I recently bought a usb bitcoin miner because I thought it would be a fun way to learn more about the bitcoin economy. I’ll be lucky to break even on my purchase after a year of running it, but that is still a better ROI than most of my hobbies. :D

The trick with bitcoin miners is that you need a computer running 24/7 to run the mining software that interfaces with the miner and the rest of the network. Seeing as how this miner is not powerful enough to even pay for itself, I didn’t really want to have a dedicated machine for it. Some people have hooked them up to a RasberryPI (cell phone sized computer), but I decided to try and get it running on a VM.

The obvious candidate for a usb pass through attempt would have been a VMware host, but I don’t currently have any running. Fortunately setting it up with Proxmox was easier than I had thought. The full details are here, but I will also provide a quick break down of how I did it.

1) Console into your proxmox host and enter the following command (replace with a id # of one of your VMs):

qm monitor

2)Enter this command and write down the bus and port number of the correct device:

info usbhost

3) Edit the config file for your VM from the console (cntrl-c to escape the previous tool) :

/etc/pve/qemu-server/.conf

Insert a line using this syntax: usb0: host=- 4) The VM has to be shutdown and then powered back on before the usb device will show up. A restart will not work. It has to be shutdown and then brought back up to pull the new data from the config file.

I ended up using a Windows 7 VM because I wanted to make sure USB pass through worked before I tried to get it working on linux. The miner has been running several days so far without any issues. So far I’ve mined .01 bitcoins, and my mining rate will only go down as more miners are brought online and the difficulty increases.

Source: www.marmotsoft.com