BFGMiner – an intermediate miner for ASIC and FPGA, with some support for CPU/GPU

BFGMiner is a modular crypto miner for ASICs, FPGA, and more recently GPU/CPU mining.

It can be used for remote management, monitoring, and overclocking of mining facilities.

Here’s a list of platforms supported by BFGMiner:

• Windows 32/64 bit
• various Linux distros(Ubuntu, OpenWrt, Debian, Gentoo, Arch, Raspberry Pi…)
• Mac

If we take a look at the README.txt file, this is what is written:

This is a multi-threaded, multi-blockchain, multi-pool ASIC, FPGA, GPU, and CPU miner with dynamic clocking, monitoring, and fan speed support for Bitcoin.

The README.txt also has a valuable intro on authors, as well basic usage with pools, accompanied by separate readme files for different mining methods, like GPU mining.

If you plan to use BFGMiner for GPU mining, then definitely check the README.GPU.txt file.

And the first lines of that file say that we should also check the README.scrypt.txt file.

In a nutshell, BFGMiner is best suited for ASIC and FPGA mining, but GPU mining can be pulled with some effort.

How to start mining with BFGMiner

To start, simply get a Windows(or your platform) version of BFG miner from the official Bitcointalk thread.

If using Windows, unpack the downloaded .zip file.

For GPU mining with BFGMiner, we have to mine a Scrypt coin. In this case, I’ll be mining DOGE.

Open the unzipped folder, which should be named something like “bfgminer-5.5.0-win64”.

Create a new file called “doge.bat”, and open it for editing in Notepad++, Notepad, or your preferred text editor.

In it, something like this should be added:

bfgminer -S opencl:auto -o http://pool:port -u username -p password

and for this example, I’ll be using the https://bsod.pw/ pool.

In BSOD settings, add your wallet, choose the coin you want to mine, the server, your hardware, and then the software(in this case I had to type in bfgminer).

Choose solo or shared type of mining, then click on “Generate string”, and you should receive something like this:

bfgminer -a scrypt -o stratum+tcp://eu.bsod.pw:2146 -u DCPUG16b98acUEeduaPggXuZQ6JHg4o5BR -p x

This looks good, but according to the readme files I’ve mentioned before, we need to alter the mining instruction a bit:

bfgminer -S opencl:auto -o stratum+tcp://eu.bsod.pw:2146 -u DCPUG16b98acUEeduaPggXuZQ6JHg4o5BR -p x

Save the doge.bat file and then double-click to run it.