How to start mining Ravencoin

Getting a wallet address

Before you can begin mining, you will need an address.
You can get an address from one of the crypto coin exchanges, or you download a wallet here.
If you choose to use a wallet, make sure to encrypt and securely store a copy of the wallet.dat file generated by the software. (Wallet -> Encrypt Wallet...)
The first time the wallet may take hours to sync with the blockchain, however, you do not need to wait for it to sync to start mining. You can hide the sync window and create a new "receiving address" (File -> Receiving Addresses... -> New).
The address will look like this RHMKPy3Ana5NyzTgo6qWXXMiHAxzPyMgG1

Choosing and configuring miner software

Now that you have an address, you need to choose a miner software.
Please find [ this article ] with URLs to download and examples.

Payouts

The pool pays out outstanding balances every 3 hours. You can see the countdown to the next payout in the top right corner.
To check your balance, hashrate, past earnings and payouts click on the "Wallet" button on the top and enter your address.
The pool supports PPS and PPLNS payouts if you used one of the commands above, you will be paid with PPS, which we believe is better for new miners.
Check out below for explanation of differences between the two modes.

Join Ravenminer Discord

You are always welcome to join our Discord server. It's a great place to get your questions answered and get support from admins.
The server also has a Ravenminer bot, which can help you change your minimal payout settings and generate bat files for your miner. To start using the bot, send +help to #bots channel.

Advanced topics

Payout methods

Ravenminer supports PPLNS and PPS payout methods. The default method is PPLNS. You can switch to PPS by adding "pps" to you miner password. If you already have something in your password, separate "pps" with a comma, e.g. "miner1,pps"

• PPLNS stands for "Pay Per Last N Shares", with this method the pool pays miners for each valid blocks found. Miners get paid proportionally to their effort.
  Pros:
  • Lower pool fee
  • More coins in your wallet in the long run
  Cons:
  • Earnings frequency depends on pool luck
  • The pool needs to wait for the block to be confirmed by the network before paying it out
• PPS stands for "Pay Per Share", with this method the pool pays miners for each submitted share.
  Pros:
  • Earnings are more reliable, not affected by pool luck
  • No need to wait for block to be confirmed
  Cons:
  • Higher pool fee needed to cover orphan blocks, shares for which still count toward PPS rewards
  • About 1.5% less coins in your wallet in the long run

We update PPS earnings every 10 minutes.

Available regions

Ravenminer is a global pool and has stratum servers in 3 regions:

• US - us.ravenminer.com
• Europe - eu.ravenminer.com, and
• Asia - asia.ravenminer.com

We recommend using stratum.ravenminer.com in all cases, to take advantage of the automatic DNS failover.

Available ports

We provide a variable difficulty stratum on port 3838, in addition to that we have nine static difficulty ports

• 3800 - static diff 0.001
• 3801 - static diff 0.01
• 3802 - static diff 0.1
• 3809 - static diff 0.5
• 3803 - static diff 1
• 3804 - static diff 2
• 3805 - static diff 4
• 3806 - static diff 8
• 3807 - static diff 16
• 3808 - static diff 32

These ports provide virtually static difficulty. If the miner sends too many shares per minute, in extreme cases, the difficulty will be adjusted to avoid overloading the server.
All of these ports are available in all regions.
In addition to TCP ports we provide TLS (encrypted) ports. The encrypted ports have a "1" in front of a regular TCP port number.
Also, make sure to reconfigure your miner to use SSL protocol stratum+ssl://, e.g. stratum+tcp://stratum.ravenminer.com:3838 becomes stratum+ssl://stratum.ravenminer.com:13838