Using BTC Smart Agent

BTC Smart Agent is a stratum proxy for large-scale mining farm, only supporting BTC/BCH/UBTC/LTC.

You can download the newest version of it from here: 

BTC Smart Agent optimizes the stratum protocol, greatly simplifies the data volume. It will greatly improve the communication efficiency between the farm and the pool, saving bandwidth and stabilizing connection. According to actual estimates, after deploying BTC Smart Agent, running 5,000 miners only needs 1Mbps bandwidth which is only 10% of the consumption of direct traffic. The download only takes 1/2000 of direct traffic.

Also, with the general mining proxy, all miners will combined with one, you can’t find a separate miner in the pool’s control panel. But with BTC Smart Agent, all miners can be found from pool’s control panel, just like when they directly connect to the pool. And you can do any management action (example: sorting, grouping) as normal.

However, BTC Smart Agent uses its own protocol to connect the pool. So you can use it only with BTC.com pool.

How to use

  1. Download the software package and extract. There are two versions:

    • “Win7 64bit” for 64-bit Windows 7/8/8.1/10. It cannot run on Windows XP.
    • “WinXP 32bit” for 32-bit Windows XP/7/8/8.1/10.

  2. Enter the folder you extracted and double click “BTC Smart Agent.exe”.

  3. Setting an agent port. It’s 3333 by default. Miners will connect to the agent with the port.

    • If running more than one agents on the PC, please choose different agent ports for different agents.

  4. Change the host from “cn.ss.btc.com” to “us.ss.btc.com” or “eu.ss.btc.com” if you mining at US/EU region. And input your sub-account name.

    • Keep all the sub-accounts name are the same. If they are different, the second will not be used until the agent cannot connect to the first pool server.
    • All miners connected to the agent belong to the same sub-account. The miners’ sub-account config will be ignored.
    • If you have some miners and want to miner with two or more sub-accounts, please run two or more agents. See the section of “Multiple Sub-accounts”.

  5. If you have a VIP address, add a new item to “BTC Pool Servers” and input it (the port is 1800 by default). Then move the VIP address to the top of the list. And you will get a more stable connection.

    • (Keep “*.ss.btc.com” as a backup server.)

  6. Then save config and start the agent service.

    • Click “Save & Apply”, the agent service will running.
    • Click “Start” button after click “Save”, the agent service will running too.
    • Click “Cancel” if you want to drop your change.

  7. It is recommended that checking the “Start service on login” check box. So that the agent service can recover itself after the system is restarted.

    • At Windows 8/8.1/10, an “User Account Control” dialog will popup after you check the box. You must click “Yes” or the setting will failed.
    • It is recommended that the PC running the agent is no password at the login phase. Or you have to input the password before the agent “auto start.

  8. A “Windows Firewall” dialog may pop-up after the service running. Please allow it with checked all check box, or the miner could not connect to the agent.

    • If you missed the dialog, you can find it again from “Control Panel > System and Security > Windows Firewall > Allow an app through Windows Firewall”. Click “Change settings”, find “agent.exe” and check all check box after it, and save. Then miners could connect to the agent.
    • If miners cannot connect to the agent too, you may try disable Windows Firewall.

  9. After the service runs, the miner can connect to it. Click “How to configure miners” at the agent and copy these configs to miners.

    • For bitcoin newbie: you need one of bitcoin miner before you can mining at BTC pool. The “BTC Smart Agent” is not a miner, it just a proxy that optimizing the network connections from miners to BTC pool. If you have no miner, you could buy an Ant Miner. But all miners that supporting “Stratum Mining Protocol” can work fine with the agent (most miners in the market support the protocol).

There is a video about these configures：

 

 

Multiple Sub-accounts

  1. One agent only run for one sub-account, and all the miners connected to this agent belong to the same sub-account.

    • If you want to mining with more than one sub-accounts, you should run multiple agents for different sub-accounts at the same time.

  2. Simply copy agent folder and you will get another one. Assign a different agent port for the second agent, and it can run simultaneously with the first one. Then, you can distinguish the miners tied to different sub-accounts by different ports.

  3. No matter how many agents you are running, each configuration is unique. Set each agent as “Start service on login”, and they all will auto run when your PC starts.

There is a video about these configures

FAQ

  1. Showing “Service stoped unexpectedly, auto restarted n time(s).” Check if the sub-account is correct. Specially, input a sub-account belongs to the US region with the host “eu.ss.btc.com” will cause the issue.

    • If it’s correct, then check the port or network connection.
    • Or whether or not you run two agents with the same agent port? Notice that the first agent may hidden to system tray.

  2. How to check if the agent is connected to BTC pool？

    • If the later log shows, it works:
      • auth success, name: "your sub-account", extraNonce1: number

  3. How will the agent logs when miners are on-line or off-line?

    • When miners are on-line, the log will show:
      • miner connected, sessionId: number, IP: miner-IP
    • When miners are on-line, the log will show:
      • miner disconnected, sessionId: number, IP: miner-IP

  4. I want to report an issue. How to send the logs of agent?

    • Just pack and send the “log” folder, it contains logs in 7 days.

  5. Will the logs of agent full my hard disk?

    • Usually not. The agent will remove the logs generated at 7 days ago.

  6. How many bandwidth the agent needs?

    • For download bandwidth, it same as 5 miners connect to BTC pool directly. For upload bandwidth, it depends on how many miners you have. But the upload bandwidth will reduce 20 times than direct connecting.
    • With the agent, you could run all miners with mobile 3G/4G network and an acceptable fees.