What is CRYPTOMINING?- All you need to know
- Kumar Piyush
- Dec 9, 2017
- 3 min read
Do you have an old PC collecting dust? Do you want to earn money doing nothing? Are you a complete idiot (probably not!)? Well you might have heard about the great talk these days, cryptocurrency mining or simply cryptomining. In this blog, we're gonna be discussing about everything you need to know about this methodology of earning money.
We discussed a bit about bitcoin and how it works in this blog: Bitcoins- An introduction. Cryptocurrencies are not regulated by any particular Government or organization, most of them are decentralized and rely on the miners for their legitimacy and efficiency. So let's now dive into how this system works and how you can become a miner.
Cryptominers are people with systems with suitable hardware which are made to solve math problems called "hashes". The solutions to the hashes are added as blocks on the blockchain which helps the blockchain to determine the legitimacy of a particular amount of the cryptocurrency, say bitcoin. The math problems which the miners solve is actually needed to check and regulate if the currency just used is real or made up. Miners also regulate the transaction between two nodes and verify the legitimacy of their currency. For all this labor, the miners are rewarded with certain amounts of the cryptocurrency, after the cut of the marketplace they use to sell their hashing power.
The speed of a particular rig is measured in Millionhashes per second (MH/s).
After discussing what you'll do as a miner, it's time to discuss how to become one. As a beginner, you certainly don't need to invest big on your rig with FGPA or ASIC.
GPU mining is the most common mining technique to start with. So choosing the GPU is a bit tricky. Although the GTX 1080ti has the highest hash rate, its power consumption is also drastically high. An RX 580 should serve you fine as a perfect proportion between cost and performance. To measure the efficiency, you gotta see the hashes generated per watt. In this aspect, the RX 580 outperforms other cards. So after you've decided the GPU, you can throw in any processor, ram, mobo, it doesn't really matter as mining is exclusively a GPU dependent load. After you have your rig up and running, there are just a few steps before you start making money.
You have to choose a wallet for your cryptocurrency to store your earnings. There are 4 types of wallets you can choose from: desktop wallet (downloaded on pc and credentials stored on your pc), online wallet (credentials stored online), mobile wallet (downloaded on phones and credentials stored on your mobile) and hardware wallet (a hardware device used to store your credentials). All these have different service providers to choose from. After you have chosen a wallet, say an online wallet, you'll get a wallet URL. Then you've to choose and download a marketplace where you'll sell your hashing power. Some of them even provide a profit calculator that let you enter your electricity rates and provide you with your real-time profits. Once you have your marketplace installed, launch it, after the setup procedures, provide it with your wallet URL and you're all done. It will run its algorithms and you'll start earning right away.
Things to note before you flow away in emotions:
*The system has to run all day.
*The profits you'll earn with basic equipment is not very substantial.
*The value of these cryptocurrencies is very unstable, if you invest big, you may be in great losses
if the value of these currencies decrease. For instance, the value of 1 bitcoin has risen from
$2500 to $16000 in the past 2 months.
That's all you needed to know about this sizzling topic. Happy mining!
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