Frequently Asked Questions

1. If you are mining with a GPU, download and install a suitable miner. If you are using an FPGA, it will generally have its own mining software.

2. Configure your mining software to point to mvis.ca:8080. Port 8080 is set up for the RPC protocol, which is compatible with most 0xBTC mining software.

3. Start your miner, wait a few minutes until it has sent in a few shares, and then visit http://mvis.ca/miners.html and verify that your miner has been recognized by the mining pool. Use the Miner Account search box at the top-right to access your mining details page. Verify that the mining pool is receiving your submitted shares.

No. You need to use an external, non-exchange, wallet. MetaMask is a very good choice, although there are other options as well. The main reason you can't use an exchange wallet is because of the way this mining pool handles deposits. When the pool sees an incoming ETH deposit, it looks at the "Sender" address to determine which miner sent the deposit. The problem with exchange wallets is that when you send ETH, the funds don't actually originate from your wallet. Instead, they come from one of the exchange's "hot-wallets". As a result, the mining pool will not know which miner sent the deposit.

The solution is to set up an ETH address in an external wallet, like MetaMask. You would then do a 2-step transfer: first send ETH funds from the exchange into your MetaMask wallet address, and then transfer the ETH from MetaMask into the pool.

By default, payouts will be sent out on the Ethereum Mainnet as a regular ERC20 token transfer. Alternatively, you can receive your payouts on the Polygon Network (formerly Matic). The advantage to having payouts on the Polygon network is that they are basically free. The disadvantage is that withdrawing your tokens from Polygon to Ethereum Mainnet is fairly expensive (about 3x the cost of an ERC20 transfer). You can set your payout preference on your Miner Profile Page.

If you choose to have your payouts on the Polygon network, you can use the official block explorer to view your payouts, or better yet, configure MetaMask to connect to the Polygon network so you can have full control of your tokens. Once connected to the network, you will also have to use the 'Add Token' feature to add 0xBTC to your wallet. The address for 0xBTC on Polygon is 0x71b821aa52a49f32eed535fca6eb5aa130085978.

Yes, workers are supported. The term "workers" refers to a feature whereby the mining pool will track the hashrate of each individual mining rig, and display it on your profile page. This allows you to monitor your mining farm and watch out for individual mining rigs that need special attention.

To set up for workers, simply append a unique alpha-numeric identifier to the end of your ETH address in your mining rig configuration screen. For example, 0x5e193...8c2a9,F2-001. You can use all numbers if you want. If you want your mining rigs to sort naturally in numeric order, pad the numerical part of the worker name with leading zeros as in the example given, so they are all the same length.

To change any of your settings, you first need to prove you are the owner of that particular ETH address. There are two ways to do that. One is by signing a message using MetaMask, and the other is by entering a password. If you want to use the password method, please see the next FAQ entry, "How do I set a password on my account?"

To use MetaMask message signing, select that option when given the choice, then unlock your wallet and select your ETH mining address as the active wallet and make sure it is connected to the web page. Signing a message does not cost any money or gas fees.

To set a password on your account, append a special string to the end of your ETH mining address on one of your mining rigs, in the form pwd=my_password. Use a comma or period to separate. For example, 0x5e193...8c2a9,pwd=abc123. Do not use a comma or period in the password. If you also use worker names, put the password at the end. For example 0x5e193...8c2a9,F2-001,pwd=abc123

IMPORTANT NOTE: You do not have to put the password on all your mining rigs! You only have to put it on one. Once that miner connects up to the pool for the first time, that password will be recognized and set on your account. That password will stay on your account even if that mining rig goes offline.

When gas prices are high, the transaction fees to mint the tokens can cost more than the tokens are worth, so mining is no longer profitable. MVis pool will only try to mint tokens when the gas prices are reasonable. This is currently defined as any time the Effective Fee is below 65%.

This pool allows you to decide what to do when gas prices are high. You will see this on your Mining Profile page, under "High Gas Price Option". If you set this to "Stay Connected", the pool will continue to communicate with your miner and receive shares that you send in, but your earnings will be reduced, possibly to zero, because the pool will not try to mint any tokens.

If you set the option to "Disconnect", the pool will stop communicating with your miner, and instead return an error message to the effect "Mining operations suspended due to high gas prices. Please try again later." Depending on how you have your mining software configured, this could allow your mining rig to go to idle and possibly save power, or it could switch to a secondary mining pool to mine a different token.

You can either send ETH to the pools minting account address on Ethereum Mainnet, or you can send WETH (Wrapped ETH) to the same address on the Polygon Network. The address to send to in either case is 0x7d3ebd2b56651d164fc36180050e9f6f7b890e9d.

For detailed instructions on sending ETH, please see the Deposit ETH page. For sending WETH on Polygon, see the next FAQ entry.

Yes. Send WETH to 0x7d3ebd2b56651d164fc36180050e9f6f7b890e9d. Make sure the transaction originates from your mining address, so the pool knows who sent it. In other words, send directly from YOUR wallet (ie. MetaMask). Do NOT send from an exchange wallet.

• If you're never used Polygon before, you first need to connect your wallet to the Polygon Network.
• Next, you need to acquire some WETH. One way to do that is to transfer (deposit) ETH from the Ethereum Mainnet to the Polygon Network. It will show up on Polygon as WETH. To make the deposit, use the Polygon Bridge.
• Alternatively, you could deposit just about any other crypto asset, and then swap that for WETH on the Quickswap exchange.

This pool uses a modified form of PPLNS. With traditional PPLNS, tokens are awarded every time the pool finds a solution and mints some tokens. This is referred to as the end of a 'round'. With MVis Pool, a 'round' is defined more simply as a 4 hour period of time. Every 4 hours, any tokens that were mined are awarded to the miners in proportion to their hashrate. As well, ETH transaction fees arising from the mint contract calls are charged to the miners in the same way.

The Stratum protocol is a more efficient way for the pool and your mining software to exchange information. It uses the concept of "push notifications", where the pool sends certain mining parameters to the miner only when necessary. (If you are a computer dev, you could also compare it to a websocket connection).

This is in contrast to the legacy RPC protocol. RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call. Under this protocol, the mining software continuously queries the mining pool (often multiple times per second) to see if any of the mining parameters have changed. It does this by sending an HTTP request. This is very wasteful and inefficient, given that the mining parameters typically only change every 10 minutes on average.

If your mining software supports the stratum protocol, simply point your rig to mvis.ca:8090

Note, however, that most 0xBTC mining software does not support the Stratum protocol. This is especially true if you have a hosted FPGA mining rig on HashAltCoin (HAC). Your only option for a HAC hosted rig is to use the RPC protocol (port 8080).

However, if you are in possession of your mining rig, you can use a Stratum Proxy to connect to the pool. See The FAQ entries below on running a Stratum Proxy.

1. Download the Stratum Proxy .zip file and extract it to a folder of your choice. If you are running Linux, please see the Readme for alternate instructions.
2. Double-click StratumProxy.exe to start the program.
3. Enter your ETH mining address in the text box provided. This is the ETH address that will receive payouts from the pool. This address needs to match the ETH address set in your mining software.
4. Once you have done that the proxy should start automatically, and you should see some output in the log window at the bottom.
5. Start your mining software and point it to http://localhost:8080.