How do I get bitcoins for mining Ethereum Classic (ETC)? Detailed guide

March 30, 2022 by cryptobreak

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2021 was a year of skyrocketing popularity for NFT tokens. Users of the Etherium blockchain were actively mining tokens and overloading the network, which also caused transaction fees to skyrocket. In response, the 2Miners mining pool team came up with an innovative feature to pay ETH miners in BTC and NANO. This way it was possible to save on costs and purely technically even mine Bitcoin on a video card. Now a similar feature has appeared for Ethereum Classic. We will tell you more about it.

Traditionally, we will start with the backstory. Commissions on the Ethereum network were indeed setting records in 2021. To illustrate, on February 22, a single token exchange transaction on the Uniswap decentralized exchange cost more than $600. On that day, the swap cost us approximately $150 - i.e. everything depended on the load on the network at that minute - but still.

The cost of an Etherium network swap on February 22, 2021

NFT token transactions are even more expensive. The reason for this is simple: interacting with NFT requires more network resources, and this has a proportional impact on the amount of gas spent and the cost of transactions.

To illustrate, here are the transaction costs in the Eth blockchain at the time of writing. A quick ether send costs $4.48, a quick ERC20 token transfer costs $11, and an exchange on the decentralised exchange Uniswap costs $39. Even more expensive is the sale of NFT on the already familiar OpenSea exchange – $43.

Transaction fees on the Etherium network

NFTs have become increasingly popular. Here’s a chart of trading volumes from NFT since January 2018. Notice how the figure jumped sharply in 2021.

NFT token trading volume by week

All of this ended up overloading the blockchain. Below is a graph of the average commission on the Etherium network. The peak of the figure was recorded on November 3, 2021. It was the equivalent of $52.

Graph of the average commission on the Etherium network

So it was very expensive to transact in the Eth blockchain, as it still is compared to other popular networks like Solana or Avalanche. But that’s not all.

Commissions on the Etherium network

The increasing commissions made ETH miners happy because it had a direct and positive impact on their earnings. On top of that, the mining pools had the ability to include transactions in a block for a minimal cost.

Accordingly, not only did the miners earn a lot, but they also received their remuneration practically for free. For example, the 2Miners pool initially paid rewards to ETH miners at its own expense.

That changed on August 5, 2021. At that time, the Etherium network upgraded to London and learned how to burn ETH as commissions. In addition, due to the introduction of the so-called base fee, pools lost the ability to make payouts for the lowest possible value.

Eventually, the 2Miners team came up with a simple and ingenious solution. ETH miners’ reward was converted to Bitcoin or Nano and sent to the user’s wallet. This way less money was spent on commissions. Read more about the scheme at the link.

The scheme proved extremely popular. In particular, there are more than 155 thousand miners in 2Miners pool today. ETH accounts for 116 thousand of them.

Cryptocurrency allocation at the 2Miners mining pool

A similar feature has now appeared for miners of Ethereum Classic, the second most popular cryptocurrency on 2Miners. It is becoming more and more common among miners due to the increased profitability of mining. For example, here are the profitability figures for mining on a single Nvidia RTX 3060 video card. Ethereum Classic is in second place and markedly outperforms the popular Ravencoin.

Returns on mining on an Nvidia RTX 3060

ETC’s rise in value is having an impact here. Over the past two weeks, the cryptocurrency’s value has risen by 90 percent, which means it has almost doubled in value.

Ethereum Classic exchange rate chart for the last 90 days

How to get Bitcoin for mining Ethereum Classic

To receive BTC, ETC miners need to do the following.

Get a local or mobile BTC wallet, or get the appropriate address at a cryptocurrency exchange. As mobile wallet we recommend Coinomi or Trust Wallet. From exchanges we can use Binance, Kraken, Gate.io.
In the miner’s settings, specify the BTC wallet address instead of the ETC address. Here is an example of a bat file for mining cryptocurrency with the Gminer miner. You can use Bitcoin addresses of SegWit, Compatibility and Legacy formats.
miner.exe --algo etchash --pool etc.2miners.com:1010 --user bc1qnkyhslv83yp0qsuxw0uj3lg9drgqq9c0auzc.
Once you start mining, go to the stats page by entering the wallet address in the search bar on the pool website. It will be displayed in the list of all pool’s miners along with regular ETC addresses. Also on the stats page you will be able to specify the required payout amount, with the figure being set in ETCs.

A guide on how to start mining Ethereum Classic - along with links to download miners and settings - is on this page.

Cryptocurrency miners

The 2Miners team uses the Binance exchange to exchange ETCs for BTCs due to the relative low number of deposit confirmations for Ethereum Classic. This requires 500 blocks, each of which takes an average of 13 seconds to create – i.e. about 2 hours per confirmation. Accordingly, a full round of exchanges and payouts would take around 3-4 hours.

On some other trading platforms it takes 1-2 days to confirm a deposit. Why so long? The reason is the events of the summer of 2020. As a reminder, the Ethereum Classic network then fell victim to the so-called 51 percent attack, and more than once. As a result, thousands of so-called orphan blocks were formed in the blockchain, and users lost time and money. So since then, exchanges have been reassuring themselves and setting aside a very large number of blocks for confirmation.

Why miners need a new payment system

Huge fees on the Etherium network were a consequence of the blockchain’s popularity and versatility. This year, however, Eth developers plan to move it to a Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm, which will cause miners with video cards to be replaced by validators with steaks, that is, a certain amount of coins locked into a deposit smart contract. Accordingly, compute hardware owners will be forced to switch to other cryptocurrencies – Ethereum Classic among them.

As users become more active and transactions are heavy, the fees are sure to increase – which will also happen if ETCs rise. Accordingly, many will want to save on them and at the same time get more popular cryptocurrency in the form of BTC to their wallets. And 2Miners miners are already ready for such a development.

It should be noted that Ethereum Classic can also be mined on video cards with 3GB of memory. According to Minerstat platform, ETC mining on such devices will be relevant until approximately mid-June 2022. Therefore, the cryptocurrency's popularity among miners may indeed increase significantly after ETH's transition to PoS.

Duration of Ethereum Classic mining on video cards with different memory capacities

As a result, Ethereum Classic miners on the 2Miners pool are already insured against a likely increase in commissions on the cryptocurrency's network. Most importantly, this payout system allows you to earn BTC directly without any unnecessary transactions, and this also applies to relatively old 3GB video cards.

We recommend that you join our community of miners on Telegram. There we will discuss other important innovations in the 2Miners pool and cryptocurrency mining in general.