What is ben-g-miner?

Ben-G Miner is a complete setup for mining Bitcoin using an NVIDIA graphics card, connected to your own Bitcoin Knots full node and a DATUM gateway rather than a commercial mining pool. It bundles a patched version of the bfgminer software, the Bitcoin Knots node software that builds the blocks you attempt to mine, the DATUM gateway that connects your setup to the wider Bitcoin network in a decentralized way, GPU support through OpenCL, and a background service so it keeps running without you needing to babysit it. The README is unusually blunt about the economics involved. It states plainly that a single consumer GPU produces such a tiny fraction of the total mining power on the Bitcoin network that, mining alone, you would expect to find a valid block roughly once every 9,370 years, while still paying for 150 to 200 watts of continuous electricity use. The author describes this directly as a technical proof of concept and educational experiment rather than a way to make money, and states outright that if your goal is to own Bitcoin, you should simply buy it instead of trying to mine it with a GPU. Setting it up requires a Linux computer, generally Ubuntu, Debian, or Arch, with an NVIDIA GPU that has at least 6GB of memory, a synced copy of Bitcoin Knots, and the DATUM gateway running in Docker. Installation is a matter of cloning the repository and running an included install script, after which mining starts as a background system service and its progress can be watched through the system's logs. The project is released under the MIT license and its README lists several supporting documents covering installation, configuration, troubleshooting, and how the system is architected. It also includes a performance table comparing hashrate and power use across several NVIDIA GPU models.