An experimental vector-accelerated CPU miner for the Webcash electronic payment network.
Webminer is tested and known to work on recent versions of macOS and Linux. It is written in a platform-independent style and is likely to work on other operating systems as well. If you need to make modifications to get it to run in your environment, please consider submitting a pull request on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/maaku/webminer
Unlike the official Webcash miner which is written in unoptimized Python, webminer is written in hand-tuned C++ and uses x86 vector SIMD extensions to accelerate SHA256 calculations. On this author's Intel CPU the official Python miner is able to achieve approximately 12.5 khps. A single-threaded webminer instance on the same machine is able to mine approximately 1445 khps, for a total speedup of over 115x.
Further optimizations are possible, and will be implemented in time.
To compile webminer, a C++ compiler and a few standard developer tools are required. On Ubuntu you can install the required dependencies with the following command:
sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool
You will also need Google's bazel build tool, which is not available from the default Ubuntu package repositories. Instructions for installing bazel are available at the official bazel website: https://bazel.build
On macOS the build environment can be prepared by installing XCode (with the command-line developer tools), then fetching the required dependencies with homebrew:
brew install autoconf automake libtool bazel
To build webminer, open a shell and navigate to directory containing the source code and execute this command:
bazel build -c opt webminer
Bazel will handle the details of fetching and compiling all the necessary dependencies.
The final built executable will be available at bazel-bin/webminer. Simply run this executable and it will begin mining webcash.
The claim codes for mined webcash will be logged both to the stdout (along with lots of other info), and to a dedicated file named 'webcash.log' in the current directory. If webcash is successfully generated but there is an error communicating to the server, the relevant information (including both the proof-of-work solution and the claim code) are output to a file named 'orphans.log' in the current directory. The names of both files can be changed with the --webcashlog=filename and --orphanlog=filename command line options.
Webminer will automatically spawn mining threads equal to the number of execution units on the machine in which it is running. To control precisely the number of mining threads, use the --workers=N option.
WARNING: Do NOT execute webminer with with bazel run! Webminer will generate files to store the claim codes for any webcash generated, which will be destroyed along with the temporary sandbox created by bazel run.
Webcash claim codes generated by mining need to be inserted into a wallet and replaced quickly, in case the mining submissions are ever released as part of an audit. Mined webcash can be inserted into any webcash wallet using the official walletclient.py tool:
cat webcash.log | xargs -n 1 python path/to/walletclient.py insert
Or something similar along those lines.
WARNING: You must claim the generated webcash in a wallet quickly after generating them, or else you risk forfeiting the funds if/when your mining report is released. Mining reports are not treated as sensitive data, so this can happen at any time!
This repository and its source code is distributed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License 2.0. See MPL-2.0.txt.