Mining PKT is not as difficult as one might think. Depending on what operating system you are using, all it takes is a few commands. The best part of all is you don’t really need any type of special equipment like asic miners to start mining. You can start mining with any CPU.
Even CPUs that aren’t very powerful. However the more powerful the CPU is the higher your earnings will be. We will discuss this in further detail below.
The only real requirement to mine PKT is bandwidth. PacketCrypt is the first bandwidth hard proof of work mining algorithm. So in order to start mining you need to make sure you have sufficient bandwidth.
In PKT there are 2 types of mining:
Announcement Mining – Use your CPU to generate announcement packets and send them over the internet into a pool. Get paid every time the pool you are mining to wins a block. (Can be done ANYWHERE)
Block Mining – Pools collect all of the announcements from announcement miners and use them to find blocks. Requires a LARGE amount of computational power and bandwidth. 10Gbps+ & 50 servers+ etc. (Typically done at a datacenter)
Note: Announcement miners are not able to find blocks on their own. In order to mine blocks you must setup all of the pool components and setup a pool.
Getting Started With Announcement Mining
To start ann mining, you have to get the PKT ann mining software on your computer. Fortunately there are a few ways to accomplish this and some don’t require much technical knowledge.
Before you start announcement mining, you need to have a mining compatible wallet setup first. Visit our PKT wallets page for more details.
Method 1 – Pre Built Binaries
You can download pre built binaries from the releases page on GitHub. There you will see different types of files for all of the different operating systems.
Windows: For Windows look for the files ending in -windows.zip.
Mac OS: For Mac OS look for the .pkg files.
Linux: For Linux look for the files ending in -linux_amd64.
Arch Linux \ Manjaro: PacketCrypt AUR package is available.
Method 2 – Build From Source
This method requires a bit more technical knowledge but its worth the effort. Building the ann mining software from source on the system you are going to use it ensures the absolute best performance since the binary is built specifically for your CPU.
Installing On Ubuntu
Execute the following commands in Ubuntu to install the ann mining software.
1. apt install screen git gcc make curl clang
2. curl –proto ‘=https’ –tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
3. git clone https://github.com/cjdelisle/packetcrypt_rs
4. cd packetcrypt_rs
5. CC=clang cargo build –release –features jemalloc
Running The Announcement Mining Software
Now that you have the software on your system, it time to start mining and earning some PKT. If you followed method 1 above you should know where you downloaded your binary. If you used method 2 above, you will find you binary within:
/packetcrypt_rs/target/release/packetcrypt
Running The Miner On Ubuntu
./packetcrypt ann -p pool_1 [pool_2 pool_3 pool_4]
Running the Miner on Windows
packetcrypt.exe ann -p pool_1 [pool_2 pool_3 pool_4]
PKT supports mining to multiple pools at the same time. You will list one pool URL right after the other including the http(s)://. To learn more about what pools are available, check out our PKT Pools page for all of the details.