WebDollar has recently deployed the 'fast loading' block chain. Gone are the days where it took an hour to load and used 8gb+ of RAM. Now it only takes 30 seconds and less than 2gb RAM!
All of this means that solo mining is available to more people than ever, without expensive hardware upgrades or time spent waiting for the block chain to load.
First things first, this doesn't mean you should jump from mining in a pool to going solo just because you can, Solo mining will only suit those people with a very high hash rate in the Proof of Work rounds (probably those who already used solo mining anyway) or those who have many millions of WebD to mine in the Proof of Stake rounds. If you are curious there is no harm in trying it, after all you can switch back to mining in a pool very easily.
Installing the Miner
Firstly you'll need to have installed the terminal miner. You've probably already done this, but if you haven't we'll have a guide for this really soon. For now you can check out the GitHub Tutorials.
Importing your Wallet
If you've previously been mining in the browser, you'll want to import your wallet into the terminal miner. If you're not sure how to do this, check out our 'How to Import an existing wallet into the Terminal Miner' article.
Downloading the Block Chain
It goes without saying that your miner should be stopped before you begin.
At the time of writing it isn't possible to download the whole fast loading block chain direct from the network. To get around this, a backup of the block chain is provided, which is updated every 30 minutes, and can be downloaded in a compressed folder.
The first thing we need to check is that there isn't an existing copy of the block chain on your terminal miner. To do this issue the following command in your WebDollar node folder (in this case, Node-WebDollar1):
dir
As you can see from the output, there is an existing folder called blockchainDB3 in the directory. We need to empty this folder before we continue.
The easiest way to do this is to simply delete the folder using the following command:
rm -r blockchainDB3
Now we want to create the folder again:
mkdir blockchainDB3
Just to be sure it's empty, let's move into the folder and check it:
cd blockchainDB3
dir
As you can see the dir command has returned null (or nothing) so we can be confident the folder is now empty.
Whilst still in the blockchainDB3 folder, we are going to download the compressed file:
wget https://webd-blockchain.ddns.net:9001/blockchainDB3.tar.gz
Now the progress of the file download will be shown. Note that other download locations are listed here. Once completed, we need to extract the compressed file using the following command:
tar -zxvf blockchainDB3.tar.gz -C .
You will see a number of .ldb and .log files being extracted and, after a few minutes, it should complete.
Starting the Miner
Next we need to step back to the Node-WebDollar folder and open the menu. So you can keep the miner running when you exit your terminal window, you should use screen:
cd ..
screen
At this point screen will load, and you may need to press enter to be brought back to the command line. Now you can continue to open the menu:
npm run commands
If your wallet is encrypted with a 12 word password, you will need to unlock it before you can continue. To do so use menu option 30, then type your password:
30
*Type Password*
Check to ensure you get the 'Mining Address Ready' message before you proceed.
Next we need to tell the miner that we want to go solo, to do this we will use menu option 8:
8
Now the miner will start. The key output to look for to ensure you are loading the virtualised block chain is:
If you see this message and get no errors, you are nearly there! You will see some output from the terminal such as the ones shown below:
Finally, you'll want to see that you're connected, the number of blocks is up to date, and your wallet balance is correct:
Great work! If you've reached this point and you don't have any errors you can be confident that you're mining away solo!
In order to exit your terminal window, but keep the miner running in screen, exit with the two following commands:
CTRL + A
CTRL + D
When you want to return to your miner, log into your terminal as normal then issue the following command:
screen -r
If you're like me and want to keep an eye on things, just log in from time to time and check everything is ok!
Bear in mind that it could take days before you find your first block, depending on your hashing power and the amount of WebD your are staking.
Thanks for reading, we hope you found it useful!
If you did, send a few WebD our way: WEBD$gD##@7S@F+ki$XiMX44GFLK7WcNpHu$W4T$