Why Mine Dogecoin? Why Not?

First need to download the dogecoin core wallet. This will download and keep in sync the full blockchain. Currently at ~57GB in size.

I launched it with dogecoin-qt and configured it to put my dogcoin data at ~/dogecoin. This took 8 or so hours to download all the blocks.

After downloading all the blocks I finally found this redit post which explained how to configure the dogecoin core client to accept rpc connections.

I created the following file in ~/dogcoin:

$ cat dogecoin.conf 
rpcuser=[any string]
rpcpassword=[any string]
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
rpcport=9991
server=1
listen=1
daemon=1

After this I downloaded and complied cpuminer from github.

This was a bit of an hassle. I needed to install libcurl4-openssl-dev and run ./autogen.sh after this it was a old school ./configure && make to build.

This produced a minerd binary which I executed via:

$ ./minerd -a scrypt -u [any string] -p [any string] -o http://127.0.0.1:9991 --coinbase-addr=DSJMoWdW6cGZn9CGgnqYk8Nde555nnXbaU
[2021-12-18 10:09:54] Binding thread 2 to cpu 2
[2021-12-18 10:09:54] Binding thread 0 to cpu 0
[2021-12-18 10:09:54] Binding thread 1 to cpu 1
[2021-12-18 10:09:54] Binding thread 4 to cpu 4
[2021-12-18 10:09:54] Binding thread 5 to cpu 5
[2021-12-18 10:09:54] 6 miner threads started, using 'scrypt' algorithm.
[2021-12-18 10:09:54] Binding thread 3 to cpu 3
[2021-12-18 10:09:54] Long-polling activated for http://127.0.0.1:9991
[2021-12-18 10:09:55] thread 4: 4104 hashes, 7.00 khash/s

I determined the coinbase address by going into the wallet File -> “Much Receiving Addresses” and extracted the address from there.

This ran at a very slow rate (as expected) because its a CPU miner:

[2021-12-18 10:12:56] LONGPOLL pushed new work
[2021-12-18 10:12:56] thread 4: 24576 hashes, 6.85 khash/s
[2021-12-18 10:12:56] thread 5: 23268 hashes, 6.48 khash/s
[2021-12-18 10:12:56] thread 3: 23316 hashes, 6.50 khash/s
[2021-12-18 10:12:56] thread 0: 23820 hashes, 6.63 khash/s
[2021-12-18 10:12:56] thread 1: 24084 hashes, 6.71 khash/s
[2021-12-18 10:12:56] thread 2: 24396 hashes, 6.79 khash/s

6.5 * 1000 * 6 = 39,000 Hashes a second. Given the current network hashrate of 291,961,582,495,386 H/s its less then powerball odds that I would discover any given block making this a total waste of energy…