How to Mine Bitcoins With a GPU Using CGMiner
5 stars based on
51 reviews
Most of the sites that teach an in-depth way of mining Bitcoin are written for professional coders and people who have advanced into crypto mining. So you might not find them a lot more helpful if you are no experience or skills coding for Ubuntu, Linux and Mac. For starters, given the high value of Bitcoin -- even a single coin -- it is a very competitive field.
As more people get on-board, difficulty to mine -- which is determined by the difficulty algorithm -- increases each day. So the starting point is to determine if it will be profitable for you, even before you plan for a mining rig.
This is very important because you might need to buy specialized hardware. A Bitcoin mining profitability calculator will save you many hours of doing the math. These calculators can tell you whether you are headed for profitability depending on the cost of electricity at your locality, hash rate the cost of hardware and other variables. Here is an example of a mining profit calculator to use.
Some terms are technical but which you need to be familiar with before or in the process of mining- Even using a calculator. Hash is the mathematical problem in blockchain that the miner should solve to get rewards and the rate at which a miner solves them is called hash rate. Further, the hash rate refers to the hashing of the algorithm used to produce a checksum when users are verifying file's integrity.
Hash rate is also used to refer to miner's the mining machine's performance. The number of Bitcoins created when a mathematical problem is solved. Starting with 50 at the time Bitcoin was created, the number halves every four years and the last time it halved was July It will half again in The current number of Bitcoins awarded per block is The Bitcoin difficulty increases to match the network's hash rate.
Mining Bitcoin is power intensive and your bills will increase as you run the miners. It also depends on your miner's power consumption, which you can check on this list, in addition to the cost of power in your location. Mining Bitcoins at home alone comes with its problems that affect profitability.
You can join a mining pool where you pay some fees and then the miners in that pool divide profits among themselves depending on the miner hash rate of each member. This is one of the main factor s everyone wants to hear before starting to mine.
And since it is hard to predict how difficult it will be to mine in future as no one knows how many people will join the network at any given moment, how much profitability to expect in Bitcoin mining is a very difficult question to answer. Therefore, you may want to keep evaluating profitability and profitability decline factor from time to time yearly. Conversion rate also varies from one market to another and with time.
Still on profitability, the other thing to consider before venturing in Bitcoin mining is the actual ROI or return on income. Compare it with ROI for buying and selling Bitcoin you might get surprised that buying and selling coins might be more profitable than actually mining, for which you might need to not spend the money on mining.
Bitcoin mining is profitable if you get it right but do not expect to get rich overnight. You also need good amount of investment. However, still on the question of profitability for Bitcoin mining, there is the alternative to mine altcoins. You might also read an article about masternodes, a good alternative to mining these days and alternatives to proof of work. Read this article on the top 10 crypto to mine right now and the ROI to expect on mining other cryptocurrencies. Simply put, it is hard to get profit on a CPU mining machine, the reason people have been running for GPU miners as the difficulty of mining went up on in the years, but these are less profitable these operations so ASIC miners are more specialized devices.
Read this article on the to ASIC miners in the market. While Antminer S9 is the newest and most powerful miner, you can go through reviews to determine what's best for you.
Miners differ in Hash Rates. Their power efficiencies differ as does their power consumption, hash rate, dimensions and weight, revenue in vacuum and certainly their price and overall rating among miners. There is also the option of mining on the cloud.
Cloud mining is a popular option for many people too. With it, you rent computing power from a different company and set up to mine. You avoid all the hassles of buying expensive equipment, storing it and cooling it. However, most of these are not profitable and there are scams that do not even own a single equipment and will want you to rent.
If you want to try, a good company is Genesis Mining which runs cloud mining but do your math first. Also read more on top cloud mining companies here. This is the first to go for even before starting to mine because it is where you store the Bitcoins after mining. Once this is done, all you need is the PUBLIC bitcoin address for the wallet and obviously the private key that serves as password for the wallet.
Once you download the wallet for a self-hosted walletget a copy of your wallet. This prevent you from losing Bitcoins if the computer ever crashes. Read this article on Bitcoin wallets. Mining pools comprise of individual miners combining their computing power to make more Bitcoins. Going it all alone is tricky for making some money because Bitcoins are awarded in blocks, usually In a pool, miners share out the algorithms such that everybody has smaller and easier algorithms to solve and then all the combined work makes it more likely to solve the bigger algorithm and earn Bitcoins that the people mining them share out, minus the fees for the pool.
In a pool, you can make good returns for as long as it is a good pool. You can go through Bitcoin mining pools to identify a good pool.
You miner needs a program to get started. The software to select depends on the mining rig you got. Most rigs come with their own software. Connect the miner to power and to computer via cable and locate the software and run! For a pool mining, set up a pool for Bitcoin, enter your username and password for the mining pool and your Bitcoin wallet address. April 5, April 8, David Kariuki. Is Bitcoin mining profitable for you and me? Familiarize with the miner options Simply put, it is hard to get profit on a CPU mining machine, the reason people have been running for GPU miners as the difficulty of mining went up on in the years, but these are less profitable these operations so ASIC miners are more specialized devices.
You can read this guide for more details on which miner to choose. Get a Bitcoin wallet This is the first to go for even before starting to mine because it is where you store the Bitcoins after mining. Join a mining pool Mining pools comprise of individual miners combining their computing power to make more Bitcoins. Which immediately turns the focus on the question, which is the best mining pool?
A mining pool gives you a worker ID after you sign up and add the "Worker.