[Eru]

For people who don't want to make a money donation, but want to contribute somehow to the shard, there's an alternate way to make donations that I'd like to try out, but I'll need some volunteers.

What you need:

• A graphics card (GPU)
  
• Windows Machine (for now)
  
• A computer that is online a lot preferably, but if not that's fine.

What you would be doing is running a bitcoin miner that is linked to a mining pool that I've set up for Imagine Nation. I'd provide the tools you'd need, then you'd just need to run the program and let it do its thing.

I don't want to get too technical, but basically, the program will use your graphics card's GPU to do a bunch of work which is required to keep the bitcoin network running, then in the process of performing these hashes, you are rewarded with bitcoins. Since we'll be using a mining pool, we'd be sharing all of our combined hash rates along with some other people to get a combined contribution.

So, after this runs for a while, bitcoins are accumulated in the account, which I can then transfer to USD via a bitcoin exchange site.

Granted, this isn't going to bring in as much as a good donation, but if you can't afford to donate and have a CPU, this is a good way to help out.

As an example of what this would produce, I just bought a brand new Sapphire Radeon 6950 at ~$250 US. According to the Bitcoin Mining Hardware Comparison page on the wiki, I'd average about 360.62 Mhash/sec.

If I plug that into the Bitcoin Mining Calculator, I get:

per Day ฿0.25 $0.99
per Week ฿1.73 $6.91
per Month ฿7.50 $29.99

So, I'd be generating about $30 per month for the shard if I never turned my computer off and didn't use my GPU for anything but Bitcoin mining. Not a lot of money, but every little bit helps if we'd like to see the server on a dedicated host, etc.

If anyone wants to volunteer to help test this out, please either post or PM me this information:

• Graphics Card (If more than one, then list them)
  
• Operating System
  
• Preferred Location to Run the Script From. (By default, I have it in the C:\ drive on my computer)

For fun, I'll be posting the top contributers on the page I'm working for for explaining this as an incentive. I'm still working on the script to mine the leader boards automatically.

[Eru]

We have our first beta tester! I'm working on getting a script that will list the leaderboard, but I'm having to learn new tricks to get it working.

[Brandon]

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_min...ia_GPUs.3F

[Eru]

How to Start Mining
OK, I think I've come up with a good method for this. Here's the download for the tools. (Very tiny)

http://in-uo.net/download/mINer.zip

You'll want to unzip the miner folder into the c:\ drive like this: c:\miner
If it's not unzipped there, it won't work unless you edit the .bat files to use the new path.

Inside, there are 8 files and you can ignore the .exe files since they can't be run by themselves. (hide.exe and bitcoin-miner.exe)

There are 6 batch (.bat) files; Three of them have " - hidden" in the file name. These hidden ones will open the process in the background if you don't want their window to show up.
Now, I would *never* imply adding these .bat files to other computers' startup folders to have them mine for you. That would be downright dishonest of me. But I can't stop you of course.

There are three options:
CPU+GPU : Will use 100% of your CPU and GPU and lag the crap out of your computer.
GPU Only : Uses GPU only and skips the CPU completely. Very little system lag unless you try playing a game that uses your graphics card.
CPU Only : Mostly useless since the CPU gives very low returns compared to the GPU and the CPU+GPU one will work for computers without a GPU, but I figured I'd include it.

To start mining, just run the appropriate batch file after making whatever modifications you need. ( :: is the comment syntax)

A really useful modifier is -t which lets you set the number of CPU threads/cores to use. So, if you have two, you could use -t 1 to only use half of the CPU.

• I usually run the CPU+GPU.bat file with only 1/2 of my processor cores running and I hardly notice a difference in system performance

By default all the .bat files are set up to mine as an anonymous user that I made: donations{at}in-uo.net_anon

If you run the batch files provided, you will mine anonymously and not show up on the leader boards I'm working on, so If you want your contributions to show up, right-click the .bat file, click "Edit" and replace the _anon with _yourname.

PM me or post here and I'll make a user for you. (There's an 8 character limit on username)

[Gatin]

Eru for what it? sl3 brutforce? or other brut?

[Eru]

Eru for what it? sl3 brutforce? or other brut?

[youtube]Um63OQz3bjo[/youtube]

[Eru]

Oh cool, theres a browser version too. I'll start running this while I'm at work.

http://www.bitcoinplus.com/generate?for=10166689

Apparently you can just leave that open and it generates. It's SUPER slow compared to the program I posted though. Like 10% as efficient if not less.
Also, you don't get credit for it in the statistics. :/

[kyleus3]

Everytime I open up the .bat file, it opens and then closes right away. Why?

[Eru]

Which one are you running? Also, the miner folder should be in the c:\ drive's root by default:

c:\miner\bitcoin-miner.exe

If it's not, it will fail.

You can try copying the command that's in the .bat file into a command prompt to see if it gives an error maybe.
Or, if you edit the .bat file and put "pause" at the end, that will at least make it pause before closing the .bat file.

[kyleus3]

got it working!

[Christina Thorn]

What did you do?

[kyleus3]

just place it into my C: directory as he said. (i had it on my desktop).

when you open it then it will be running by the clock.. to close it i had to task manager .