Stacks Mining

Secure the network, compete for STX.

Quick Overview

Mining on the Stacks 2.0 network requires spending Bitcoin to compete for the chance to mine the next Stacks block, and in turn, receive a STX reward.

More details can be found in the Stacks documentation and several resources exist for would-be miners on the network.

The basic process for setting up a miner is outlined in full here and includes:

  1. setting up and maintaining a Bitcoin node
  2. setting up and maintaining a Stacks keychain
  3. setting up and maintaining a Stacks miner

The Stacks miner (stacks-node) communicates with a local instance of Bitcoin Core (bitcoind) in order to:

  • check the BTC balance of the miner
  • perform replace-by-fee (RBF) transactions
  • interact with the Bitcoin blockchain

System Requirements

Bitcoin Core

  • Disk Space: 350 GB1
  • Download: 500 MB/day
  • Upload: 5 GB/day
  • Memory (RAM): 1 GB

More detailed information can be found on the Bitcoin Core website.

Stacks-Node

  • Processor: 2 vCPUs
  • Disk Space: 50 GB2
  • Memory (RAM): 8 GB3

  1. Pruning is not supported ↩︎

  2. SSD storage preferred ↩︎

  3. The Memory (RAM) requirement is mostly used for the initial Stacks 1.0 import, and advanced Linux users can increase the size of their swap file and safely operate with 2 GB of memory. ↩︎