setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0 setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100 setx GPU_MAX_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100 setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100 setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1 sgminer --algorithm scrypt-n --nfactor 11 -o stratum+tcp://us.pool.garlicsoup.xyz:3333 -u GYx2i5QFnJkLoczYJHWYjeyp6GBETJmWNZ -p x -I 15 pause
Save and exit. Then double click and you’re away! I’d set the fans manually.
You can see from this screenshot how hot the GPU is. Press G for graphic card settings, then C for change settings and F for fan. I sit my fan at 75% and it brings the GPU to around 80deg.
Hopefully your mining away.
Setting up solo CPU mining
You need to make your miner think it’s mining to a pool location so you need to run a Network on the pc first to solo mine. If your pool cpu mining you don’t need to do this.
You need to follow the first part of this tutorial to make the network run. Download the wallet file and the binaries, put them all in the same folder, and run the file Run-Network.bat. You need this running at all times if you’re solo mining.
Now the cpu miner.
Download the AMD cpu miner from here and is extract somewhere. Download the binaries from here and move all the contents and sub folder contents into the same dir as the miner.
Right click on the solo miner and click edit. Change your recieving address to one from Garlium wallet, close and save. Then double click and it should start mining. If you get some errors of:
json_rpc_call failed, retry after 10 seconds
Then just walk away for ten mins, it should sort itself by the time you come back.
Keep an eye on all your temps, make sure your fans are on max, perhaps even open side of the pc and enjoy some homemade garlicoin!
If this has helped, feel free to donate:
Garlicoin: GPEbTFyUC5fZwsrmiP52qmYyRMca2CdRhr
