So, there's about 6 hours until Main-net launches for Bitcoin Gold. Looking to get a piece of the mining action? Me too! I follow lists of instructions really well, so here's a list of instructions on how I went about it:
Download Claymore miner for AMD cards (If you have NVIDIA cards, use EWBF miner - I only have AMD cards, so can't help you further with that)
Create a wallet - I used Coinomi (Which appears to only be available on mobile, but supports heaps of coins - Get it from the Google Play Store).
In Coinomi, generate a new BTG wallet - it should start with a G (for Gold?) and look something like this: GKBi tjUs Emch kZ5pB Bprk kSza LXpx H6hyJ (feel free to that one!).
In the Claymore application folder, open config.txt in a text editor (like Notepad).
Add your wallet address (without spaces) to the line with -zwal. Also give your miner a name (I just use something generic like Miner01). It should look like this:
-zwal GKBitjUsEmchkZ5pBBprkkSzaLXpxH6hyJ.Miner01
Save the config.txt file, close it and run the start.bat file
Now, this is the bare minimum you can use to start mining. Note, however, that until the Main Net is up and running, you can't actually mine any BTG. This is just for testing your miner.
A few other things to note if you're keen on more info:
-zpool eu.pool.gold:3044 // This line will make your miner a part of the pool.gold mining pool. Feel free to change it. If you'd like to check the stats of your miner, head over to http://mine.pool.gold/workers/[your wallet address]. As of writing this, I haven't been able to see my miner's stats - I've been told in the BTG Slack that this is just something that will be fixed when Main Net is up.
-zpsw z //This line specifies the password for access to the pool (not required by all pools)
-ftime 1 //This has to do with failover to another pool - I'm not 100% sure what this does, but I assume it will switch to another pool in # minutes if the current pool is not responding or has issues, where # is the number (in this case 1)
-i 6 //This is the mining intensity. The range is from 0-9, with 0 being low intensity, 9 being highest. According to the readme file, higher is not always better, and may cause instability. Feel free to play with it at your own risk.
-tt 75 //This specifies the target temperature for your GPUs in degrees Celsius. I'm unsure if by "target" this means it will increase mining intensity until it reaches the target, or if this will start the GPU fans at 75. Setting a negative value (eg -tt -40) will manually set GPU fans to 40%
-allpools 1 //This specifies that the miner may try to mine on other pools, rather than sticking to your specified pool above. The config file states that it will "use some default pools", but I'm unclear as to where/what these are.
It's pretty late here - I hope this saves you the stupid amount of time Googling for the same information that I spent. Feel free to ask any questions, I'll try and answer them in the comments below. I'll also likely share my .bat file for mining in a later post.