Zcash Mining Guide¶
Translations available here.
Welcome! This guide is intended to get you mining Zcash, a.k.a. “ZEC”, on the Zcash mainnet. The unit for mining is Sol/s (Solutions per second).
If you run into snags, please let us know. There’s plenty of work needed to make this usable and your input will help us prioritize the worst sharpest edges earlier. For user help, we recommend using our forum:
Setup¶
First, you need to set up your local Zcash node. Follow the 1.0 User Guide up to the end of the section “Compiling”, then come back here. (You can also do the “Testing” section if you want!)
Configuration¶
Configure your node as per [[1.0-User-Guide#configuration]], including the section Enabling CPU Mining.
Mining¶
Now, start Mining!
$ ./src/zcashd
To run it in the background (without the node metrics screen that is normally displayed):
$ ./src/zcashd -daemon
You should see the following output in the debug log
(~/.zcash/debug.log
):
Zcash Miner started
Congratulations! You are now mining on the mainnet.
To stop the Zcash daemon, enter the command:
$ ./src/zcash-cli stop
Spending Mining Rewards¶
Coins are mined into a t-addr (transparent address), but can only be
spent to a z-addr (shielded address), and must be swept out of the
t-addr in one transaction with no change. Refer to our 1.0 User
Guide for
instructions on how to use the z_sendmany
command to send coins from
a t-addr to a z-addr. You will need at least 4GB of RAM for this
operation.
Mining pools¶
If you’re mining by yourself or at home, you’re most likely to succeed if you join an existing mining pool. See this community-maintained list of mining pools for further instructions.
P2PKH transactions¶
The internal zcashd
miner inherited from Bitcoin used P2PK for
coinbase transactions, but Zcash 1.0.6 and later use P2PKH by
default, following the
trend for Bitcoin.