Mining Tao cryptocurrency without buying hardware

8 min readMar 22, 2021

What is Tao? Tao is the coin that you earn whilst contributing to the Bittensor decentralized neural network.

See the below Introduction excerpt from the Bittensor homepage. Don’t worry if it doesnt make 100% sense, you don’t need to understand the concept to contribute and earn Tao.

For the advanced (not me), see the whitepaper here: Bittensor Whitepaper — please skip past this whitepaper if it does not interest you, you won’t need it for this tutorial.

OK, let’s get started with the fun stuff.

Get a Raspberry Pi here:
🖥️Buy Raspberry Pi 🖥️

Rent a Server

You need CPU power to mine Tao, as your server will be responding to and working on requests from other servers in the network, helping solve problems.

We will need to rent a server from your favourite provider, mine is DatabaseMart as they’re cheap and based in the US. Although server location doesn’t matter too much.

The beauty of renting a server is not having to outlay any capital for a beefy server, it doesn’t take any space, doesn’t use your electricity nor heat your house as well as no wear & tear to worry about.

You pay your X amount of dollars per month to rent a server and that’s all you care about.

Click here for a Database mart link. Select the DBM Bare Metal — Advanced Bare Metal Server (2022) option

CPU speed is important for processing requests, as the quicker you are, the more Tao you earn.

Select the below options. I recommend choosing a 1 month billing cycle.

Don’t forget to set yourself a Server name & Administrator password

Once you purchase your server, you should receive login instructions which you can use for the next step.

Log into your server

Log into your server as per Racknerds email instructions.

sudo apt-get update

Install Bittensor

Note, when pasting into the PuTTy SSH terminal, right-click is paste.
Highlighting text within the terminal automatically copies it to your clipboard, so be careful as you can accidently paste the wrong thing.

Become super admin

Install cURL

Copy and paste (right-click) the commands into your PuTTy Terminal

apt-get install curl -y

Increase ulmit

ulimit -n 1000000

Install Bittensor

Run the below script to install bittensor.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/opentensor/bittensor/master/scripts/install.sh)"

Press Enter to begin

The Bittensor install process can take a few minutes. When completed you will see a screen such as this below:

If you see an error regarding testresources, you can run the below code:

If you don’t see any error, then move onto Install Docker

Run this code to fix it

sudo apt install python3-testresources

Then run the same bittensor install script

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/opentensor/bittensor/master/scripts/install.sh)"

Install Docker

Run the below command to install docker.

apt install docker-compose

Install Subtensor

First, clone the Subtensor repository to your local Bittensor folder:

git clone https://github.com/opentensor/subtensor.git ~/.bittensor/subtensor

Move into the directory first

cd ~/.bittensor/subtensor

Edit the below file & add the code just below that

vi /root/.bittensor/subtensor/docker-compose.ymlversion: "3.2" services: node-subtensor: container_name: node-subtensor image: opentensorfdn/subtensor:latest ports: - "9944:9944" - "30333:30333" - "9933:9933" environment: - CARGO_HOME=/var/www/node-subtensor/.cargo command: bash -c "/usr/local/bin/node-subtensor --base-path /root/.local/share/node-subtensor/ --chain /subtensor/specs/nakamotoSpecRaw.json --rpc-external --ws-external --rpc-cors all --no-mdns --rpc-methods=Unsafe --ws-max-connections 1000 --in-peers 500 --out-peers 500"

Run docker compose to pull the latest image of the blockchain and run it:

docker-compose up

If the installation was successful, then you should see a massive output (these are debug logs, do not be alarmed it is not an error). Once synchronization finishes, you should see logs similar to this:

node-subtensor | 2021-11-23 18:42:22 ✨ Imported #147209 (0x83b6...4178) node-subtensor | 2021-11-23 18:42:24 ✨ Imported #147210 (0x482f...be10) node-subtensor | 2021-11-23 18:42:25 💤 Idle (28 peers), best: #147210 (0x482f...be10), finalized #147208 (0x50d1...e7f6), ⬇ 10.0kiB/s ⬆ 8.3kiB/s node-subtensor | 2021-11-23 18:42:30 💤 Idle (28 peers), best: #147210 (0x482f...be10), finalized #147208 (0x50d1...e7f6), ⬇ 22.8kiB/s ⬆ 12.6kiB/s

Now that the chain is running and synchronized, we can safely run it in and know our miners will have a blockchain to connect to (local). Press ctrl + c to cancel the run, and then run it in the background:

docker-compose up -d

Install PM2

We’re going to install PM2 which will allow us to run the miners in the background whilst we can still use our main terminal window to run other commands, such as checking processes, RAM usage, Bittensor wallets, and so on.

apt-get install git && apt-get install git && apt-get install curl openssl libssl-dev && apt update

If prompted, Press Y & Enter to continue

Completed.

Install NPM & PM2

apt install nodejs npm && npm install pm2 -g

If prompted, Press Y & Enter to continue

Completed

Create swap space (Optional)

Swap space helps for the stability of the server, should RAM usage exceed amount it has installed, the RAMs data will be written to the disk.

Run each command at a time.

Turn the swap off

Your server might have swap already, so we will run this command in case as we will be resizing if it exists, otherwise creating swap if it doesnt.
The below command will move what’s stored in swap memory to your RAM.

sudo swapoff -a

Create an empty swapfile

We are making a 4GB swap file. Edit the last number (count= 4) if you want to increase/decrease the amount of swap.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1G count=4

Set the correct permissions

sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile

Set up a Linux swap area

sudo mkswap /swapfile

Turn the swap on

sudo swapon /swapfile

Now check to make sure it’s worked.

grep Swap /proc/meminfo

Your numbers may not be exactly the same, but it will be similiar in size.

Create your Bittensor wallet

Create your wallet/coldkey.

You can use the one wallet/coldkey for all your miners.

btcli new_coldkey

On the next line you specify the name. We gave it a generic name of mycoldkey. Call yours whatever you’d like.
Take note of the mnemonic keys. You need this to recover your wallet. (Important: Do not lose or share this. Keep track of this phrase. If you lose it, or it becomes compromised, you could lose all your Tao.)
Specify a password

Create your hotkey.

It’s recommended to use a different hotkey for each miner.

You can repeat this step for the amount of miners you are going to run.

Each new hotkey will reside in the same coldkey/wallet.

btcli new_hotkey

On the next line you specify your wallet name (In the step above we called it mycoldkey)
On the next line you specify the hotkey name. We can call it myhotkey1 (If you are making multiple miners, then the next hotkey you make increment this to myhotkey2, myhotkey3 and so on)
Take note of your mnemonic keys. you need these to recover your hotkey.

Step Start your miners

Now that the wallet is created, we can run the miners in pm2.

If you went with the 32GB Hybrid Server, we can run about 4 miners.

For each miner, the three changes will be -name and -wallet.hotkey and -axon.port

Note: If any issues, try this code.. check python3 ~/.bittensor/bittensor/bittensor/_neuron/text/advanced_server/main.py -name miner01 -time -interpreter python3 — -logging.debug -subtensor.network nakamoto -neuron.restart true -neuron.model_name distilgpt2 -wallet.name wallet1 -wallet.hotkey hotkey1 — axon.port 8010

The first miner

-name miner01
-wallet.hotkey myhotkey1

pm2 start ~/.bittensor/bittensor/bittensor/_neuron/text/advanced_server/main.py --name miner01 --time --interpreter python3 -- --logging.debug --subtensor.network nakamoto --neuron.restart true --neuron.model_name distilgpt2 --axon.port 8091 --wallet.name mycoldkey --wallet.hotkey myhotkey1

The second miner

— name miner02
-wallet.hotkey myhotkey2

pm2 start ~/.bittensor/bittensor/bittensor/_neuron/text/advanced_server/main.py --name miner02 --time --interpreter python3 -- --logging.debug --subtensor.network nakamoto --neuron.restart true --neuron.model_name distilgpt2 --wallet.name mycoldkey --wallet.hotkey myhotkey2

Third miner

— name miner03
-wallet.hotkey myhotkey3

pm2 start ~/.bittensor/bittensor/bittensor/_neuron/text/advanced_server/main.py --name miner03 --time --interpreter python3 -- --logging.debug --subtensor.network nakamoto --neuron.restart true --neuron.model_name distilgpt2 --wallet.name mycoldkey --wallet.hotkey myhotkey3

Fourth miner

-name miner04
-wallet.hotkey myhotkey4

pm2 start ~/.bittensor/bittensor/bittensor/_neuron/text/advanced_server/main.py --name miner04 --time --interpreter python3 -- --logging.debug --subtensor.network nakamoto --neuron.restart true --neuron.model_name distilgpt2 --wallet.name mycoldkey --wallet.hotkey myhotkey4