This post is a guide/setup part of our Mining cryptocurrencies in 2019 on a VPS article. We will move through the steps you need to take in order to start mining Gridcoin on your new Ubuntu VPS.

Please note that software versions may change, so this guide might be outdated. Also note that we do not encourage anyone to mine cryptocurrencies, and to mine at the places where we ran our tests. The difficulty of mining cryptocurrencies and their prices are always changing.

What is Gridcoin?

Gridcoin is a PoR distributed computing platform, denoted by GRC. Unlike other coins, which use PoS (Proof of Stake), or PoW (Proof of Work), Gridcoin uses PoR (Proof of Research). PoR is similar to PoW, however, your computing power is used for a noble cause. In the case of Gridcoin, this is on Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

Gridcoin Faucet

Gridcoin faucets give you a small amount of GRC for completing tasks. However, these don’t tend to be worth your time. In this guide, you’ll find out how to mine Gridcoin, which can help you generate passive profits. We will be showing it to you with a VPS, but you can do the same steps with a local system. The only faucet working right now is https://gridcoin.ch/faucet.

Gridcoin Staking

Alongside PoR, Gridcoin also uses PoS. You are awarded as your wallet finds new blocks. To be able to earn this interest you have to have your wallet running. The more coins your wallet contains that can stake the easier it is to find a new block but all this is not going to happen unless your wallet is running. You can learn more about how you can do this here.

How to Mine Gridcoin

With the all of that out of the way, let’s learn how to mine Gridcoin. To start off you will need a VPS running Ubuntu 18.XX. Version 14.XX onwards should also work, but we can’t guarantee it.

Once you’ve set up your VPS run the following code:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This will upgrade your software to the latest stable version.

Before you start mining, set up an account on the grcpool site.

After that’s done we need to install BOINC on our server, to start mining some Gridcoin. Use the following code to do so:

sudo apt-get install boinc

If this is finished BOINC is now successfully installed. For the BOINC command, you can type in

boinccmd --help

The next step is to connect the running BOINC client to your grcpool account. You can do this by typing the below. Make sure you add your own details.

boinccmd --join_acct_mgr https://www.grcpool.com /YOURGRCPOOLACCOUNTNAME/ /YOURGRCPOOLPASSWORD/

If this is successful you will be able to see your Ubuntu server on the grcpool website under the Hosts option. You can find it by clicking on your account name on the top right and on the hosts tab after logging in.

If you click on your server that you want to add, you can choose from a running project that you want to contribute to. After this, you need to synchronize your client with the grcpool servers. To do this you simply need to run the below.

boinccmd --acct_mgr sync

Lastly, to check the state of the client, type the following.

boinccmd --get_state

There you can see the general state of the client and the current projects and tasks.

Connecting to BOINC manager

Now you need to link this with a running BOINC manager to actually start working on the joined project and mine some Gridcoin.

For this, you need to edit two files, where you can configure where can you access the BOINC client from and with what password. For this, you need to go to the appropriate folder with the following commands.

cd /var/lib/boinc-client

Now we need to edit the config files to be able to do this.

sudo vi gui_rpc_auth.cfg
sudo vi remote_hosts.cfg

In the first file, you need to add the password that you want to use. And you need to add the IP address of your computer that the BOINC manager is running on.

If you never used vi you can save and quit from it by pressing ‘ESC’ ‘:’ ‘W’ ‘Q’ ‘Enter’ .

This can be your PC that you access your remote server from. If you don’t know your address you can find out on the whatsmyipaddress.com site. For these changes to take effect you need to restart the BOINC client on your remote server by using the following command.

sudo /etc/init.d/boinc-client restart

You may need to open port 31416 for this step on your firewall.

Now you can open the BOINC manager on your PC and connect to the client. Click on File->Select Computer, add the server’s IP address to the Host Name field, and the password that you set. Once connected you can see the running projects under the Projects tab.

The status will probably state that initialization is pending at this point. In the computing preferences, you can set additional parameters. If this server is always running and will be only used for this you want to un-check the suspend-when-computer-in-use and suspend-when-non-BOINC-CPU-usage-is-above-x%.

Now you can synchronize again with the pool, by using the command line or going to Tools->Synchronize-with-grcpool.com. After this check on the grcpool website under Hosts. If there are any unsolved problems left you will see an error sign next to the host or next to the projects inside the host setting. If you open the BOINC manager you will see the running Tasks on the client and the progress made.

You can check the magnitude and estimated daily GRC on the grcpool site. Be patient, it takes a while to update.

Congratulations you now have a running Ubuntu server mining Gridcoin!

Check out the official tutorial made by Gridcoin.

AWS setup:

Additional setup steps in case of AWS GPU accelerated servers: (Make sure to check the latest driver version available)

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get upgrade -y linux-aws
sudo apt-get install -y gcc make linux-headers-$(uname -r)
sudo reboot

wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/tesla/410.79/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-410.79.run
sudo /bin/sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-410.79.run
sudo reboot

From here on you can continue with installing BOINC on your server. 

Recap

Now you should be mining Gridcoin. If you’ve had any problems with setting up the procedure, then let us know in the comments. Now go and mine GRC!