Mining is a very important facet to the entire PegNet network. The prices on the PegNet decentralized exchange are reported by the PegNet mining community (you guys!) and this enables the entire project to be able to function as it does!

The mining process can get a little bit complicated at times, but DO NOT worry! I have you covered! In this article, I will attempt to run through every stage of the mining process from setting up to running the miner! Hopefully, by the end of this guide, you will be able to set up a PegNet miner and start earning PEG as a reward!

Let’s get cracking!

So How Does The Mining Thing Work?

When you become a miner on PegNet, you will act as an “oracle” for the network in which you will provide the pricing data for all of the PegNet assets! It will be your job to fetch the latest pricing information and feeding it back into the Factom blockchain (remember PegNet runs on top of Factom - take a look at this article if you need to refresh yourself about PegNet!).

It is the miner’s responsibility to fetch the data from their specific APIs and then send it back to the specific Oracle Chain on the Factom blockchain for review.

Mining on PegNet uses the LXRHash algorithm. This algorithm has been extensively explained in this article and I HIGHLY recommend you go over this before attempting to become a PegNet miner yourself!

So What Do You Need To Be Able To Mine?

As the LXRHash is a memory-intensive mining algorithm there is no need for any specialized hardware. In fact, you can run this mining operation on your very own PC as it can even just run on a Raspberry Pi. 

The minimum requirements are;

• Any 32bit CPU
• 4GB of RAM (it is really just 2GB you need at the moment).

Pretty low right?

There are 3 options for you to run this whole mining operation which include solo mining with a docker or without a docker and pool mining. As PegNet is run on top of the Factom blockchain you will ALSO require access to a fully synced factomd (yes, there is a d at the end, this is not a typo) node! You can run this on your own machine, although the process is pretty tricky for beginners! 

I would HIGHLY recommend you starting up with the pool mining option as this is by far the easiest to set up! You don’t even have to worry about syncing with a full Factom node as the pool will handle this. Furthermore, joining a pool also helps to bring more consistent results as everybody’s mining power is combined together. 

In this article, we will just focus on pool mining as I believe the majoirty of readers will be more than capable to set this up!

Mining On The Pool

To pool mining on your CPU we will be using the ORAX mining pool. This method is BY FAR the easiest way to set your miner up and get mining right away! This requires minimal expertise (except a few command-line tools which we will cover here!) and you should be able to get this up in a matter of minutes! 

To complete this method you will need a valid email address and a Factom payment address. If you do not have a Factom wallet, head over to https://myfactomwallet.com/ and create one for yourself! You will need to copy the address to paste it into one of the following steps. It should look something like this;

“FA24PAtyZWWVAPm95ZCVpwyY6RYHeCMTiZt2v4VQAY8aBXMUZyeF” 

with different characters as your address will be unique!

Step 1

The first step is to download the Orax mining program to be able to run the miner. You can download this from the official site here! Once this file has been downloaded, I would recommend that you change the name from “orax-cli-windows-amd64.exe” to simply “orax-cli.exe”. 

This is to make it easier to reference the file in the following steps!

Step 2 

The next steps involve getting your mining account registered with the pool and starting your miner! To do all of this, we will be using the Command Prompt (cmd.exe) in windows - just simply search for cmd.exe in the bottom left search bar (next to the Windows “start” icon)!

Once CMD is running, we need to head toward the download folder to access the orax-cli.exe program that we downloaded. Typically, when you run CMD.exe you will be directed into your “User” folder. So all we have to do is execute the following command in CMD;

cd Downloads

This should bring you into the “Downloads” directory where the miner is located.

Step 3 

This step will get us registered to the actual pool. Once in the downloads folder, simply execute the following command;

Orax-cli.exe register

This will start the registration process. You will first be asked to enter a valid email address and create a password for the pool account. After confirming your password, you will be requested to insert a Factom address to receive payments. Here, we will post the address we created over at MyFactomWallet.

After inserting your payment address, you will be asked to create an alias for the miner. You can choose anything to help you identify which device is mining! I am mining on my laptop so I simply labeled it as “laptop”.

Step 4

This is where we will start mining! To start the mining process we must execute the following command;

orax-cli.exe mine

This will get the entire mining process started. The first time you execute this code, the miner will start to create the 1GB map for the LXR Hash algorithm. This should take between 10 minutes and 30 minutes to complete and will only be required to be done once.

Once the 1GB map has been created you should see the following screen stating that mining has started;

Step 5

That’s it! It is literally as simple as that! Congratulations, You are now mining via ORAX pool on the PegNet network using JUST YOUR CPU! You can now head over to https://www.oraxpool.com/ and login with the registration details you provided in Step 3. The dashboard to the website will show all the miners that you have running, along with the hash rate and how much PegNet you have helped to mine!