Solo mine on a CPU

You need:

An installed exfer binary (Install)
A wallet (we only need the pubkey, not the private key — see below)
A machine with at least a few hundred MB of RAM and a routable network

Get a payout pubkey

Generate a wallet on a different machine (not the mining host):

exfer wallet generate --output ~/payout.key --json

Grab the pubkey field. The mining host needs only this 64-hex pubkey — the private key never leaves the wallet machine. This protects funds if the mining host is compromised.

{
    "pubkey":  "fcbd5a818501cd5439ebe8c0c5ff244c0f1475333e226b7f998e6eb80552c69d",
    "address": "8d896d64864f53214acb49aeb44a09a03d5bb23d19a417a6ce7b0da65c7bd750"
}

Start mining

exfer mine \
    --datadir       ~/.exfer \
    --miner-pubkey  fcbd5a818501cd5439ebe8c0c5ff244c0f1475333e226b7f998e6eb80552c69d \
    --rpc-bind      127.0.0.1:9334 \
    --repair-perms

Flag	What it does
`--datadir`	Where chain + state live. Same as `exfer node`
`--miner-pubkey`	The pubkey that gets the coinbase reward. No private key needed on this host.
`--rpc-bind`	Optional: expose RPC on the given address. Use `127.0.0.1` only.
`--repair-perms`	Auto-fix `node_identity.key` permissions if stripped by the filesystem

exfer mine is a superset of exfer node — it syncs the chain, accepts peer connections, and additionally tries to win blocks.

Watch it work

# new tip every ~10 s under normal network conditions
journalctl -fu exfer | grep -E 'New tip|Mined block'

If you find a block, you'll see a Mined block at height H line. The reward output goes to your --miner-pubkey and is immature for the next 360 blocks before you can spend it.

Confirming coinbase rewards arrived

Coinbase outputs are returned with is_coinbase: true by get_address_utxos. Use the get_address_utxos try-it widget with your address to see them.

The is_coinbase flag plus the height field tell you whether the output is spendable yet (tip_height - height >= 360).

Run as a service

See Run as a service for systemd, launchd, and Docker templates. Substitute exfer node with exfer mine --miner-pubkey YOUR_PUBKEY_HEX.

Important: the systemd User=exfer should not be the user that holds your wallet. The mining service is intended to be unprivileged and own only the chain database.

Running on a low-RAM box

Each parallel Argon2id attempt needs 64 MiB. Today the miner uses a fixed number of worker threads tuned for the host's logical CPU count. On a tight VPS:

Make sure the box has at least 512 MiB free RAM after the OS.
Avoid running the miner alongside other memory-hungry processes (the Argon2id working set is random-access; if it spills to swap, hash rate collapses).
If the host is shared (e.g. a tiny VPS), prefer pool mining — solo on a tiny box is mostly heat.

Stopping cleanly

sudo systemctl stop exfer
# or, if running in the foreground:
^C

The miner persists its state on the way out; no chain-database corruption from a clean shutdown.

Sanity checks before leaving it running for days

Disk has headroom: df -h $DATADIR shows growth, no full filesystem.
Time is correct: out-of-sync clocks cause peers to reject your blocks. timedatectl status should say "NTP synchronized: yes".
Pubkey is right: a typo in --miner-pubkey means any blocks you find pay an address you don't control.
Backups in place: see Backup & recovery.

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Exfer Documentation