How to Mine Ethereum (ETH) with Nix

Update March 2021: Use ethminer 0.19 so that it is compatible with Cuda 11 and Nvidia Geforce RTX 30 series card.

Background

The price of cryptocurrency is soaring again recently, and as an owner of several Nvidia GPUs, I thought it would be fun to start mining them. After consulting my college roommate (who is an expert in cryptocurrency mining), he recommended mining ETH, which is the cryptocunrrency of the Ethereum.

Disclaimer: It is so damn hard to get Nvidia cards recently, and unfortunately this is not a guide on how to get one.

Once you get your Nvidia GPU, start mining is super simple with Nix. I think the monst important reason that prevents me from becoming a miner many years ago is how difficult it seems to deploy the miner. Had I known Nix then, I am probably already rich now (Stop day dreaming!).

Preparation

You need a wallet to store the mined ETH. I used to use MEW, and switched to a hardware wallet recently. you can choose whatever you like. The ETH in one wallet can be transferred to another wallet with no restriction (but with transaction fees).

A wallet here is basically a pair of private key and a public key. In mining you give the pool the public key so that the pool knows where to send the money (ETH) you earn to.

Run ethminer

The only thing you need is your GPU and a tool called ethminer. Compiling it from source is challenging if you are not familiar with C++ and CMake. The good news is that you don’t have too, because nixpkgs already have it! This means that installing it is as simple as putting it in your nix-shell or NixOS configuration, and profit (literally)!

environment.systemPackage = with pkgs; [
  ethminer
];

Once your have this added to your NixOS configuration (after nixos-rebuild switch) or when you are in your nix-shell, a single line command is all you need to start.

An example command looks like this

$ ethminer --farm-recheck 200 --cuda --pool stratum1+tcp://0x0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef01234567.MyAwesomeMiner@us2.ethermine.org:4444

To explain each parameter

1. --farm-recheck 200 is to set the interval (200 ms in this case) of checking with the server whether the problem your miner is solving right now has been marked as stale. Solving a stale problem does not generate profit.
2. --cuda tells the miner to use the CUDA + Nvidia GPU for mining
3. --pool stratum1+tcp://<your wallet>.<name of your worker>@us2.ethermine.org:4444 seems a little complicated, but it describes how to setup the wallet and the pool your are joining.
   • In this case, I am using ethermine.org’s US West server, with address us2.ethermine.org:4444.
   • You wallet’s public key (a sequence of hex hash) needs to be there as <your wallet>, so that the pool knows how to pay you.
   • <name of your worker> is just a name you give to this worker. This is to distinguish it from the others if you have multiple worker.

When the program runs scuccessfully, you will see logs on the screen similar to

Dec 20 11:47:58 samaritan ethminer-start[13097]:  m 11:47:58 .ethminer-wrapp 0:49 A23 31.72 Mh - cu0 31.72
Dec 20 11:47:58 samaritan ethminer-start[13097]:  i 11:47:58 .ethminer-wrapp Job: ad0d935e… block 11492204 us2.ethermine.org [172.65.226.101:4444]
Dec 20 11:48:01 samaritan ethminer-start[13097]:  i 11:48:01 .ethminer-wrapp Job: 058942cb… block 11492204 us2.ethermine.org [172.65.226.101:4444]
Dec 20 11:48:03 samaritan ethminer-start[13097]:  m 11:48:03 .ethminer-wrapp 0:49 A23 31.66 Mh - cu0 31.66
Dec 20 11:48:05 samaritan ethminer-start[13097]:  i 11:48:05 .ethminer-wrapp Job: c300a280… block 11492204 us2.ethermine.org [172.65.226.101:4444]
Dec 20 11:48:06 samaritan ethminer-start[13097]:  i 11:48:06 .ethminer-wrapp Job: 42ce69d5… block 11492205 us2.ethermine.org [172.65.226.101:4444]
Dec 20 11:48:07 samaritan ethminer-start[13097]:  i 11:48:07 .ethminer-wrapp Job: 5c997035… block 11492205 us2.ethermine.org [172.65.226.101:4444]
Dec 20 11:48:08 samaritan ethminer-start[13097]:  m 11:48:08 .ethminer-wrapp 0:49 A23 32.05 Mh - cu0 32.05
Dec 20 11:48:11 samaritan ethminer-start[13097]:  i 11:48:11 .ethminer-wrapp Job: 51424d25… block 11492205 us2.ethermine.org [172.65.226.101:4444]
Dec 20 11:48:13 samaritan ethminer-start[13097]:  m 11:48:13 .ethminer-wrapp 0:50 A23 31.96 Mh - cu0 31.96

Where the number 32.05 Mh is the hash rate. Just in case you are interested, 1080 Ti can get to 30ish Mh/s, while 3080 can get to 80ish Mh/s.

Once your miner is up and running, you can see how it performs by visiting https://ethermine.org/ and put your wallet address in the search bar.

Just kill the program if you want to use your GPU for some Gaming or training some neural network, and re-run the program after that.

If you only want to be able to manually run miner like this, you can stop reading here.

I have 30 series GPU and Cuda 11, what should I do?

In this case you’ll need to run ethminer 0.19 (while the one in the official nixpkgs is 0.18).

The mitgation is to write a derivation for 0.19 (I did not submit a pull request to nixpkgs because 0.19 is not considered a stable release yet). You can find my 0.19 derivation here. And to use it in your NixOS configuration, just add it in the overlay so that it overrides the official ethminer 0.18:

nixpkgs.overlays = [
    (self: super: {
      ethminer = self.callPackage ../pkgs/temp/ethminer {};
    })
];

You’ll need to replace ../pkgs/temp/ethminer with the actual path to the derivation .nix file you downloaded.

NixOS Service

If you are running NixOS, where this can be further simplified. Since nixpkgs alreayd have the ethminer service defined, you can just add the following to your NixOS configuration

  # Eth Mining
  services.ethminer = {
    enable = true;
    recheckInterval = 200;
    toolkit = "cuda";
    wallet = "0x0123456789abcdef0123456789abcedf0.my1080Ti";  # Your own wallet and worker name
    pool = "us2.ethermine.org";
    stratumPort = 4444;
    maxPower = 300;  # Use at most 300 Watts
    registerMail = "";
    rig = "";
  };

And after nixos-rebuild switch your service should be up and running with systemd! To temporarily stop it and resume it, do

systemctl stop ethminer.service

and

systemctl start ethminer.service

To check how its status

systemctl status ethminer.service

Enjoy mining!