This guide is incredible -- very well laid out and organized (and pictures too!). Very noob friendly. I'm going to give this a shot in the morning , since I'm a total linux noob. Great work pfunk!

Great effort looks like a lot of effort went into writing this guide, i will give it a shot when i get home! :)

Excellent guide, thank you for posting it. 
Once you have mined a block and have a new account it shows 1 steam here on steamit. In the cli_wallet it shows 7700+ vests in the account. I tried the withdraw_vesting command, but that says it will power them down and takes time.  Is there a way to just transfer the vests to steamit?

Nice job pfunk!

Nice! 

I'd be interested to see if you actually see a performance improvement, however, from setting the number of cores *lower* than the maximum number (at least when you're using the host machine at the same time)... Reason being that in most hypervisors (I could be wrong here, so someone please correct me if I am...) the VM will only be scheduled CPU time when all cores are available concurrently.

If you're using the host machine at the same time, this is going to mean that whenever you're running even a single process with a single thread, the entire VM is off-CPU because in order for the guest OS to do that multithreading, it needs its full contingent of cores simultaneously (having no real awareness of the host system).

Again, my previous disclaimer about possible factual inaccuracy stands (I don't know what work has been done on hypervisors here within the last few years, and I wouldn't be surprised if VMWare player runs completely in userspace and therefore does some crazy weirdness), but it would be nice to see a comparative load test if you're set up for it!

wow got 100% increase.
http://imgur.com/3cAUQNp
mining-threads = 4

Wow. Fantastic! Thank you for taking the time to put this together.

If I'm trying to use an existing account, which WIF key/permission should I use? Owner, Active or one of the others? 
>If you have an account already, you can get the key you need to mine to that account with by going to your Permissions page on your Steemit profile: https://steemit.com/@yourusername/permissions

I went through all comments, and it looks like I'll be the first one to ask: which mining algorithm is used to mine steem? Is it SHA256 or scrypt?

Best guide ever!!!  It still works as of my post (Windows 7 AMD).  I would suggest adding a FTP\GIT download of the blockchain if possible.

Nice Job

Fantastic Article, currently loading the blockchain to my VM. Hopefully my i7 4790 still packs a punch!

Thanks very much. But one quastion. What about NVIDIA cards? Can I mine with nvidia cards?

Quick question how or where do I get another account from without actually making one, if I just input "will-zewe1" will it automatically make a new account for mining? I know how to get the additional keys off bitaddress I'm just not sure where the account name comes from...

Every time there's a problem with the network (like when hacking occurred or this morning when there was interruption for an hour) my miner stops. When i try to run it again, it's not working. Instead it says  on the first line error parsing logging config from the config file (config.ini). I haven't changed that since initial setup. And then the miner starts, but it gives all errors.
It says error when pushing block, unlinkable block exception, block does not link to the known chain. Once again I didn't change anything, just restarted the miner after the miner stopped working. Is there anything that I can do to fix that?
Thanks

what blok are steem right now ?

now I am getting this when it was building the blockchain http://prntscr.com/bu3ha1   do I just wait?

Problems with this error code with building steem:

    FC_ASSERT( hardfork == hfp.last_hardfork + 1, "Hardfork being applied out
       ^

What to do?

hi pfunk,  i followed your guide and make it work, but the problem is i 've never get any POW for 2 days, and i'm running Core i7-5820K 3.3Ghz

hi i have followed these instruction to the t several times and i can not get this to work for me the program starts then immediately crashes the the first time it start to load blocks but they were all red after that it just crashed

fav

I had running miner. But tell me where to see how many Steem that miner is working?

Great guide, It has been fun to get it all together. 
If anyone has any advise? I have made it to step 9 and entered "screen -t steemd ./steemd" It did not go so well. When I click the enter key the screen flashes and I get the message [screen is terminating] 
I did start over  twice and received the same flash and message.
Aloha and Mahalo!