Get Started Mining

Introduction:

There are hundreds of different crypto-currency pools out there, some offering more to the miner than others. I am here to help my average Joe make the most out of his old gaming rig or his desktop in the basement collecting dust. As a quick reminder to all, do not mine on your laptop as its components are not made to withstand long term heavy usage of its components as they may easily fail and you will be left without a laptop. With that out of the way, let’s get started mining. First decide what coin you want to mine with your gear, remember that scrypt mining is much more profitable to mine than SHA-256 unless you have a super powerful ASIC. Once you have decided on which coin, you now have to choose what pool you will mine on.

What is Mining? + A little background Info

Mining in crypto-currency terms, is the process of maintaining the block chain of the coin that you are mining for. Miners constantly process payments and verify transactions as valid and add them onto the block chain in blocks. Miners are paid in transaction fees for each block. The concept of the block chain and an open ledger payment system started in 2009 and was created by Satoshi Nakamoto. Mining is a constant competition between other miners and the price of the coin and profitability. Since the end of last year to the present, there has been a constant competition between mining companies to control profit, and build the most powerful and efficient miners on the market at the time.

Where to Mine? The question of where to mine varies across each coin. Now, this may be tricky because there have been pools that have scammed its users so make sure you know if your pool is reputable or not. Some major names in the mining pool business are GHash.io, multipool.us, and clevermining.com. Other smaller, newer pools for specific coins offer incentives for mining on their pool to start to grow. One of these pools is 247doge.info which offers a 5% mining bonus on all dogecoin mined as well as a 1000 doge block finder bonus. Though these bonuses may seem great, I would highly recommend sticking to the trusted pools/multipools to avoid scamming and get quicker payouts. There are also some smaller cpu-only coins which do not have ASICs and are usually more profitable than Bitcoin and its variants such as Quarkcoin and Sourcecoin.

What do I mine with?

Many desktops have built in GPUs as well as CPUs, both of which can mine on the scrypt algorithm which has 100’s of alternative coins under its encryption algorithim. From a financial standpoint, if you can use your GPU to mine your coins, always choose the GPU over the CPU as they are more power efficient and more powerful in terms of hashrate. Slowly, scrypt ASIC machines, or (Application Specific Integrated Circuit), are beginning to take the market as they had done so with Bitcoin and SHA-256. The choice to invest money into a powerful, power efficient machine to mine you scrypt coins 24/7 or not is completely personal. MORE ADVANCED: Another more complicated attempt at using computing power for your profit is to use Windows Azure which is a professional cloud computing server service. Currently they offer a week long free trial in which you can get up to 20 free CPU cores to use for mining your favorite coin. For this service all you need is a valid credit card and a Microsoft account

Setting up your Mining Software

To mine scrypt right now, there is no easy miner like bfgminer or guiminer, so the miner will have to have a basic understanding of the command line and the usage of .bat files. The two best mining programs to use if you only have a pc/mac are cgminer for GPU’s and cpuminer for CPU’s. (See bottom for links to download as well as tutorials.)

Am I going to make money?

With most modern desktops, if you have a nice GPU, you may be able to say that you are in fact making money and paying off your power costs (and keeping a bit of money as well) with your mined cryptos. Personally, though I wouldn’t recommend pressuring your computer’s hardware to constant rigorous processing jobs 24/7.

Personal Setup

Personally, at my disposal, I have a 2006 desktop running Windows Vista and cpuminer hashing at 20 kh/s around the clock, and a Gridseed Infinity (also known as the 5 Chip). Gridseeds are the most common and currently readily available scrypt mining ASIC’s and started production in January with a 70 KH/s USB dongle and moved up to the Infinity which has 3 modes: Scrypt only at 350 KH/s, SHA-256 only at 11.25 GH/s, and dual mining mode which mines at ~8 GH/s SHA-256 and ~300 KH/s scrypt. I also have a 2013 i5 laptop that hashes at 26 KH/s but I don’t use it because of the massive risk that it poses on the longevity of my hardware.

Conclusion

In conclusion, right now is the perfect time to get into scrypt mining as you aren’t limited to a single coin like with Bitcoin under the SHA-256 algorithm. If you are a smalltime miner or potential miner I would personally recommend the 5-Chip ASIC from Gridseed on GAWMiners or ZoomHash.com. If you think that you want to get more ahead in the mining community, I would personally recommend purchasing a Gridseed Blade from GAWMiners as it isnt a preorder, it doesn’t take much power, and it costs about $1500 in total. Honestly, for the current miner, I think that you shouldn’t take interest into any preorders from KnCMiner or any others right now as shipping dates are not certain and the future is also unclear (mining difficulty, price of coins, etc) I would not recommend purchasing a dedicated GPU at this point unless you have intentions to mine an ASIC resistant coin (one that cannot be mined with current scrypt or SHA-256 ASICS), or if you plan to resell/reuse the GPU for gaming purposes.

If you are new to the Crypto-Currency community, welcome and I hope you found this little informational article helpful in some way. Thanks for Reading and Have a Great Day :D, Taylan

Written by Taylan Unal (Last Saved 2014-08-03)