This guide will show you how to mine Kaspa coin on a standard Windows PC. Kaspa is a reasonably new cryptocurrency released in 2022 that has gained much attention among miners as a profitable coin. This cryptocurrency is PoW crypto designed explicitly for the GPU community.
What is Kaspa Coin ($KAS)?
Kaspa is a cryptocurrency that utilizes the GHOSTDAG protocol as its underlying consensus mechanism. In contrast to traditional blockchain architectures, GHOSTDAG allows for the coexistence of parallel blocks without orphaning them, thereby enabling their inclusion in consensus ordering. The Kaspa network employs a blockDAG, a generalized Nakamoto consensus structure that provides high throughput and low confirmation times due to its ability to support high block rates, presently achieving one block per second to reach 10 blocks per second and aspiration for 100 blocks per second. The low latency required for achieving these rates is primarily due to internet latency.
Kaspa’s implementation features a variety of useful functionalities, such as the ability to query the topology of the blockDAG using the Reachability feature, block data pruning (with plans to introduce block header pruning shortly), SPV proofs, and subnetwork support to facilitate the implementation of layer two solutions in the future.
Requirements for Mining Kaspa coin
- Compatible GPU (see github)
- Miner (Bzminer) – Here’s a guide to setup BZminer.
- Kaspa Wallet (web wallet)
- Mining pool (acc pool)
Kaspa Staking
Currently, there are no centralized exchanges or decentralized exchanges that allow for Kaspa staking. The official documentation does not show or suggest that its coming. Since staking is a part of what I do, I will keep a close eye, and update this blog when its available.
How to mine Kaspa Step by Step
One you have everything downloaded, we need to extract the contents from BZminer. You may get a warning from Windows that the download is a security threat. This is a false positive. Most miner software is perceived this way. It is a good idea to add the extracted files to an exclusion list, before proceeding. When all files are extracted, you want to ensure that you have the ‘bzminer.exe’ and ‘config.txt’ files available in the folder. We will need both moving forward.
Edit the ‘config.txt’
Double click and open the ‘config.txt’ file with notepad or any plain text editor. It may seem like a lot but we will only be editing a couple things in this file. Near the top look for “algorithm”
Inside the quotation marks, remove ethash, and enter kaspa
Next, below we have the wallet. This is where you will want to go into your web wallet, and copy your receive address. You will need to paste everything inside the qutation marks, including the work kaspa.
Lastly, we are going to edit the ‘url’ portion of the text file. In this example we are going to be using the acc pool, but you can use any pool you’d like. Ensure when you are entering the server address you are selecting the server closes to your region, and include the port number.
Insert those details into the text file.
Below the URL is the “username”. You can enter anything in here that you would like, but isnt required. This is useful when you need to identify GPUs if you are running multiple units.
Save your changes, and you can close the text file.
Run BZminer
Now that the config text has been edited, we are ready to run the miner. Simply double click on the ‘bzminer.exe’ file to execute it. You will see a console window pop open with some general information about the GPU you are running, and a benchmark test will run. This takes a minute or so, then the mining with begin.
Once running, you can open the ‘index.html’ file in the same folder. This is a dashboard, and provides you with stats from your GPU as well as hash rate details from the pool you’re using.
That’s pretty much it, if you would like a visual walk through, check out the video below.
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