Mining Ethereum using Windows 10 and a GTX 1080

If you are into cryptocurrencies probably you already know about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency and the most popular, but it’s not the only one, there are more. Some of them are only simple (and bad) Bitcoin copies, but others are innovating by incorporating new technology like smart contracts, like Ethereum.

Nobody knows if those cryptocurrencies are going to prevail in the future as a form of payment, or if they are just speculative investments, but nobody can question that their popularity is rising. Even AMD and Nvidia are planning to create specialized products for mining cryptocurrencies.

Speaking of mining, if you are one of those gamers with a expensive GPU, for example a GTX 1080, your card can be used to obtain some Ethers right now.

Do you want to know how? Keep reading.

Like always, our first step is downloading all the software we need. Let’s start by the downloading the latest Nvidia Drivers (382.53 right now) and the Cuda Toolkit (8.0.61 at the time of writing). Once we are finished downloading and installing these prerequisites, we can continue downloading the mining software.

For mining there are various alternatives, but for me the easiest to use is Genoil. The software can be downloaded from github too, here is a link to the zip file. Extract the contents of the zip file to a folder but don’t execute it yet.

Again here we have to choose between solo mining or mining in a pool with other people. In this tutorial we are going to mine using a pool, because we don’t have to keep running the Ethereum software all the time and the setup is less complicated. There are a lot of pools, but keep in mind that all of them charge a fee for using them. Mining in a pool gives us a more predictable incoming rate as well, allowing us to calculate the profitability.

An easy to setup pool is nanopool, we only need to obtain an Ethereum address and change some parameters in the start.bat file to start mining.

For getting an address go to https://www.myetherwallet.com/ and generate a Wallet, store in a safe place the generated file and your password, you will need both to spend your Ethers. The address is like a public key, for example a valid address is: 0x1CD2bb2c119F607F03E0C34FBeEdE2cC65A25baE and it’s used for receiving payments.

Now that we have the address let’s edit the bat file it should look like the following (replace the address with your own address):

REM setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
REM setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
REM setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
REM setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
REM setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

REM ethminer.exe -G -S europe1.ethereum.miningpoolhub.com:20535 -O Genoil.home:home
ethminer.exe -G -F http://eth-eu1.nanopool.org:8888/0x1CD2bb2c119F607F03E0C34FBeEdE2cC65A25baE/myminer/[email protected]

Once done, double click on the bat file and the mining process will be started. You must left the black window open as long as you want the mining process to continue, close it when you are done. For example seems like a good idea to close it if you are going to play, and open it when you are finished playing.

If you want to check your profit go to the following address (Replacing it with your own value): https://eth.nanopool.org/account/0x1CD2bb2c119F607F03E0C34FBeEdE2cC65A25baE . The address while only be valid after a while so be patient.

The Ethers will be transferred to your wallet each time you accumulate 0.02 Ethers by default (it can be configured on the setting button).

Enjoy your Ethers!.