Mining CitiCash - A privacy coin with great user experience

Intro (What is CitiCash?)

CitiCash aims to help wide adoption of crypto through great user experience and debit card integration. It is a privacy coin that is a fork of Monero, but with faster blocks (60 sec), Ring CT 6 mixin minimum (you can add more if you like) and ASIC resistant thanks to CryptoNight Heavy algo (https://github.com/curie-kief/cryptonote-heavy-design) and has light wallet and soon web wallet and iOS mobile, their aim is to make is as easy to use as possible. Also very cool feature I haven't seen before - they call it "alias" - basically you can name your address (send a transaction with the name and becomes a part of the block) so instead of the long string of characters you can use something like "Steven" (if not already taken), which is really cool in my opinion, I think this will likely become a future stnadard as today addresses are very impractical.

How to mine CitiCash (CCH)?

This article will explain how to mine CitiCash (CCH) on Window computers (the core wallet is only available for Windows atm, but they seem to be keen on building wallets for all devices, I will make another post how to set it up on iOS/Linux if it becomes avaliable.

What you will need?

In order to start mining you will need:
1) A 64 bit computer preferably with good CPU and GPU
2) A CCH wallet (first part of this blog post explains how to get one)
3) xmr-stak mining software (second part of this post explain how to install and set it up)

How to create a wallet?

If you do not have CCH wallet yet you can download the wallet UI from CitiCach website: https://www.citicash.io/#!download.

The installation is quite straight forward.
Once you have started the app select to create a new wallet:

You can then create a user profile:

The next screen will display your seed. Copy it and keep it safe, it will be required if you want to transfer your wallet on another computer.

You now own a city cash wallet. Congratulations! You can easily copy your wallet address using the “copy” button (this will be required to set up your miner):

How to set up the miner?

Once you have CCH address you can setup the miner. We will be using xmr-stak mining software. It is an open-source mining software which supported by various CPUs & GPUs.

You can download xmr-stak here: https://github.com/fireice-uk/xmr-stak/releases

The zip file might be flagged as dangerous by your web browser. Xmr-stak is a software which is run from command line which is quite suspicious from security point of view. However, it is a legit project, so you can accept the download without risk.

Next step is to unzip the file you downloaded.
Then click on the exe file. Your antivirus might try to block it (just unblock it).

You should now see a “nice” command line interface, it is where all the fun starts:

First question is to set up HTTP interface. It is a way to get a nicer user interface than the command line but it requires a lot of setup, so type 0 and enter.

Next you need to select the mining algorithms. CCH is using cryptonight_heavy. So just type “cryptonight_heavy” and enter.

Next question you need enter the pool address. You can find a list of all CCH mining pool here : https://www.citicash.io/miners/#!pools
It is recommended to use a mining pool close to your location. If you have some network lag time, the result of your mining might arrive too late to the pool and be rejected.
I will use as an example the Bohemina Pool - https://cch.bohemianpool.com/#/home

All pools’ websites include a quick connection guide like bellow:

You will need to copy past the pool address from there. For bohemianpool it is : cch.bohemianpool.com:7777

You now need to type in your wallet address (that you got at the end after setting up your wallet).
As the address is quite long I strongly recommend to copy paste it to avoid mistakes. If you copy paste the address from a paper wallet don't forget to remove the space.
Once you will have some CCH on your wallet you will be able to create an alias. This alias can be use instead of your wallet address to setup the miner, which is more user friendly (but you need to have about 0.4 CCH minimum in your wallet to be able to send alias transaction).

Last questions are not really important.

You can type “X” as password and press enter. Password are interesting only for mining pool which allow you to set up a miner account.
Rig identifier can help you to check your mining performance on some mining pool. With Bohemia Pool you can check your performance using your wallet address (see last part the article).

The last 3 questions type no.

You should see text like on following screenshot alternating from “result accepted by the pool” and “new block detected”.

If you see “result rejected by the pool” something is wrong. Most likely explanation is that you chose the wrong mining algorithms. Open the pool.txt file (in you xmr-stak foleder). Check that currency is set to cryptonight_heavy (last line of the text file)

You are now mining CCH, congrats !:).

Monitor performance and optimize.

You can check the performance of your computer by taping “h” and enter.

You can also check the performance of you mining on bohemia pool website. Under dashboard go to monitoring and past your wallet address (or alias). This will show you nice graph about performance of your mining:

You can optimize your miner to reduce energy consumption. In the folder of your miner you should find some text file cpu.txt and Nvidia.txt (or amd.txt if you have amd GPU)
At the end of the CPU file you should see some configuration as follow:
"cpu_threads_conf" :
[
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },
{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 2 },

]
Every line corresponds to one CPU core. So, if you delete one line the miner will use one less CPU core and consume less energy (but also provide lower hash rate). If you want to fully disable the CPU mining replace the CPU config by null (as shown bellow):
"cpu_threads_conf" : null,

Alternatively, you can do the CPU mining but set up the “low_power_mode” to true. This should lower the performance of the CPU to 80% of the maximum. However it is likely not profitable anymore to mine on CPU, so better stick to GPUs.

In Nvidia file you should find a configuration as follow:
"gpu_threads_conf" :
[
// gpu: GeForce 940MX architecture: 50
// memory: 1692/2048 MiB
// smx: 4
{ "index" : 0,
"threads" : 26, "blocks" : 12,
"bfactor" : 8, "bsleep" : 25,
"affine_to_cpu" : false, "sync_mode" : 3,
},

If you want to lower the power consumption of the GPU you can lower the number of threads. If you want to use the mining on background and use the computer for something should increase bsleep to at least 18.

Ok, so that's it, if you have some questions write me or for faster response join CitiCash Telegram https://t.me/citicash one of the admins (@vserejch) is a miner, he can help you if you run into trouble.

Anyways, if you found this helpful and feel like tipping me - this is my CitiCash address: "ultramarine" :)