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The more I read on this, the more I see lots of general answers that either point to Testnet Ether donations, claim they have no difficulty in mining a ton of Testnet Ether (in no time at all) or suggest a private Blockchain is used.

I have found a great Testnet Ether 'donation' site at: Ethereum Ropsten Faucet but I really wish to mine using the public Testnet (rather than a private Blockchain) to ensure a 'as close to reality' simulation as possible.

Expecting life to be simple, I have downloaded the Ethereum Wallet which is connected and fully synced with Testnet and I have enabled mining (little pickaxe showing) and nothing has occurred after a few hours...

From what I have read, I was under the impression I completed these steps and I would see Testnet Ether flowing in, but alas no.

I also don't mind using Geth CLI if that's simpler and more visible but I can't find specific instructions on how to do this.

If someone can point me at a decent modern guide (or write one) that clearly communicates the dos and don'ts then I'd be delighted to complete the steps, create a video and get it live to help others out.

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Based on your description of the story so far, you're mining in the simplest way possible (Just confirm it's testnet and mining enabled).

Patience is the answer. TestNet is usually not competitive, but you might need leave the computer alone for a little while to see results. In the past, I've achieved good results letting it mine while I sleep.

Hope it helps.

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  • Ah, patience, yes... I struggle with that... I shall sleep now and see what I have in the morning. Thanks for the confirmation all is correct in my method.
    – Chris Currie
    Feb 14, 2017 at 23:27
  • It's the simplest way, but far from the most efficient.
    – Teleporting Goat
    Feb 15, 2017 at 0:10
  • Accepted on the basis of 'simplest' way. With practically no effort, leaving the wallet mining in the background over 3 days has mined me 62 Testnet Ether on my i5 laptop with 16 Gig of RAM and which is more than enough for my needs.
    – Chris Currie
    Feb 17, 2017 at 23:31
  • The machine works so the man can rest.
    – Rob Hitchens
    Feb 18, 2017 at 0:21
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What I don't like with Ethereum Wallet mining is it doesn't let you set your mining settings (as far as I know).

If you have EW you must have geth somewhere, find it, run it (geth attach) and mine with that. You must find your address with eth.accounts.

Then, instead of mining with one thread, or 8 like the example in the wiki, think bigger. Try stuff like miner.start(64) or even miner.start(128). You should get your ether in 10-15 minutes. And since you're looking for the fastest way, you could just start as many thread as you CPU can handle (just don't kill it. If it still doesn't work in 45 minutes with more than 64 threads, maybe the problem is elsewhere).

I'm not sure how many threads EW mines with, but it's certainly not much, and it's far from the fastest way.

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  • Voted it up. It's good to have lots of points of view and alternatives to choose from.
    – Rob Hitchens
    Feb 15, 2017 at 0:28
  • As far as I know there is no sense to set the nubmer of threads in miner.start more then you have logical cores in your CPU. This will not let you mine faster.
    – Alexey Barsuk
    Feb 16, 2017 at 19:22
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    Interesting to know. Yes, I did open geth to watch the blockchain download (out of interest) but I didn't try to mine from within there.
    – Chris Currie
    Feb 17, 2017 at 23:27
  • @ChrisCurrie You might want to wait for your blockchain to fully sync, though. You can't mine anything if you don't have the latest block.
    – Teleporting Goat
    Feb 17, 2017 at 23:37

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