With the recent upsurge in Monero popularity and price,  now is the perfect opportunity to begin exploring and mining the cryptocurrency. If you're not familiar with Monero, it's a cryptocurrency with privacy built in.

> Monero uses a cryptographically sound system that allows you to send and receive funds without your transactions being publicly visible on the blockchain (the distributed ledger of transactions). This ensures that your purchases, receipts, and other transfers remain private by default.
— [getmonero.org](https://getmonero.org/home)

If you have some spare computing power, or a decent GPU, you can contribute some hashing power to the network and earn some Monero yourself.

---
# Getting started
This tutorial assumes you're running a version of Ubuntu. If you don't have Ubuntu, you can install it on your machine for free [here](http://www.ubuntu.com/download).

## Installing ccminer-cryptonight
ccminer-cryptonight is a fork of ccminer that runs on the CUDA architecture and takes advantage of your Nvidia video card.
#### Download the source code for ccminer-cryptonight
 [https://github.com/tsiv/ccminer-cryptonight/archive/v0.17.zip](https://github.com/tsiv/ccminer-cryptonight/archive/v0.17.zip).

#### Update the system
`sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade`
#### Install dependencies
```
sudo apt-get -y install gcc g++ build-essential automake linux-headers-$(uname -r) git gawk libcurl4-openssl-dev libjansson-dev xorg libc++-dev libgmp-dev python-dev
```

#### Install the nvidia display driver
```
cd && wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/352.41/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.41.run
sudo chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.41.run
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.41.run --accept-license --no-questions --disable-nouveau --no-install-compat32-libs
rm NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.41.run
```

```
sudo echo 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset"' >> /etc/default/grub
sudo update-grub
sudo nvidia-xconfig -a --cool-bits=28 --allow-empty-initial-configuration  # flags enable OC and fan controls.  via: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=826901.msg12279696#msg12279696
```

#### Install Cuda
```
cd && wget http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1404/x86_64/cuda-repo-ubuntu1404_6.5-14_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu1404_6.5-14_amd64.deb
rm cuda-repo-ubuntu1404_6.5-14_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install cuda-toolkit-6-5 
```
*Note: you can skip having to read over the entire agreement by pressing ctrl+c after the last command above.*
```
sudo usermod -a -G video $USER
echo "" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "export PATH=/usr/local/cuda-6.5/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/cuda-6.5/lib64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
```

#### Reboot
`sudo reboot`

*Make the deviceQuery sample.  This is used to verify cuda works*
`cd /usr/local/cuda/samples/1_Utilities/deviceQuery && sudo make`

*If you see all of your cards listed, and the last line says "Result = PASS" you're good to go.*
`/usr/local/cuda/samples/1_Utilities/deviceQuery/deviceQuery`

#### Build ccminer-cryptonight
```
cd ccminer-cryptonight_20140926
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
```

## Mining
First create a wallet, either using the [simplewallet](https://getmonero.org/downloads/) binary, or using [mymonero.com](https://mymonero.com). Copy your wallet address.

We'll be mining with a pool I like called [MoneroHash](https://monerohash.com/). It's relatively small, which means payouts will be larger (but might take longer).

Simply start ccminer to begin mining:
`ccminer -o stratum+tcp://monerohash.com:3333 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS -p x`

If everything went smoothly, you'll see output like this:
```
[2016-08-24 17:48:52] Using JSON-RPC 2.0
[2016-08-24 17:48:52] 1 miner threads started, using 'cryptonight' algorithm.
[2016-08-24 17:48:52] Starting Stratum on stratum+tcp://monerohash.com:3333
[2016-08-24 17:48:52] GPU #0: GeForce GTX 970 (13 SMX), using 40 blocks of 8 threads
[2016-08-24 17:48:52] Pool set diff to 5000
[2016-08-24 17:48:52] Stratum detected new block
[2016-08-24 17:48:57] GPU #0: GeForce GTX 970, 76.20 H/s
[2016-08-24 17:49:10] GPU #0: GeForce GTX 970, 350.35 H/s
[2016-08-24 17:49:10] accepted: 1/1 (100.00%), 350.35 H/s (yay!!!)
```

Happy mining!

*Thanks to Zach Shiner for his [UbuntuMiner script](https://gist.github.com/zcshiner/4b32980792d367222304#file-ubuntuminer).*