What happens to the etherbase while migrating a mining rig?

Question

I've successfully set up a 4 GPU rig and have been mining for about a month now. I see that my rig has an ether base, and i essentially mine ether to that base. The base has an address something akin to an account.

I also set up an account and have successfully transferred ether to it.

Now, if i were to rebuilt my rig, or migrate to another rig running a different operating system, what are the steps that i should be taking to ensure I retain all my Ether?

I am suspecting that I won't be able to keep my current ether base, so that would entail transferring all my ether from the base to the account, and migrating to another system. Is my supposition correct?

Answer 1

You can do a few things.

1. Move your keystore to the new rig

   • If you move the whole folder, the new rig should mine to the same etherbase by default.

2. Set the new rig's etherbase to your wallet or old etherbase

   • The command in geth is miner.setEtherbase(0x123...)

3. Transfer all of your ether to your wallet, and start from scratch on the new rig.

I personally would recommend just moving the whole keystore folder, but note that you do not need to actually have a key on the machine in order to use the account as your etherbase. This means you could theoretically mine directly to your wallet. The default etherbase in geth is just eth.accounts [0] (the oldest account) .

Answer 2

Etherbase is just a pointer to an account. So back up your keystore in the normal way and you should be able to retain all of your ether.

You probably should be able to keep your existing etherbase. (But keep in mind that if you are copying keystore files to another computer, that they both now have access to spend the ether.)