Requirements

In order to mine Bitcoin, you will

• A pool account
• Bitcoin Wallet
• Raspberry Pi
• Raspbian image SD card
• USB Bitcoin miner

Creating an Account

There are two things you need to do:

1. Download a bitcoin wallet
2. Create a pool account
3. Set up payment
4. Set up workers

A wallet is a program that sits on your computer and gives you a wallet address, this is a unique string of numbers and letters that you will use to receive bitcoins. Download the client for your computer from https://bitcoin.org/en/download

After installation, you will have to save a file called wallet.dat, keep this file safe, as this contains your unique wallet address within it, including all bitcoins that you will gain. If you lose this file, you cannot recover any bitcoins it contained.

Once you have a wallet address, create a pool account. A pool is a huge collection of other people working towards gaining bitcoins. Due to the complexity of mining a bitcoin, it has become unrealistic to solo mine–the act of processing millions of numbers to solve the block problem. Working as a group, or pool, lets everyone have a chance of earning some Bitcoin. There are many pools around, in this tutorial I’ll be using one called Slush’s pool: http://mining.bitcoin.cz/

Once you have created a pool account, you'll need to enter your unique wallet address into the Bitcoin payout address.

Next step is to create a worker login account. Within your pool account you have the ability to create something called a worker for each of your bitcoin miners, so you're able to monitor them all separately just in case one should fail.

Each worker has its own login name and password. Whilst you are on My Account click Register New Worker and give it a name, for example; worker,and a password.

Now you're ready to set your Raspberry Pi mining for Bitcoin.

Installing Required libraries

The miner to be installed comes as source files, which means that the program must be compiled into a binary before it can be run. To make a program, in this case BFGMiner, many dependencies are required.

Dependencies are additional software, or libraries the program needs in order to compile properly, as it has been developed using them to make the software more efficient.

Hopefully you will be seeing the Raspbian desktop, so double click on LXTerminal and type in the following:

This process will take a few minutes to complete