Mining Otherthings

If you are just arriving in the bitcoin scene and are despairing over the missed opportunities to mine some bitcoins and earn a little currency, don't give up quite yet.  

Bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency on the block.  A sampling of the so called "alt-coins" which can be mined are as follows:

• Litecoin - 

• Namecoin -

• Terracoin - This entire section will be updated as I explore more.

• PPCoin - 

• Devcoin -

The only one of these which I have used at all is Litecoin (LTC).  The client is based off of the bitcoin-qt client, and operates almost identically.  The only addition being a built in "mining" capacity, which I believe does CPU mining.  

Another thing people have begun "mining" are vanity addresses.  

These are custom bitcoin addresses generated with a two-part public/private key setup, so you can mine one for someone and they don't have to worry that you have access to the address.  For example:  1forksuypXbvhGmA1NGnk5ndyfKnPFvxF  is a vanity address I had generated (feel free to donate to it, lol). 

Some bitcoin developers dislike the phenomenon, as they feel it's "wasting" addresses during the searching process, but I'm not really clear on the details of how this could be.

But enough of that, some places to check out to get you started mining vanity addresses:

• Vanitygen - Github repository for the software you'll be needing.  This is where you'll need to go if you're on Windows, or if it's not available in your GNU/Linux distribution's repositories, I have no idea about Mac.

• Solus Wiki - Info on setting up/using vanitygen, vanityminer, and oclvanitygen.

• Bitcointalk - The post where this concept was introduced, with links to other resources and information about getting started mining.

• Vanity Pool - The only mining pool for vanity addresses that I know of so far, a good place to get some work.  Also the address at which you would point oclvanityminer.

If you manage to get oclvanitygen and oclvanityminer to make or get it from your repos, and you want to mine in the pool, you'd use something like this on Linux:

$ ./oclvanityminer -u https://vanitypool.appspot.com/ -a 1yourbitcoinaddressgoeshere

And you should start getting info on what you'll be mining on, the pay rate, and it'll start mining. chugging away at 100% of your machine's combined CPU and GPU capacities, making your machine completely unresponsive.  Read the thread on Bitcointalk and find the proper tweaks and settings you will need for your specific hardware and the "aggressiveness" you want the miner to use.  I think I ended up using:  

$ ./oclvanityminer -u https://vanitypool.appspot.com/ -a 1yourbitcoinaddressgoeshere -v -p 0 -d 0 -w 256 -t 1 -g 512x256 -b 1024

With this I had acceptable system response (could type into consoles normally and use IRC) and was getting about 1 Mkey/s, but your mileage will vary.

Another aside about vanity addresses, some of the longer ones with specific upper/lowercase letters (like 1Casascius) would take me something like 200+ years for 50% probability to solve, so don't expect to get 1IAmTheCoolestBitcoinAddress or something, unless you're super lucky or plan on being an immortal cyborg.