Want to Use NiceHash Miner on Linux? Here's How to do That

What is NiceHash, again?

If you are looking for using NiceHash on Linux, you probably already know what is NiceHash. I’ll explain it briefly anyway.

NiceHash is essentially two things: a crypto-mining marketplace and a software to connect to this marketplace and use its service.

Mining cryptocurrency requires huge processing capacity. People with resources have built Bitcoin mining factories.

But not everyone can create a setup worth hundreds of thousands of dollars consisting of a cluster of high-end processors. This is why there are many crypto-miner malware that leech off the CPU from unsuspecting users.

NiceHash uses a similar concept but in legal ways. This Slovenia based company provides a marketplace where an end-user can ‘rent’ out part of his CPU’s power to a buyer who wants to use more computing power to mine cryptocurrency.

The renter gets paid (in cryptocurrency) for the use of his/her processor while the buyer gets to use more processing power for crypto mining without purchasing new hardware.

Apart from the marketplace, NiceHash also provides a free to use software that automatically connects the buyers and the renters.

Now the problem is that the NiceHash software is Windows-only. Does that mean you cannot use NiceHash on Linux? No.

There are a few applications that allow you to use NiceHash on Linux. I am going to discuss one such software called nuxhash.

Use NiceHash on Linux with nuxhash

Since NiceHash application is not available for Linux, you’ll have to use some unofficial applications for this purpose. Nuxhash is such a NiceHash client for Linux.

Nuxhash consists of a headless daemon and a Python-based GUI so you can use it on servers or desktops, as you like.

I have performed this tutorial on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS but it should be applicable for other Linux versions as well because it uses Python.

Prerequisites

Here are a few things you need to have in order to install and use nuxhash.

• Python 3.6 and Pip3 installed on your system
• Curl because it will download the proprietary NiceHash excavator.
• Nvidia graphics driver (if you have Nvidia GPU on your system)
• ocl–icd-libopencl1 library (may already be installed)
• An account with NiceHash that will give you NiceHash wallet address

Once you have all these required stuff, let’s see how to install nuxhash to use NiceHash on Linux.

Installing nuxhash

Open a terminal and use the following command to install pip on Debian and Ubuntu based distributions:

sudo apt install python3-pip

Now run the following command to install nuxhash:

sudo pip3 install git+https://github.com/YoRyan/nuxhash

Once installed, you can use either nuxhashd or nuxhash-gui to start the setup process. I have used the GUI in this tutorial:

When you run it for the first time, it will download the NiceHash excavator.

Once the excavator has been installed, it will ask you to configure the setup.

If not already done, you should create an account with NiceHash. This is where you’ll get the Wallet Address that you need to enter in the settings.

Do note that 0.5% of the mining time of your system will be donated to the developer of nuxhash by default. If you don’t want to help the developer this way, you can change the flag in file ~/.config/nuxhash/settings.conf to optout = True

Once you have everything setup, you can start using NiceHash on Linux. Enjoy your bitcoins 🙂