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Despite its lower profitability compared to Ethereum (ETH), Ethereum Classic (ETC) mining attracts farm owners. The lower mining complexity and the information that Vitalik Buterin decided to remove the PoW mining option for Ethereum make miners pay attention to the promising coin. Let’s understand what you need to mine Ethereum Classic and consider the technical nuances of mining this cryptocurrency.

Features of the ETC coin

Ethereum Classic (ETC) is not just digital money, but a platform for running decentralized applications (dApp). ETC and ETH coins appeared in the spring of 2016 after the hardfork of the popular Ethereum cryptocurrency. It was made after a blockchain hack in which hackers managed to steal more than $50 million. Some users did not support the rollback of the blockchain, which the developers decided to apply to eliminate the consequences of the attack. Proponents of the conservative approach continued to use the old blockchain, from which the ETH branch broke off.

ETC and ETH mining applications use the same mining algorithm and work with the same hardware. The only difference is that Ethereum Classic has a smaller DAG file and can be mined on video cards with up to 3 GB of RAM.

Advantages

Despite its lower price and popularity than Ethereum, ETC has certain advantages:

• The principle of code supremacy underlying Ethereum Classic guarantees the inviolability of the ETC blockchain and ensures the decentralized operation of the network.
• The project’s open source code, which allows enthusiasts to develop ETC and create their own applications on its platform.
• Good feedback, ensuring upgrades based on consolidated decisions of the community and the three development teams,
• High block closing speed, providing a faster network performance compared to BTC and ETH.
• Ability to mine ETCs on video cards weaker than those required to mine ETH.

Disadvantages

The disadvantages of Ethereum Classic include the following points:

• Low activity of the development team.
• Vulnerability to “51% attack”, typical for PoW algorithms.
• Using a blockchain that was successfully attacked in 2016

How to mine Ethereum Classic

To mine ETCs you need equipment: an ASIC, a computer with a powerful video card or a farm with a lot of video cards that will provide a high profit margin. You will also need special software and a wallet to withdraw and store the earnings.

Ethereum Classic, like Ethereum, can be mined through a pool or in solo mode. However, solo ETC mining is not profitable. To increase efficiency, miners work through pools that distribute the task of calculating block signatures. This allows for stable profits and increases the profitability of each participant’s farm.

Mining Pools.

The profit made by mining Ethereum Classic as part of a group (pool) depends on its characteristics. Each pool has its own commission, but you should not focus only on this parameter. It is better to determine the profitability by experience. To do this you need to connect to several pools for the same period of time (at least 12 hours) and evaluate the profitability of the farm. 

You should pay attention to the following pools that support ETC mining:

• Ethermine is one of the first pools, characterized by high reliability. However, on the web there are mixed comments about the profitability of the resource.
• Nanopool is a relatively new project, which managed to get ahead of the competition in a short time. The pool is characterized by low commissions and favorable terms for cooperation. However, the technical support of the site leaves much to be desired.
• P2pool is a pool with high profitability and support of ETC mining in solo mode.
• ETC 2miners is a new resource that supports a large number of cryptocurrencies. Thanks to the low commission and high reliability of work, the site since its opening in 2017 has managed to win a large number of fans,
• Supernova – a well-known resource, distinguished by a high degree of security, user-friendly interface and excellent technical support.
• MinerGate is a convenient, reliable multilingual resource for mining cryptocurrencies, which managed to win the trust of the community.

Equipment for mining Ethereum Classic

Not only ASIC or top-of-the-line video cards can be used for ETC mining. The main thing is that a DAG file of over 2 gigabytes can fit into the GPU’s RAM. However, older graphics cards have low power efficiency (ratio of performance to power consumption). Coins mined on such devices may not even be enough to pay for electricity. This also applies to attempts to mine ETC on a CPU.

Ether is being mined on AMD and Nvidia video cards. However, mining on Nvidia, such as Geforce GTX 1050 Ti, brings less income for equal investment. The reason lies in the different architecture of the GPU, which affects the power consumption. Therefore, it is preferable to use AMD cards of the latest generation for ether mining.

Where to Store Coins

To store ETC coins, you can use software and hardware wallets, accounts on cryptocurrency exchanges.

If you intend to accumulate significant amounts of Ethereum Classic, it is worth looking at hardware devices (Trezor, Ledger Nano S and similar). Web wallets are less reliable, but much more convenient for withdrawals, exchanging cryptocurrencies for fiat money and conducting quick transactions. An example is Ethereum Classic Wallet. This service is extremely easy to use, and it takes literally seconds to start working with it.

Technical nuances and mining software

Setting up ETC mining starts with choosing an application to work with the pool. The most popular program for mining Ethereum Classic is Claymore.

To configure the settings, unzip the miner file and edit Start.bat. In the latter you need to specify the pool IP and port, as well as the Ethereum wallet address you want to output the coins to. After that, run the file and start mining Ethereum.

The initialization parameters are available in the corresponding section of the mining pool website. There are also links to recommended miner programs.

What is a Claymore S Dual Miner

The Ethereum Classic S Dual Miner allows you to effectively use the capabilities of your video card and mine not only ETCs. Dual mining allows you to mine coins using two different algorithms simultaneously. Together with ETC, whose hash calculation loads the RAM of the video card, you can mine Decred or other processor-intensive GPU coins. This increases the profitability of mining with a small increase in power consumption.

Claymore DuaL is considered the best miner for regular and dual-mining.

Pros of the application (utility):

• simple user-friendly interface,
• high performance,
• stable work,
• mixed support for farms (with AMD and Nvidia cards),
• Linux and Windows versions.

Cons of ether dual-miner:

• the program does not work on 32-bit OS,
• Some of the video card resources are spent on secondary coin, slightly reducing ETC hashrate.

Why do we need the bat-file?

Start.bat is used to start an application and it contains the parameters of its work. Their priority will be higher than that of the options prescribed in config.txt. So the easiest way to configure the program is to create a bat-file and put in it the key information about the wallet and the pool server.

Profitability

ETC mining profitability depends on the following parameters:

• mining speed (hash rate),
• Power consumption of the farm,
• channel reliability (if the connection is unstable, the calculated hashes can be lost).

To calculate the profitability of Ethereum mining equipment in advance, it is worth using online mining calculators. The most authoritative one is whattomine.com, which allows calculating a farm’s profit based on its hash rate and equipment power consumption.