How to Mine Bitcoin Private: Complete Beginner’s Guide

Bitcoin Private is a long awaited cryptocurrency that takes the best of bitcoin, makes it about 4x faster, and adds Zcash’s privacy (zk-SNARKS) aspect to it. It is the first fork that involved two different coins, both Bitcoin and Zclassic (a fork of Zcash).

Holders of Bitcoin and Zclassic received a 1:1 ratio of BTCP. This means if you had 1 BTC and 2 ZCL before the fork, you would have received 3 BTCP. The fork occurred on February 28th, 2018 and the mainet launch was around March 2nd, 2018.

Here is a quick chart that the Bitcoin Private team made, comparing BTCP to other BTC forks

You can find out more about Bitcoin Private including wallets and how to claim it from the fork in our in-depth guide located here.

Now that we know the details about Bitcoin Private, lets get to mining some BTCP.

Some General Mining Tips

So before we start this tutorial, I have two tips for making the most out of your mining experience. First make sure you have the latest drivers for your GPU’s. Secondly, most mining software will get flagged as a virus from virus scanners. Because of this, if your mining on your normal everyday use or gaming computer that has an antivirus installed, you will want to exclude the mining software from the antivirus. What I like to do is I make one folder and then put all of my mining software in sub folders. I then exclude the top level folder from the antivirus and that excludes all the mining software.

Mining Pools

The first thing we need is a mining pool. You can solo mine, but the payouts could take months depending on how powerful your mining rig is, and the mining pools usually charge a very small fee (1% or less). Using a pool will allow you to receive consistent payouts, multiple times per day. The bitcoin private team has an official list of most of the mining pools on their website.

On the website there are four different categories. The official mining pool is run by the BTCP team, and all fees go to the development of the coin. Sponsored pools are verified and donate a portion of their fees to the BTCP team. Verified pools mean they have tested the pools and know they pay. Unverified means they have not been tested by the BTCP team.

For this tutorial we will use http://btcprivate.pro – a sponsored pool. I have chosen this pool because of their unique features. Their a larger pool, they have servers in US,EU and Asia, they charge 1% fees and donate half of their fees to the BTCP team, they have an API as well as a page to check and change your miners settings, and they have a custom payment threshold. This means you can bundle your payments into one payout per day, per week, or whenever you want!

Now that we have a pool, lets start mining.

CPU Mining

Their are only two options for mining Equihash using a CPU. One is Minergate, but I don’t prefer them because they take a large percentage of your profits because of the easy to use system they have. The only real miner is Nicehash’s nheqminer. You can download the precompiled binaries for Windows or Linux.

We will not focus on CPU mining since it is not profitable, compared to GPU mining.

GPU Mining – Nvidia

For GPU mining there are many programs for Nvidia, but the one I have found to be the best is EWBF’s CUDA miner. The miner does have a 2% Dev fee. The miner is compatible with Windows and Linux. You can find the official page and the download link at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1707546.0

Once downloaded, it is really simple to use.

Just create a new batch file (or script file if using Linux) inside the folder where the miner is and paste this into the batch file

miner --server miningpool --port port --user wallet_public_key.worker --pass x --pec

Replace “miningpool” with the server you want (eu.btcprivate.pro, us.btcprivate.pro, asia.btcprivate.pro)

Replace “port” with the port you want (2827 is the only option)

Replace “wallet_public_key” with your wallet address. Make sure you use the transparent address, it starts with a b and not the shielded address, it starts with a z

“Worker” is optional. Use this if you have multiple mining computers. For example I could do b1PR4MkpD5BpRu6BUbX1uCz9ptuPzjoY3FP.officecomputer for one computer and then b1PR4MkpD5BpRu6BUbX1uCz9ptuPzjoY3FP.gamingcomputer for another computer.

This way you can keep track of them on the pools dashboard.

Double click the batch file to run the miner, and you should see something like this

Where the red arrow is on the picture, this means the GPU’s it has detected. The blue arrow indicates the temperature and speed for each GPU as well as the total speed. The green arrow indicates the power usage for each GPU.

GPU Mining – AMD

For GPU mining there are many programs for AMD, but the one I have found to be the best is Claymore’s ZCash miner. The miner hash a 2.5% Dev fee, or a 2% Dev fee when using a SSL connection. You can find the official page and the download link at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1670733.0

If you need the Linux version get it at https://github.com/nanopool/ClaymoreZECMiner/releases

Once downloaded, it is really simple to use.

Just create a new batch file (or script file if using Linux) inside the folder where the miner is and paste this into the batch file

setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 1
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
ZecMiner64.exe -zpool miningpool:port -zwal wallet_public_key.worker -zpsw x -allpools 1 -i 8 -asm 1

If using Linux, remove all of the setx commands.

Replace “miningpool” with the server you want (eu.btcprivate.pro, us.btcprivate.pro, asia.btcprivate.pro)

Replace “port” with the port you want (2827 is the only option)

Replace “wallet_public_key” with your wallet address. Make sure you use the transparent address, it starts with a b and not the shielded address, it starts with a z

“Worker” is optional. Use this if you have multiple mining computers. For example I could do b1PR4MkpD5BpRu6BUbX1uCz9ptuPzjoY3FP.officecomputer and then b1PR4MkpD5BpRu6BUbX1uCz9ptuPzjoY3FP.gamingcomputer

This way you can keep track of them on the pools dashboard.

If you are running large GPU’s (1GB of memory or more per GPU, jump down to #5 under the problems section, even if the mining software appears to work)

Double click the batch file to run the miner, and you should see something like this

The first image shows that the miner should pickup all of the GPU’s in your system (The 3 Vega GPU’s in my example)

The next image shows The GPU temperatures and fan speed where the red arrow is, and the GPU speed and total speed where the blue arrow is.

If there are problems, you can try a few things.

• Use -asm 0 or don’t use the asm flag instead of using -asm 1. Note for Vega cards you have to use -asm 1 otherwise you will get an error.
• Try not using the setx commands. For Vega cards I got an openCL error before I used these options.
• If you get a invalid pool error try adding or removing the -allpools flag.
• If your miner crashes after a while try to lower the intensity by using -i 6 instead of -i 8
• You may not have enough virtual memory. You may need 16GB of virtual memory (for Vega GPU’s you need more like 16GB per GPU) to change this go to Control Panel -> System and Security -> System and the click Advanced system settings on the left. From their click settings under the advanced tab. Next click change, and then on the third screen, uncheck automatically manage, choose custom size, and type in the size (in MB) for both text boxes. Then press the set button, and then the Ok button.

General Troubleshooting

One thing to monitor for is stale or rejected shares. If you see a lot of stale shares, you may want to try a server that is closer to you. If you see a lot of rejected shares, try to lower the intensity of the miner if available.

How Much Bitcoin Private Will I Earn Per Day?

Usually to figure this out, you would go to http://whattomine.com and use their calculator. For example https://whattomine.com/coins/167-zcl-equihash you can type in your speed, power usage and electricity cost and see a rough estimate of how much ZCL you would mine in one day, as well as how much that is in USD.

Because BTCP was released last week there’s no calculator available yet. However, we can use a formula to determine a rough estimation.

block_reward / ((network_hash_rate/your_hash_rate*block_time) / (60*60*24)) * percentage

For BTCP we have:

• block_reward = 1.5625
• network_hash_rate = changes constantly. From the http://www.btcprivate.pro homepage image it showed 25.24Msol/s so we have to convert to sol/s so 24.25*1000*1000 = 24250000
• your_hash_rate = on the AMD system picture it shows about 1383
• block_time = 2.5 minutes but it is more like 3 minutes so 3*60 = 180 seconds
• percentage = would be 100% but we need to subtract the pool and miner software fee so 100-(1+2.5) = 96.5%

With our example we would get

1.5625 / ((24250000/1383*180) / (60*60*24)) * 96.5% = 0.041

So this means we would have a rough estimate of 0.041 BTCP per day.

That’s it. You should now be mining BTCP. Make sure to type in your public key into the mining pool’s dashboard, to keep track of your statistics, and to set your custom payout options.

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