It’s awesome and cool that Arweave is a decentralized storage platform where my mirror.xyz blog posts are stored. Even if the mirror platform disappears my blog posts are still out there, all over the world, for me to access and retrieve.

What’s even cooler than that though, is that I can contribute to this decentralization myself by running my own Arweave miner! How cool is that?

First things first, if you don’t have an Arweave wallet already, follow this guide to create one. You will need a wallet address to start the mining operation, so it knows where to send your rewards!

We will start by following the Arweave Mining Guide. However, since my machine is a Windows 10 machine, the first thing we need to do is to install the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is a feature that is available on Windows 10 and higher and allows you to run a Linux (Ubuntu) Virtual Machine (VM) right inside/on top of your Windows 10 operating system.

With that done, the next thing we are going to do is to download the .tar.gz archive for the OS from the releases page. I am going to download the arweave-2.5.3.ubuntu18-x86_64.tar.gz file and save it on my C:\ drive in the downloads folder.

In the Ubuntu VM I browse to the following path (C:\ is my local hard drive, and jacob is the username on my computer, yours might/will vary).

cd /mnt/c/Users/jacob/downloads

If you do an ls command, you should see your file in the list. Now to copy the file into the Ubuntu VM, run the following command to copy the file into the Ubuntu VM home directory.

cp arweave-2.5.3.ubuntu18-x86_64.tar.gz ~/

Now if we change directory to the home directory we should see our file there

cd ~
ls

Now, the next step is to unpack the file. I am creating a specific Arweave directory for these files. Note: You will need to be in the same directory as the tar.gz file (and not the Arweave directory you created) or this will not work.

mkdir arweave
tar -xzf arweave-2.5.3.ubuntu18-x86_64.tar.gz -C /home/jbenson/arweave

At this stage to avoid the error “error while loading shared libraries: libtinfo.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory” when starting the miner, install the libtinfo5 package with the following command. Shoutout to the Arweave Discord Server FAQ’s for making that so easy to figure out.

sudo apt install libtinfo5

Now to actually start the miner make sure you are in the Arweave directory and then run the following command. The part at the end is a NSFW content list that will ensure you aren’t hosting any data that is on that list.

./bin/start mine mining_addr wUXCeIyfv6gjstdIR7kjlco_P9LLFmJtY-XBZjJqwVk peer 188.166.200.45 peer 188.166.192.169 peer 163.47.11.64 peer 139.59.51.59 peer 138.197.232.192 transaction_blacklist_url http://shepherd-v.com/list.txt

If it works you will see a bunch of stuff like this, congratulations! You are now contributing to the decentralized storage network!