- Joined
- Oct 24, 2003
Hey guys, finally, 3 years later lol I get to update this 
(amazing how much info is still actual btw, from 3 years ago ..)
First, if you are curious what this whole thing is about please take a look at the following two articles on Wikipedia (I really don't want to type a whole history in here):
Now, what is mining ? in very simple words, mining is using your PC's CPU (still valid in 2021, esp with Ryzens) or GPU or specialized miners such as ASICs to produce cryptocoins. Cryptocoins are created, maintained and processed by running computations and mining basically means getting paid for supporting the network, that's what you really do.
OK, now the big question - is mining cryptos worth it ?
I will start by asking you to take a look at the overall market capitalization (over 1 trillion as of January 2021): https://www.coingecko.com/en
But its worth mentioning Bitcoin (BTC) mining has become nearly impossible for the regular home user who runs a computer with a video card or two (moreso now in 2021), it is now only an option for the big guns who buy specialized miners (ASICs), which cost ridiculous amounts of money and in time become useless as difficulty goes up.
A note here: Difficulty, what is that. Mining any crypto is subject to a difficulty (computations needed to achieve a result) and of course the more people join in and the more time passes, difficulty increases, as such keep in mind that what you make today, you probably will not make next week. But with some luck prices on the coin will go up or you will switch coins, that takes us to the next chapter of this intro.
What should you mine ?
First, Id like to say that here we focus on the home/hobby miner, not industrial levels, so here we go - the biggest alternative to Bitcoin is Litecoin (LTC), it's a coin that was still profitable for good ol GPUs until a few years back, but sadly it has fallen to the ASIC curse as well. So at this time and day we shall turn to Ethereum (ETH), Ravencoin (RVN) and so many others which are still great on GPUs,and we even have Monero (XMR) which is great on both GPUs and strong multi-core CPUs.
There are a ton of alternative coins (altcoins) available for mining and one can easily check which ones are profitable and how profitable by using a cross-calculator such as this: Note: to get an estimate of your computer's mining power you can check the following two links:
If you have decided you want to try this and need some help getting started, here we go:
This howto is a work in progress and will be constantly updated with new info, stay tuned
(amazing how much info is still actual btw, from 3 years ago ..)
First, if you are curious what this whole thing is about please take a look at the following two articles on Wikipedia (I really don't want to type a whole history in here
):Now, what is mining ? in very simple words, mining is using your PC's CPU (still valid in 2021, esp with Ryzens) or GPU or specialized miners such as ASICs to produce cryptocoins. Cryptocoins are created, maintained and processed by running computations and mining basically means getting paid for supporting the network, that's what you really do.
OK, now the big question - is mining cryptos worth it ?
I will start by asking you to take a look at the overall market capitalization (over 1 trillion as of January 2021): https://www.coingecko.com/en
But its worth mentioning Bitcoin (BTC) mining has become nearly impossible for the regular home user who runs a computer with a video card or two (moreso now in 2021), it is now only an option for the big guns who buy specialized miners (ASICs), which cost ridiculous amounts of money and in time become useless as difficulty goes up.
A note here: Difficulty, what is that. Mining any crypto is subject to a difficulty (computations needed to achieve a result) and of course the more people join in and the more time passes, difficulty increases, as such keep in mind that what you make today, you probably will not make next week. But with some luck prices on the coin will go up or you will switch coins, that takes us to the next chapter of this intro.
What should you mine ?
First, Id like to say that here we focus on the home/hobby miner, not industrial levels, so here we go - the biggest alternative to Bitcoin is Litecoin (LTC), it's a coin that was still profitable for good ol GPUs until a few years back, but sadly it has fallen to the ASIC curse as well. So at this time and day we shall turn to Ethereum (ETH), Ravencoin (RVN) and so many others which are still great on GPUs,
There are a ton of alternative coins (altcoins) available for mining and one can easily check which ones are profitable and how profitable by using a cross-calculator such as this: Note: to get an estimate of your computer's mining power you can check the following two links:
If you have decided you want to try this and need some help getting started, here we go:
- Get a wallet for the coin you chose to mine, download and install and let it sync, this way you will have where to store your coins. Most coins have an infosite, go to that site and download the wallet. An alterantive is to use the exchange, look at the exchange section below.
Quick note: for btc, the official wallet is super heavy (lots of history to download) so I recommend Electrum, a lightweight and very good all around wallet. Same for LTC
- Find a pool for your coin. There are a bunch of pools for about every coin out there so listing them here won't be feasible. However you can search the forums or the web or post in our cryptocoin sub-forum asking fellow forum members for advice.
A good resource to see how popular a pool is can be found here https://miningpoolstats.stream/ (this is actually important, because to find blocks and get rewards the pool must have a decent amount of hash)
Note: Many of us here on OCF prefer to run hassle-free auto-trade pools, these pools mine the best coin and pay us directly in bitcoin! example: nicehash.com, its easy to use,they have their own auto benching miner, and it pays directly in BTC.
No longer recommending nicehash due to corrupt miner incident which they tried to blame on the developer, though they didnt get it from the developer ...
- Get a miner.
* The best AMD/Nvidia gpu miner (IMO) for ETH and similar Ethash coins isClaymore's miner, obtainable herePhoenixminer, obtainable here
* The best AMD gpu miner (IMO) for ETH and similar Ethash coins is TeamRedMiner, obtainable here
* The best miner (IMO) for ZEC (equihash) is DSTM's miner, obtainable here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2021765.0
* The best miner (IMO) for XMR (cryptonight) is XMR Stak, obtainable here: https://github.com/fireice-uk/xmr-stak
- Set up miner. I will only address basic configs for now, but later I can come back with linux builds and so forth.
* Use a command line .bat file to start it with the arguments you need (actually most already come with a template these days). The arguments usually include the pool, your username on the pool and settings for the GPU. It looks like so: "PhoenixMiner.exe -pool eu1.ethermine.org:4444 -pool2 us1.ethermine.org:4444 -wal YourEthWalletAddress.WorkerName -proto 3".
Far easier than what it used to be in the older days btw
Note:it is always best to allow for max use of the GPU. You do so by opening a command line terminal (cmd from start) and entering the following two commands (without quotes): "setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0" "setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100" "setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1" "setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100" "setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100" or just adding these lines to the start bat file.
- Find an exchange for your coins. Major exchanges are:
Coinbase(biggest US exchange)
Binance(biggest world exchange)
Bitfinex(best margin rates, p2p rates)
there are others too, but these are the majors.
Note: the exchange deposit address can be used instead of a wallet, you can mine directly to the exchange, however keep in mind that holding large amounts of coin on exchanges can be risky, a wallet is a far more secure bank.
- Optional: Get a Bitcoin wallet (good options are Electrum or standard Bitcoin wallet).
If you want to hold long-term, it is best to hold Bitcoin and not altcoins, since Bitcoin is the yardstick to which all the others compare to at the end of the day.
- A decent multi-coin wallet would be Exodus, has a truckload of coins, very fain interface, but its less tested by me personally compared to Electrum which I can recommend after using for the past 7 years
- If you are gonna hold long term, consider earning some interest on it, a good investment platform would be BlockFI, you can earn up to 8.6% APY on your deposits as of January 2021 and if you use my referral link, you get a $25 bonus on your first deposit
- Alternatively, cash-out, buy stuff, be happy
This howto is a work in progress and will be constantly updated with new info, stay tuned
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