Whitepaper - Ethereum Classic With Cover

Ethereum Classic Documentation, Release 0.1
1.6.3 CPU mining
You can use your computer’s central processing unit (CPU) to mine ether. This is no longer profitable, since GPU
miners are roughly two orders of magnitude more efficient. However, you can use CPU mining to mine on the
Morden testnet or a private chain for the purposes of creating the ether you need to test contracts and transactions
without spending your real ether on the live network.
Note: The testnet ether has no value other than using it for testing purposes (see Test Networks).
Using geth
When you start up your ethereum node with geth it is not mining by default. To start it in CPU mining mode, you
use the --mine command line option. The -minerthreads parameter can be used to set the number parallel
mining threads (defaulting to the total number of processor cores).
geth --mine --minerthreads=4
You can also start and stop CPU mining at runtime using the console. miner.start takes an optional parameter
for the number of miner threads.
> miner.start(8)
true
> miner.stop()
true
Note that mining for real ether only makes sense if you are in sync with the network (since you mine on top of
the consensus block). Therefore the eth blockchain downloader/synchroniser will delay mining until syncing is
complete, and after that mining automatically starts unless you cancel your intention with miner.stop().
In order to earn ether you must have your etherbase (or coinbase) address set. This etherbase defaults to your
primary account. If you don’t have an etherbase address, then geth --mine will not start up.
You can set your etherbase on the command line:
geth --etherbase 1 --mine 2>> geth.log // 1 is index: second account by creation order OR
geth --etherbase '0xa4d8e9cae4d04b093aac82e6cd355b6b963fb7ff' --mine 2>> geth.log
You can reset your etherbase on the console too:
miner.setEtherbase(eth.accounts[2])
Note that your etherbase does not need to be an address of a local account, just an existing one.
There is an option to add extra Data (32 bytes only) to your mined blocks. By convention this is interpreted as a
unicode string, so you can set your short vanity tag.
miner.setExtra("ΞTHΞSPHΞΞ")
...
debug.printBlock(131805)
BLOCK(be465b020fdbedc4063756f0912b5a89bbb4735bd1d1df84363e05ade0195cb1): Size: 531.00 B TD: 643485
NoNonce: ee48752c3a0bfe3d85339451a5f3f411c21c8170353e450985e1faab0a9ac4cc
Header:
[
...
...
}
Coinbase:
Number: 131805
Extra:
ΞTHΞSPHΞΞ
a4d8e9cae4d04b093aac82e6cd355b6b963fb7ff
You can check your hashrate with miner.hashrate, the result is in H/s (Hash operations per second).
1.6. Mining 67