Novacoin NVC mining guide, cpu

Step 1: Novacoin NVC CPU mining

Firstly, I have to warn you that Novacoin is considered to be a scam by many people, this due to pre-mined coins by it’s creator which he can sell at any time to make profit. However, the Novacoin exchange rate is higher then Litecoin making Novacoin more profitable to mine under some circumstances. As long as you exchange your Novacoin to Bitcoin there is no big risk. I disadvise you to keep large numbers of NVC due to the risk of the value dropping fast.

This guide will show you how to get started with Novacoin CPU mining. If anything is unclear in this guide please leave a comment about it. You’ll want to start with pooled mining as solo mining is not very viable anymore.  The difficulty of the network is too high to effectively solo mine with a single computer. It’ll take a very long time to get a single block of 50 NVC. I suggest you skip to step 2 for pooled mining. However, for people with access to many computers I’ll leave the basics of solo mining in this guide and you can continue reading.

If you want to do solo-mining you’ll need to have the Novacoin client installed and configured. You can download the Novacoin client here, if you are running windows look for the latest .exe file as this is the easiest way to install the client.

After you installed the Novacoin client it will have to catch up with the network first before you can start mining as you can see in the image below.

Once the client is done synchronizing with the network (this can take some time) you’ll have to get a cpu miner.

In order for the Novacoin client to support mining you’ll have to create an ini file in the %appdata%\novacoin folder. To get to this folder click your start button (start->run for Windows XP) and type in %appdata%\novacoin

Now right click in the folder (not on a file or directory) and goto New->Text Document

Rename it to novacoin.conf

Now you should get this pop-up as you’re trying to change the extension of a .txt file to .conf. Click Yes.

If you don’t get the above pop-up you’ll have to switch off “Hide extensions for known file types”. In Vista/Windows7 you can find this by pressing ALT once and then going to the Tools->Folder options menu. In Windows XP this menu should be visible without pressing ALT.

After this, remove the .txt from the filename so the full name becomes novacoin.conf.

Now open novacoin.conf and insert this information:

You should change the username and password for safety, even though you’re only allowing the localhost here trojans and mallware ect. could easily access your wallet if you have the standard username/password.

Step 2:

The fastest cpu miner out there is currently pooler’s cpu miner, you can download the appropriate version from one of the links below.

Windows 32 bits Version 2.23
Windows 64 bitsVersion 2.22
Linux 32 bits Version 2.2.3
Linux 64 bits Version 2.2.3
Macintosh 32 bits Version 2.1.2
Macintosh 64 bits Version 2.2.2

Extracting the zip file should give you the following files:

(to make it easier to launch I extracted the files to c:\novacoin\)

Step 3: Setting up the mining pool

If you are solo mining you can skip this and proceed to step 4.

In order to mine with a pool you’ll have to register an account. I will be using the khore mining pool in this guide.

Go to http://nvc.khore.org/register

Now log in with your newly created account at http://nvc.khore.org/

Next, go to your username and review your worker, there is no need to make one as on is created by default.

Here you should see that a default worker is already created, in this case with the username Cryptocur.1 and the password being x.

Step 4: Starting with mining

To start mining you have to use the following command, I prefer to run it from cmd so I can see any error might it occur. The number after -t stands for the amount of threads, I advise to set one for each core your cpu has, if it has hyperthreading you can see the virtual cores as normal ones also, there will be a small performance gain. The miner is set to low priority by default so it shouldn’t slowdown your computer.

For pooled mining: c:\nvcminer\minerd -a scrypt -r 1 -t 4 -s 6 -o http://pool-nvc.khore.org:9332 -O Cryptocur.1:x

For solo mining: c:\nvcminer\minerd -a scrypt -r 1 -t 4 -s 6 -o http://127.0.0.1:7332 -O username:password

For solo mining, if you have more computers, just follow step 2 and replace the ip (127.0.0.1) with the ip of your computer in the command to the computer running the novacoin client. This way you can connect a whole network of computers to mine on your wallet. Also make sure to change rpcallowip in your novacoin.conf file to allow the other computers in your network. This can be 192.168.1.0 for example to allow all computers in the 192.168.1.x range.

Here you can see the miner running, it shows the performance per thread, in this case 4 and the total hashrate when your first work is accepted. Here I’m mining at 34.17 khash/s.

If everything is running smoothly you can create shortcuts on your desktop by just right clicking your desktop and going to New->Shortcut

Now just paste the commands in there and create the shortcut

Now you should easily be able to start mining with your cpu from your desktop.

You should be mining by now! Anything missing or any questions? Leave a comment below. If you want more hashing power the Radeon 7950 is currently the most energy efficient card, you can find a lot of them on sale here.

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