How To Mine Bitcoin From Home Using Start9 (Free Tutorial)

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]This is Matthew Crowder's Bitcoin University. Today I want to talk about how to mine Bitcoin from home using Start 9. A disclaimer first. I'm not being paid or compensated in any way by any of the companies that I mentioned in this video, including Start 9, Ocean, Brains, Playit.gg, etc. Now, here's our goal today, which will prove, I think, to be an amazing tool in the toolbox for every serious Bitcoiner. Our goal today is to use someone else's mining rakes in order to do industrial strength Bitcoin mining at your own house. Now, the sky's is the limit here. There's no noise, there's no maintenance, there's no high electricity bills. A Bitax, a really small Bitcoin mining rig that you can put on your desk. It's a great project.

[00:00:41]A Bitax is great if you want to mine at one terraash per second. A much larger Bitcoin mining rig ASIC called an AMP miner S21 is great if you want to mine at 200 terraash per second and you don't have high residential electricity rates and you don't mind a bit of noise in your garage. So that's if you want to mine at one terraash or 200 terraash.

[00:01:01]But what if you want to mine at one pahash? One pahash is about a thousand bit axes or it's about five noisy ant miner S21s. The equipment which current currently costs $7,000 just for the equipment. Not to mention, if you have a high residential cost of electricity, this is yet another reason why if you want to mine at one pahash per second or more, you might choose instead to use rented hash rate. Currently, it costs about $36 to mine at one pahash per second for one day. And you'll get most of that money back. In the example I showed over the last week, I actually made something like 25 30% on my money doing that. But you should expect to lose a little bit of money. So, this is a way to exert your influence over the Bitcoin network to reserve some block space for yourself. It's important to point out as well, this is not scammy cloud mining. This is renting Bitcoin Shaw 256 hash rate from other people's mining rigs and then building your own block templates using your own datam gateway and Bitcoin not node, which means that you'll be able to directly verify the proof of work is being done by that rented hash. Although there's no way to be cheated here, unlike cloud mining, which will which relies on multiple layers of trust, mining your own Bitcoin at home can give you non-KYC SATs, the ability to decide what goes into a Bitcoin block. This will prove increasingly important. For example, if you hate spam, you can exclude all spam from the blocks that you mine. If you hate spam and you want to help to signal for the Bitcoin soft fork that's going to undo the damage that Bitcoin core has done over the past few years, you could also mine from home using rented hash and include the BIP 110 flag in your blocks that you mine, thus helping to signal for the minor activated soft fork part of this soft fork. Yes, you and I can be miners as well. Rented hash rate mining empowers Bitcoin plebs while helping to reverse Bitcoin mining pool centralization. Now, today's video was supposed to be part two of this video, which I'll put a link to in the description notes below. This was part one, but over the last few days, I've learned a new and easier way to do this.

[00:03:01]So, I'm going to make this into a standalone video instead of it being part two. If you want to watch part one though, there's still some useful tips.

[00:03:08]For example, about how to upgrade Start OS. If you're running Umbreal or other systems instead of start 9, I'll put a link as well to this resource, which is sort of the master resource for a lot of this. It's called ransomash.com.

[00:03:20]And if you look at the top here, it'll show you how to do this using a fresh VPS node setup, using umbrell and using start OS. So, we'll be following along roughly using this guide, but we're going to be adding a new app that I don't think has been widely seen before.

[00:03:37]So, here's what you'll need to complete this video. You'll need a Start 9 server, preferably updated to Start OS version 0.4.0. This is the brand new system. So, your screen will look like mine. That's one reason to do this. I think you'll still work with the older 0.3.5.1 operating system. So, you'll need a Start 9 personal server. You'll need an account at hashpower.brains.com.

[00:03:59]And you also need a premium, in other words, a paid account at playit.gg. A premium account costs uh $3 per month.

[00:04:07]Now, if you're smart enough to know how to use an iPhone or other smartphone, you're going to find the Start 9 personal server really easy to use, so don't be intimidated. It's designed for English majors like me. while also having incredible power if you're more technically proficient. When you get your Start 9, you just plug it into your home router and an electrical outlet and then you follow along with the simple setup instructions. Now, you can buy or build your own Start 9 server. If you have the cash to throw at it, I would just suggest getting a server one or Server Pure. Server One currently about $800, but you can also build your own for much less than that. I'll put a link to Paul Lamb's video here as well as Forest Hodel's videos here as well. If you are currently running the old operating system running 0.5.1, I'll put a link to this which shows you how to update to start OS the new the new version 0.4.0.

[00:05:01]And then there's also this I wanted to point out this resource which if you built your own server, you need to pay $300 to get access to tech support over at Start 9. Their software is open source, but if you want this sort of community support and tech support, you can pay $300 for it. But the good news is this product is free. As it says here, it's free with the purchase of a Start 9 server. So, that's an advantage.

[00:05:25]Uh that might be an advantage of just buying one of these as well. Again, I don't work for Star9. I'm not being compensated in any way. I'm just a happy customer who loves my Start 9 server.

[00:05:34]And once you realize the power that it gives you, the power it gives you to coin join, to set up Lightning channels, and also to mine from home, as we're about to see. Now, once your Start 9 server is set up, it's easy to access using a browser on any computer that's on your home network, in other words, on your Wi-Fi at home. And if you're using the new operating system 0.4.0, this is what your installed services will look like. You can see here that I'm running a Bitcoin node. I'm running Bitcoin Knots plus to signal for BIP 110. I'm running Datam Gateway, which we'll be talking about. I'm also running my own instance of the Mempool app. So, there's lots of cool stuff you can do here. So, that's the first thing to do. You need a start nine server. Then you need to install as I said bitcoin knots plus bip 110 or regular bitcoin knots if you prefer as well as datam gateway. I already have those installed here. But the way you would install them they're free apps from the marketplace. You can just go here and you can see already bitcoin knots plus bit 110 is already available here or you can do a search as well. So I did a search for datam and all you need to do then is you just click on this and it will automatically install. It's a lot like using the app store or the Google Play Store. So, you'll need those free apps on your Bitcoin um I'm sorry, on your Star9 server. You'll need the Bitcoin knots.

[00:06:47]You'll need a node node software like that. You'll need datam gateway. And here's how it's going to work. Here's the big picture of what we're setting up. Your Bitcoin knots node software will collect new Bitcoin transactions from the Bitcoin network. Your datam gateway will package them up into a new Bitcoin block, technically a new block template. And so once we've done that, all we'll need is just to find someone to hash the new Bitcoin block or the block template to see if we can get it accepted by the network. In other words, get it mined. Now, since we don't have powerful Bitcoin mining rates at home, we're assuming this and we have high electricity rates where we live. We're going to buy the hash power. We're going to buy the hash rate from someone else.

[00:07:24]We're going to buy from this hash power marketplace called Brains. And so, that's the next thing you need to do.

[00:07:29]You need to open up a free account with them. Verify your account using Telegram. If you've just used it on your phone, you can uh it'll show you how to use it on your screen as well to verify stuff. This is going to basically factors to this is basically going to function as two-factor authentication.

[00:07:44]So, you'll need an account with brains hash power. If you want more privacy, if you're interested in the non KYC SATs angle, use a burner email and a burner phone number. If you want more privacy, you'll need that phone number obviously for Telegram. Next thing to do after you've set up your account with Brains is to send some SATs some send some Bitcoin to the Bitcoin address that Brains will provide. Start really small.

[00:08:04]I would suggest 50,000 maybe 100,000 sats. And it's important to note, very important to note again, all of this is experimental. This whole setup and everything. So, play around with small amounts of money and start with very small amounts with brains because any money that you deposit there can never be withdrawn again. They don't want to be regulated as a custodian and so they will basically keep your money. The only way to get it out is to use it to pay for hash power. So, start with really small amounts until you get the hang of things. Again, Brains does this for regulatory reasons. So, they don't get end up being classified as a custodian.

[00:08:37]So, anything you sent send in there is assumed to essentially uh be used in the future to pay for hash power. I'll put a link to Brains Academy here which contains a lot of resources about Brains hash power including how to create your account and account management. And when you have it all set up, it will look like this. You can click on account.

[00:08:56]It'll provide a Bitcoin address. You can send some SATs in there. And then we can see what the marketplace looks like. We have bids. We have buyers on the right and then we have sellers of hash which is essentially just brains on I'm sorry we have the bids on the left and the sellers of hash on the right. We'll look at this in a little bit more detail and then you can click on here if you want to place an order to rent hash rate to point at your datam gateway. So that's the next thing. We've got our start 9 server. We have our brains hash power account. The next thing to do is to open up an account at playit.gg.

[00:09:29]This will cost you only $3 per month.

[00:09:31]You'll need the premium account. Play it premium. You can see I'm paying $3 a month for this. So, it's very, very self-explanatory. I'll put links to all this in the description notes below. You basically sign up and set up your premium subscription. It was I had a little trouble actually finding where to sign up for it. I think I I can't remember exactly where I found it, but it was maybe under billing or or subscriptions. You can also Google how to subscribe to that uh buy the premium subscription. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to install another Start 9 app. We already have Bitcoin Knots running on there. Bitcoin Knots plus BIP 110. We have datam gateway.

[00:10:06]This new app is not available yet in the marketplace for Start 9. So, we're going to load it in a way that's called Sideloing. And this new app is called Hash GG. It was written by Paul Lamb, who I often refer to his videos. He's also a subscriber to this channel. Um, a great guy. And as you're going to see, this is a great app. This app will connect your datam gateway stratum port to the public internet through playit.gg tunneling. That's why we need playit uh playit.gg. We're going to be using that instead of start tunnel on start 9 at least for this video. No port forwarding or static IP is required. If you if you get a static IP, for example, static IP address from your ISP, there's always a chance that people can if they know that IP address, they can use it to figure out location. So that's one of the risks. You also don't want to have to open up your router to the internet.

[00:10:59]It's not a good idea. Uh open up some ports on your router. That can come with its own problems. So the nice thing about this, this will connect your datam gateway stratum port to the public internet. You don't need port forwarding. You don't need a static IP.

[00:11:11]Miners and hashers then anywhere via brains in this case connect your can connect to your gateway your datam gateway using the public endpoint displayed in the dashboard of this app hash GG. Now, it's so important to always verify new software before installing it. You can use the terminal.

[00:11:28]What I'm going to use is Sparrow Wallet here, which I've used in a lot of videos. I'll put a link if you want to download it. This is a free desktop Bitcoin wallet, and you can download it for your operating system. I'm going to be using it to verify the release, the software release, which is important to do. This is Paul's app. This is Hash GG, which is on Git GitHub. I'll put a link to in the description notes below. says here, "Expose your datam gateway stratum port to the internet via playit.gg.

[00:11:55]Sovereign hash routing for start OS. No port forwarding required." If you scroll down here, you can see the releases on the right side. And there may be later releases by the time you watch this.

[00:12:05]I'll click on that. I'm going to be installing version three of this software. And as part of that, I'm going to check the signatures and check the hash. And so, you have two choices here.

[00:12:16]If you're running the old the old operating system on start 9, you'll download this one uh 0 0.3.5.1 essentially. And I'm going to be using the 0.4.0. That's what that means. So, you just click on these to download them. And I'm also going to download uh the Shaw 256 sums as well as the ASC version of that. That's all we need. If you want to use terminal, you can uh use these commands up here. But for the sake of this, basically I've downloaded it into the same folder. I've downloaded it into my download folder on the Mac. Next thing I'm going to do to verify the software. Um this is admitted admittedly an optional step, but I think it's wise to to always do this. I'm going to go right here to Sparrow. I'm going to go to tools. I'm going to go to verify download. And then you want to put the program itself right here, the S9 package. That's where the actual uh release file is. And then in terms of signatures, I'll click here and I want to put the ASC version right here. Next, I want to put the uh the plain SHA Shaw 256 sums right here. I forgot to mention that you need to download the public key for Paul Lamb. And so, um you can do that. You can just go to his website right here and uh download the GPG key.

[00:13:37]I've already done that. And so what we can do is we can go here. I think I have it in my download folder as well. It's right here. It's Paul's code.Aasc.

[00:13:47]Once I click that, it can verify the software and it shows that it was signed by Paul Lamb. The release hash matches and so it's all been verified. It's ready to install. So now that we've verified the software, verified the software release, we can go back to start 9. go back to our our web browser interface for this. And now it's time to sideloadad this new app. And so what we'll do is we'll click sideload here.

[00:14:09]We need to select the package. Uh we can see that it's right there. We'll click open. And then we'll click install. And we'll wait while it installs. Okay. Once it's fully installed, you'll just click on it here. And then you're going to want to start it. And we'll wait for that to get started. We can see that it's passing all the health checks. We got two green check marks here. So, the next thing to do is to open the UI. And then at this point, it'll give you two choices. You can do this using a VPS tunnel, maybe use Digital Ocean for that. Uh, in this case, we're going to be using playit.gg because I think it's a little simpler. So, we will click select. When you do this, it's important that you already have playit.gg uh in a in a browser tab and that you subscribed to the premium subscription.

[00:14:52]So, I'll just click select for this.

[00:14:55]It says it requires a subscription to playit.ggremium.

[00:15:00]I'll just click start setup. Now for the wizard, I just need to click on this link in my browser. At this point, you'll see an IP address. You'll probably see your location. I'm going to black all this out for obvious reasons, but you basically want to just scroll down and follow along. It says this agent is requesting self-managed permissions. This will allow the agent to create and delete tunnels for itself.

[00:15:20]I'll just click continue. This is the claim agent. I'll click add agent. And so now if we go back a tab, we can see our mining endpoint. This is basically the stratum server that we're going to be pointing to. You want to make sure that tunnel is green, datam gateway is green, and agent is green. So that's basically how you sideloadad hash GG. If you need some paid assistance, if you need help with this, it worked pretty smoothly for me. But if you need some help, you can always book some time, some paid time with Hash GG's creator, as I said, Paul Lamb. You can go to paulscode.com. Also, if you love this app and you're using it with no problem, then consider sending Paul a tip over lightning. Here's his LN URL. It's a PayPal. It's sort of a pun on PayPal, I guess. PayPal at paulscode.com.

[00:16:03]So, be sure to send him some SATs if you're finding this useful. It's much easier to use this way than uh the way that I've been uh trying to do it. Okay.

[00:16:11]Now, the next step is to go back to Brains and buy some hash rate. So we can see here they're currently have uh about 1xahash or 879 pahash per second available. The bids again are on the left. The offers are on the right. So if you want to play the game of trying to get filled at a good price, you can put in a limit order here. What we're going to do is just lift one of the offers.

[00:16:34]You can see on the right here it says available. All of these none of these have hash available. It looks like the next price that hash is available is at approximately 48,000 sats. Um, another way of doing this, we could go to hash rate index. We can go over here and see the price in US dollars to hash at one pahash for 24 hours. We can see it's currently at 36.47.

[00:16:59]We can go here to this converter. That's about 47,860 sat. So, we can see hash power on brains always traded a little bit of a premium to that. And so we can eyeball this. I'm just going to use the maximum as you're going to see to make sure that we get filled. Uh but you can play some play some games here. You can have some laddered uh buy limit orders. What we want to do now is click uh so I went to orders. I was at market. I went to orders. I click create. And then we need to fill in these blanks. I'm just going to use uh this looks a little bit high.

[00:17:30]It says 48,000. Uh I'll just lower this to 48,000. Um, and again, you can look at the limit order book to see where you should be. I'm going to use my max budget for this, which is 133,000 SATs.

[00:17:42]I'll probably cancel this after making the tutorial. And then we need to put in the mining pool URL, the stratum. So, we'll click copy here. And then we'll paste and put that right there. And next thing we need to do is to have a payout address, a Bitcoin address. So, we'll go back to Sparrow. This is the same payout address I've been using for these public tutorials. So, I'll copy that Bitcoin address. I'll go back to Brains and I will paste it right here. So, now I have my mining pool URL. I'm going to be mining with Ocean. I'll be doing poolled mining, but I'll be building my own blocks and block templates using using uh Datam Gateway. I have my payout address for the Bitcoin mining rewards.

[00:18:22]And now, it's just a question of deciding on the speed limit. It looks like recently, it didn't do this before, but recently it's been requiring you to mine at one pedash per second maximum.

[00:18:31]So if I mine at that speed that speed limit and again the hash rate will fluctuate on delivery but this number of sats 133,000 sats paying this for the hash rate this order will give me hash rate at one pahash per second for 24 hours for about 2.8 days. So now I just hit create bid and then it's going to ask me to approve it inside of telegram.

[00:18:53]So I'm going to go do that. I'll be right back after I do that. So now if we go back to brains hash power under orders we can see that my bid is working and that there is hash rate being sent uh currently at 0.98 pahash per second.

[00:19:07]You can see the progress here. If you want to cancel your order at any time there's something like a 5m minute grace period during which you can't cancel in the first 3 four 5 minutes but after that you can cancel. You just click this X. You can also adjust your bid. So now delivering we can see it will fluctuate above and below one padash per second.

[00:19:24]Before it was at 0.98, now it's at 1.22.

[00:19:28]Now back to 0.98. Next thing to do is to take that Bitcoin address and to go put it into Ocean just to see uh to see if we're getting hash over there. So I'll copy that address. I'll go to ocean.xyz.

[00:19:42]Then I will click on dashboard. That will take me to this right here. I'll click on my stats, my stats, I'm sorry.

[00:19:49]And I'll paste in the Bitcoin address.

[00:19:51]And then that will give me uh that will show that I'm hashing or if I'm hashing.

[00:19:56]We can see this is the same address I was using before for this public demo.

[00:19:59]And I was trying this out last night as well. You can get rid of the blocks if you want to see the hash rate. We can see the far right side here. It's just beginning to send some rented hash my way. And then if we scroll down, we can see currently not quite up to one pahash per second would be a,000 terraash. So currently at 281, this will begin to fluctuate. This will fluctuate quite a bit at the beginning. Once you've been doing it for a couple hours, you'll see it pretty steady. You'll be able to see your earnings here. You'll be able to download that as well as if you scroll all the way down, you'll see your lifetime earnings. I have some earnings already in here from previous tutorials I've done on YouTube. I've currently about 533,000 SATs. In order to get a payout, you'll need to have at least a million SATs, uh 1,48,576 sats to get an automatic payout to that Bitcoin address. There's a way to set this up using lightning as well, which I can show you in a later video, but if you do this for a while, you'll be sure to hit uh hit a million sats. The idea, too, is to collect these sats as quickly as possible, and then use them again, recycle them to rent more hash rate. So, it looks like we are, if we scroll down again, look one more time, uh down to 18 terraash here. But over the past 5 minutes, we've been averaging about 150 terraash. This should ramp up pretty quickly and uh run for 2.3 days delivering one pahash. The one thing I forgot to show you in the initial setup which you should do before you place your ocean brains bid. This is a little bit backwards but you should go to datam gateway. I always forget the details of how this works but basically I'm at services here. I click on datam gateway.

[00:21:36]I click on actions. Uh you want to go to stratam server settings I believe it is and scroll uh no it's not that one sorry uh first thing we'll do is go to datam uh what are the settings here it says datam datam gateway settings we'll click right there and if we scroll down we want to select collaborative reward sharing so this is for pulled mining click require and then click uh click submit so make sure you have that set and then I believe it's under maybe it's under minor settings you can enter your Bitcoin address that you want to be paid out too just to make sure that they have that as the default in there. And if you mine a block, it will say it will say datam and then it'll have the secondary Coinbase tag. So you can put whatever you want here. You could put your name, you could put uh your name of your dog.

[00:22:21]I just put Satoshi Nakamoto for this demo. Then you'll click submit. So those are all the settings you need in Datam Gateway. Basically, we're all set. We're using Start 9. We're using the Bitcoin node, uh, Bitcoin Knots on Start 9, and we're using Datam Gateway to build block templates. And then we're renting hash from brains and sending it through the playit.gg tunnel to that stratum endpoint which I showed right here. I think anyone can actually mine to this.

[00:22:48]If you point to this um it would be interesting to test whether it goes to your Bitcoin address or my Bitcoin address. But you can play around with this. I might delete it at some point.

[00:22:56]So actually it's a don't don't play around with this because if I delete it and you have a bid over it o over at brains that might mess things up. But that's basically how you do it. We can take a look at the hash rate over time.

[00:23:08]You can see how it's fluctuated. The main reason it's come down is because the price of Bitcoin has come down. As the price of Bitcoin goes goes back up, the price of Bitcoin hash rate should move up as well. So, we can see it was almost double where it is now is at $60 per pahash per day rather than closer to 30 or 35. But we will monitor this for now. This is extremely cheap. for spending $35 per day, you'll probably get 95% of that back as I said. So, this is how you mine Bitcoin from home. And if you successfully mine a block and you are running um you running uh BIP 110 Bitcoin knots plus BIP 110, it will have that flag in the block as well. So, that's really exciting if you want to use this to help to signal for the upcoming soft fork. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to hit the subscribe and like buttons. Hit the notification bell if you want to be notified when I publish my next video. And let me know your questions and comments in the comment section below. Thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next