Mining

Miners are essential to the health of the Iron Fish network. Without them, blocks won't be generated and transactions won't be transmitted.

It's also the key algorithm used to determine consensus and is important to be distributed among many different sets of miners. If any one miner controls too much of the mining power, it will compromise decentralization.

This page primarily discusses the mining landscape and how to join and choose an existing pool, or to start your own.

What is a mining pool? 

A mining pool pools block rewards and distributes them via various reward distribution schemes such as PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares). It is unlikely for small miners to find blocks, so pools provide a steady income in return for a fee. They may also provide other services such as customer support or custom software. Pools also run the node for you so that you do not need to maintain your own.

Mining Pools 

Please check out the ecosystem page for a list of mining pools that support Iron Fish.

⚠️️ Note: Any pool with greater than 45% hash rate is hidden from this list. Please do not join a mining pool that has more than 45% hash rate. It is very important to promote decentralization.

Mining Software 

Please check out the ecosystem page for a list of miners that support Iron Fish.

Solo Mining 

The Iron Fish CLI also supports solo mining with most of the available mining software. After installing the CLI, start your node and make sure it is synced before starting a local mining pool.

To start a local mining pool on port 9034 by running the following command:

ironfish miners:pools:start

You should then be able to connect your miner to localhost:9034 and start mining.

Questions? 

Have any questions about mining? Come ask in the #mining channel in the Iron Fish Discord