How to build your own altcoin cryptocurrency mining pool

This lesson covers course expectations and what you should be able to achieve after the completion of the course.  It covers what experience you should already have, and what the costs are likely to be to build your own mining pool.

This lesson covers the basics of bitcoin and altcoins, the difference between daemons and wallets, and some general information on blockchains.

This lesson covers some basics on how mining pools work, algorithms, hashrates, the TTF, how the workload is spread over mining participants, and more.

This lesson covers some of the benefits of a mining pool and being a mining pool owner/operator.

This lesson gets into some detail about the Yiimp mining pool software and the stratum process.

An overview of what you will need to successfully build and run a mining pool and a development server that you can compile coin daemons on.

This lesson covers the requirements of building a development coin daemon compilation server.

This lesson contains a demo of how to build the development server using Virtual Box.

A step-by-step demo of how to build the main production mining pool server, using a Contabo virtual private server (VPS).

A quick overview of the components that will be installed as part of the Yiimp mining pool software installation.

A step-by-step demo of how to install the Yiimp mining pool software.

A quick demo on how to create a swap file on your production server to allow RAM to be swapped to disk when it is running low.

This demo takes a quick look at the Yiimp main web page, as your users will see it.

This a quick demo taking a look at the Yiimp administration control panel.

A demo shows the startup scripts that have been created as part of the Yiimp installation.

An overview of the stratum & blocknotify processes.

A demo on how to configure some of the main settings of Yiimp through the serverconfig.php file.

Details of the stratum startup script which is used to start your stratums up automatically on server reboot.

A quick demo of how to manage your Yiimp database through the web based PHPMyAdmin interface.

A demo on how to configure your UFW firewall to appropriately secure your server from unwanted inbound connections.

A demo on how to customise the text on the main Yiimp website front page.

Demo on how to change site themes to make your Yiimp installation appear in your chosen colour scheme.

An optional demo on how to remove the Contabo branding from your SSH sessions, if required.

Some theory on the blockchain related files that are used on the mining pool server.

This article contains the commands that will be used in the following lecture.

This demo will take you the steps required to compile your first coin. The end result of this compiling exercise will be daemon and command line interface binaries.

This demo takes you through the compilation of a second coin, but this one has a couple of problems that need to be addressed to make the compilation successful. Coming across issues compiling coins may occur from time to time, and if you want to be able to successfully compile the coin, you will need to know how to work out what is wrong yourself. This lesson will give you some hints on what you should do.

This demo takes you through the process of uploading your newly compiled daemons to the pool, and also making sure they are ready to be launched in the next lesson.

This lesson takes you through the method of adding your newly compiled coin(s) to the Yiimp mining pool.

This demo shows how to prepare the website for your users to be able to mine the new coin.

This lesson takes you through the process of testing your newly added coin. It is important that the coin is thoroughly tested prior to releasing it for the general public to mine. This lesson will show the mining process from both the end user perspective and from the pool workings. It will demonstrate successfully mined blocks.

This demo will show you how to add new coin network node details to your mining pool so that your server can synchronise with more servers on the same coin network.

A demo on how to resynchronise the blockchain, should the blockchain have issues (for example, forks).

This lesson demonstrates how payments work in Yiimp so you can understand this important process.

This theory lesson will take you through some common problems and how to troubleshoot and potentially fix them.

Unfortunately scams are everywhere. This lesson will highlight some of the things to watch out for when thinking about adding a new coin to your mining pool to reduce the likelihood of you or your miners being subject to a scam or coin failure. Note, this is personal opinion.

Disasters do happen unfortunately.  This lesson covers details of some of the things that you should think about backing up so that the pain of recovery is reduced.