June 12th, 2017 
CryptoBadger 
If you’ve followed my Ethereum mining guide and successfully set up your own rig, you may have noticed that the Claymore mining software we’re using supports a dual-mining mode. The premise of dual-mining sounds great: mine another altcoin alongside ETH, ostensibly for free. Sounds like an easy way to increase profitability without any downside, so shouldn’t we all take advantage?
Read on for the pros and cons of dual-mining with Claymore, and instructions to guide you through enabling it.
What’s this dual-mining mode?
Claymore’s miner (the mining software you’re already using if you followed my guide) supports mining one of several altcoins (Decred, Siacoin, LBRY, or Pascal) while simultaneously mining ETH. When properly configured, the impact on Ethereum mining speed is nearly negligible.
The upside to dual-mining is obvious: you earn some extra cryptocurrency, and gain some diversification.
Sounds great—is there a downside to dual-mining?
In short: yes—you’re going to earn a tiny bit less ETH, and you’re going to consume significantly more power (which in turn is going to cause your rig to generate extra heat & fan noise).
Enabling dual mining mode in Claymore immediately increases the developer’s usage fee from 1% to 2%. So right off the top, you’re losing 1% of your mined ETH to the additional fee. The additional workload of dual-mining will reduce your ETH hashrate by another 1% or so, when properly configured (eg: dual-mining intensity set to have minimal impact on ETH). So in total, dual-mining will cause you to earn about 2% less ETH compared to ETH-only mining mode.
2% doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t—but it’s not completely negligible either. A single 6-GPU rig currently mines about $1,100 worth of ETH per month, so losing 2% of that amounts to roughly $22 monthly.
Increased electricity consumption is the other downside, and one that people often overlook. My own tests with a kill-a-watt meter indicate that enabling dual-mining mode uses another ~30 watts of power per GPU (so nearly 200 watts across a 6-GPU rig). At $0.10/kWh, that’s an additional ~$14 per month in electricity. Don’t forget that the additional power consumption will increase the heat generated by GPUs, which in turn makes GPU fans work harder. Additional power usage might also cause system instability if your undervolt settings were already near the limit, so be aware.
Between the loss of mined ETH, and the increased electricity usage, enabling dual mining “costs” roughly $40/month. The next obvious question: are the dual-mined altcoins worth that much?
How much are these altcoins worth?
I’m going to focus on Siacoin for the rest of this article, because of the four options available to dual-mine, I think it’s the most interesting. Numbers for the other three altcoin options will vary, but my guess is that they’re all pretty similar at this point.
When configured in the manner that I outline in the next section, a 6-GPU rig will hash Siacoins at about 2000 Mh/s in dual-mining mode, which is enough to earn roughly 10,000 SC per month. Each SC is currently worth about $0.013, which means dual-mining earns about $130 in siacoins every month.
If we subtract out our $40 in additional dual-mining “expenses” (outlined in the previous section), that means dual-mining can potentially net us another $90/month! Probably worth it for most people, unless you pay an abnormally high rate for electricity, or put a premium on keeping your rigs as cool and quiet as possible.
So how do I actually enable dual-mining?
It’s pretty straightforward: first, you’ll need a wallet address for whichever altcoin you’ve decided to dual-mine. For Siacoin, that means downloading the official app, and using it to create a wallet address. You can do this on any computer (it doesn’t need to be on your mining rig).
Make sure that you follow proper precautions and securely backup your wallet key file in multiple offline locations, just as you (hopefully) did with your ETH wallet key. Here is a great Siacoin-specific guide backup guide. Using multiple USB sticks to hold your wallet keys, and storing at least one of them offsite with a trusted friend (or bank deposit box, etc) is a good practice.
Once you’ve generated a wallet address, you’ll need to edit your mining script to enable dual-mining mode, specifying your new wallet address as the destination for mined coins.
If you followed my Linux guide, you’ll need to edit the mine.sh file that you created in step 6. You can make a backup of your current mine.sh first by typing “cp mine.sh mine.sh.bak” in case you want to undo your changes easily later.
If you followed my Windows guide, you’ll need to edit the mine.bat file that you created in step 10. You can make a backup of your current mine.bat first by highlighting it in Windows Explorer and then pressing CTRL+C followed by CTRL+V.
In either case, you’ll need to edit the line of the script that starts with “ethdcrminer64”. On that line, find “-mode 1”. We’re going to replace that “-mode 1” switch (eg: delete the “-mode 1” text, inserting the text below in its place—leave everything before and after intact) with the following:
-dpool stratum+tcp://sia-us-east1.nanopool.org:7777 -dwal [address] -dcoin sia -dcri 16Replace [address] with your own Siacoin wallet address (without the brackets).
If you have multiple rigs, then you should specify multiple workers like this (eg: replace [worker name] with Rig01, Rig02, etc):
-dwal [address]/[worker name]I’ve used nanopool.org as my mining pool here, though you can of course substitute any pool that supports Siacoin. Assuming you stick with nanopool, you can check on your mining progress by visiting this URL (wait at least 10 minutes after you start mining): https://sia.nanopool.org/account/[your wallet address]
The -dcri switch specifies dual-mining intensity—a higher number will improve Siacoin hashrate at the cost of decreasing Ethereum hashrate. I’ve found that 15-16 appears to be the sweet spot for me: the impact to ETH mining is nearly negligible; increasing it beyond this point started to noticeably decrease my ETH hashrate. Feel free to experiment if you notice a drop in your own ETH mining speed.
That’s all there is to it—save your changes and restart your miner. If you’ve done everything correctly, you’re now mining ETH and SC together!
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thanks for your informative guide! Appreciate it and keep them coming! 🙂
Just built my 6 GPU P106 rig with your guide so you are a massive influence and help!
Another great guide CryptoBadger!
Is it possible to dual mine diffrent coins on seperate GPUs? I’m interested in mining ETH + SIA on 1st GPU and ETH + PASC on the second GPU.
Yes you can. Run two instances or claymore and specify that they only use certain GPUs via the command line options.
Dual mining does not work for me as ETH mining hashrate degradation reaches 10% as soon as dual mining is switched on. Without dual mining ETH mining = 90 MHs/s with dualmining – 80 MHs/s. “-dwal” adjustment does not helo much as well. Any recommendations to have ETh hashrate degradation to approx 1% as mentioned in the guide?
Hi friend!!
Can I use this method with GTX1070???
And what do you think about using ethOS?
These guides are killer! Love ’em thank you so much. I do have a question:
I wanted to play around with SIA mining a bit before firing up my rig for dual mining, so I installed a SIA miner (Siamining with “Marlin” on my home desktop with a standard dell nvidia graphics card. I don’t know the exact specs, but after about 6 hours of mining with a hashrate of around 80mh/s I have roughly 2.5 SIA.
I started my rig up this AM, right now it’s just 2 1060’s (more on the way) and I followed your guide using nanopool this time and I’m getting around 210mh/s however, I don’t seem to be getting shares nearly as often as I am with my basic card on my desktop.
Any thoughts?
Well, This figure is certainly different now.
A single 6-GPU rig currently mines about $1,100 worth of ETH per month
No kidding!
A question for everyone – For those mining ETH, how long on average does it take to actually earn the 3 ETH reward or to discover an Uncle?
Some details – For a school project, my son (with a little help) recently built a 6 GPU rig (Nvidia 1070oc – getting consistent 189 mh/s) mining with v10 of Claymore on Nanopool. His rig has been running for about a month. He has earned a little over $200 USD in ETH thus far. Any idea what the expectation should be on getting the reward? Never? Once a year? No way to tell?
Is $200 – $250/month the new average for this type of rig – this is obviously a far cry from $1,100 mentioned in the post!
Appreciate any education!
No clue how he’s getting $1100. From my experience $200-$250 sounds about right. I’m a novice at best so if someone out there has tips to get our rigs up to the $1100 number please share.
The 1100 was 6 months ago, difficulty has massively increased since then…
I’m a bit slow….just occurred to me that he won’t ever receive a reward because he is pool mining and the profits are shared across the pool. Duh!
Hi, I just purchased a ‘cluster’ OR 8 of these little USB ‘dual-miners’ & have them pluged into an Anker 10port hub. I am trying to mine ETH & SIA but every video I have found seem to only refer to GPUs from AMD & NIVIDIA… I have no idea what classification these, little ‘thumb drive’ sized rigs are called, (they are Blue iin color and have both Bitcoin&Litcoin symbols on front), Additionally I have no clue as to the manufacturer the individual I purchased them from told me that they are Dual Miner 20131211v1.1
whatever that means, IDK…? Please help if possible.
cheers,
Hi, I just purchased a ‘cluster’ OR 8 of these little USB ‘dual-miners’ & have them pluged into an Anker 10port hub. I am trying to mine ETH & SIA but every video I have found seem to only refer to GPUs from AMD & NIVIDIA… I have no idea what classification these, little ‘thumb drive’ sized rigs are called, (they are Blue iin color and have both Bitcoin&Litecoin symbols on front), Additionally I have no clue as to the manufacturer the individual I purchased them from told me that they are Dual Miner 20131211v1.1
whatever that means, IDK…? Please help if possible.
cheers,
Eth and SIA are GPU Mining Currencies,
You have an Ant-Miner, which is for Bitcoin + Litecoin.
Thats why all the topics show for GPU Mining for Eth.
The USB Ant Miners are ok to play around with and experiment, but don’t expect any real return on them. Depending on what your electrical costs are, you might even end up with a loss to operate them
Been trying to set up the .bat for solo mining for three weeks. A good example of a solo conf file is very ellusive anywhere on google and the one in the Readme file (from claymore) does not work and not explained clearly. Do any of you have an example of what this would look like ? trying to set up a .bat file for ETC solo and Sia Solo for the second coin. Would really appreciate the help !
I have been trying to create a Sia Wallet for the past couple of days. The message is always “Not Synchronizing” at 0% in Red. I am connected to the internet and tried with different connections (like Verizon versus others). Any idea how to get connectivity to Sia host?
Check Your firewall .. my be blocking it from communicating…
Check this :
https://siastats.info/nodes.html
Thanks for your great article
I plan to mine etherium and decred
Hi – Just started mining since Dec2017, so very much still learning!! I have used the guides here so far and they have been great.
Rig Details:
B250 Mining Expert motherboard
500 SSD
4 GB Ram
Celeron CPU
6 off GPUs (4 x Rx580, 4 x Rx570)
OS = Ubuntu 16.04.03
1200w Power Unit
Using Nanopool just now to Pool Mine
Just using the GPUs as they came “out the box” and getting 142.6 Mh/S, rig very stable, no issues! I know i can overclock and do other clever stuff, but due to my inexperience, I am still a bit nervous to do so.
Great guide but I struggled to get ETH and SIA to dual mine, so I have reverted back to mining ETH only. In addition, I am using Exodus as a wallet so as I continue on this mining learning journey, I would like to be able to mine another cryptocurrency that I can store in Exodus. So 2 questions if ok…..
1-What would be the best coin that Exodus supports to dual mine with ETH?
2-Could you provide a guide as to how I do that?
Lastly, a big shout out and thanks to all the other experts on this site. Us newbies really are grateful for your expertise and guidance.
P
OOPs, typo re GPUs, meant 3+3!!
Decred
How much eth can you mine per day if your hashing power is 90mh/s(3xrx580)?? Just want to check against the current difficulty
Hi Martin
When I first started mining using CBs guide, I was getting total circa 142MHs, with the 6 GPUs getting roughly 24MH/s average each. I hadn’t changed any of the settings yet as still fairly new to mining so still learning. However about 4 weeks ago, the average moved down to circa 18MH/s for the GPUs so ended up with circa 108MH/s. I wasn’t sure why this happened and couldn’t find a reason on any site to help. Anyway, I am in the process of installing Windows 10 on my MacBook Pro so I can have a go at trying the GPU BIOS tweaks shown in CBs guide – section 4. I hope to increase the “clock” and lower the “wattage” of each GPU, one at a time using my MacBook. That way I can leave my Linux Rig running 24/7. I will post and let others know how that goes.
Cheers
Peter
I updated my mine.sh to dual mine Pascal using the recommended format by nanopool.org. But it didn’t work correctly. Can anyone help me get on the right track with mining eth & pasc?
Thanks!
THANKS FOR YOUR WEBSITE
thanks for sharing
very good
Thanks for your great article