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A while ago, I got my hands on a large quantity of used, small form factor PCs. (Basically NUCs). I quickly ran out of TVs to attach them to, and decided to use them to play around with Monero. Individually, they're pretty low rate miners, but they're energy efficient, so collectively, I've been able to mine Monero almost cost-effectively with the batch I setup as a proof of concept.

My setup so far is a row of NUCs connected to a power strip and a Netgear switch, running Windows 7 and using the Monero daemon to mine locally. They all have the whole Monero blockchain, and are full Monero nodes. This has a serious scalabilty problem and is more of a pain to manage than it's worth, which is what I'm looking for help fixing. I don't have a problem figuring out how to manage all these devices, but I'm not sure how to usefully manage all the different XMR addresses and wallets. Right now, I have almost two dozen devices, and every few days, I log into each of them individually, check the balance, and if any of them have mined a block, I transfer the balance to a single Monero address I could actually use for transacting with Monero.

What I'd like to do is have all these devices mine to a single address, without joining a pool. Is this possible? How? (If necessary, I could probably work my way through setting up a private pool, but that seems like a lot of overhead and I'd prefer to avoid it).

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What I'd like to do is have all these devices mine to a single address, without joining a pool. Is this possible?

You can use the start_mining <addr> monerod command for each miner and direct all mined XMR to a single address under your control.

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  • Wow. That is so simple and makes me feel so stupid. Brilliant, thanks mate. I shall give that a go and report back. And give you an upvote if I can.
    – XMR Curious
    Commented Dec 8, 2016 at 2:11
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I'd suggest switching your NUCs to pool mining. You can either go to any of the large mining pools (say, minergate), or even run your own pool (there is some free software available for that).

What I do in my case (lots of low-powered PCs - not NUCs - but otherwise the same setup) is run one machine as a full node, run a pool on that same node (the pool talks to the monerod node), and have all the "workers" submit to that pool. That way your workers will run only the miner code, which should save you quite a few cycles (and consequently, generate more income).

luk

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Re the "have to periodically log in to check the balance": Note you can simply have all those NUCs use the same wallet, in which case any miner that finds something will deposit it into the same wallet. So you don't have to login to each of the nodes to check the balance, but only one (keep in mind a "wallet" is not the same as a physical wallet - it's simply a key on the blockchain... so different nodes sharing the same wallet is perfectly OK!).

In fact, what I'd do (actually, what I do do :-) ) is create a master wallet on my laptop, then copy that wallet file to whichever node I'm running, and I can always check my balance (and make transfers etc) from my laptop, no matter where the coins get mined.

luk

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