For those impatient to start mining:
- establish your own wallet at the online wallet, you can find your public address there (it has a
kaspa:qblablabla...
format),- download any miner and put your public address into the proper position within the
.bat
file, samples are present in each of the miner' distributives (choose whether you want to mine solo or using the pool, these.bat
files usually contain examples of both variants, and if not then refer to the miner embedded help).After the Eth merge there has been a huge increase in Kaspa network hashrate, so most probably it won't worth now trying to mine solo: your block hitting rate will as usual depend on your hashare, but to estimate your income, notice that currently (as of 2022 December 1, with the network hashrate of ~500 TH/s) you'll hit on average 1 block in a week per each 1 Gh/s you have, so say for you total 10 Gh/s worth of GPUs you'll on average have 10 blocks in a week. And it can't be predicted nor can be guaranteed in any way, it's a pure game of chance — the solo mining as is.
See the list of available Kaspa pools here: https://miningpoolstats.stream/kaspa. Please consider choosing the pool with lesser total hashrate to help decentralizaion: with Kaspa blockrate of 1 BPS even the smallest pool have a huge chance of hitting many blocks a day, so blocks distribution luck is negligible between pools, unlike Bitcoin and other slow coins. This way joining the small pool won't decrease your earning at all but will help keeping healthier Kaspa network and DAG structure.
Long story short: you will need a node (whether your own or someone else's) and a wallet to start receiving and sending Kaspa. And you will additionally need a miner to mine Kaspa.
The node keeps a copy of the DAG, validates blocks, transactions, and commits user's transactions.
The wallet controls user's private and public keys (addresses) generation, storage, and provides the user transaction initiation mechanisms; which work in tandem with the node.
Miners generate new DAG blocks providing transaction execution and earning block rewards for users; This also works in tandem with the node.
You can also mine to a pool, this way you omit the necessity of having to run a node, but you'll still be required to create an online wallet to get a mining address.
There are 3 ways to get a working node:
If you only need to send and receive coins and do not plan on mining you essentially only need a wallet and running a node is not necessary. You may in this instance simply stick to an online wallet. There's a node behind this wallet so it's possible to send and receive coins with it. (Mining to this wallet is also possible by simply using its public addresses).
There are 4 ways to get a wallet:
Notice that online and KDX-based wallets are incompatible with the CLI wallet currently. When it comes to restoring/importing your wallet from a seed phrase: the first two (online and KDX wallet) each use a 12-word seed phrase, while the latter two (CLI and paper wallet) each use a 24-word seed phrase. In all other respects they are identical and Kaspa can be sent between each variation seamlessly.
See more info on a separate article.