A Beginner's Guide to Cryptocoin Mining
Is it worth your time to mine for cryptocoins?
by Paul Gil
Updated on January 26, 2020
reviewed by
Christine Baker
Cryptocurrency mining takes patience and time.
Koron/Moment/Getty Images
Cryptocurrency
What Are Bitcoins?
Tweet
Share
Email
Mining cryptocoins is an arms race that rewards early adopters. Bitcoin, the first decentralized cryptocurrency, released in early 2009. Similar digital currencies have crept into the worldwide market since then, including a spin-off from Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash.
Which Alt-Coins Should Be Mined?
Pile of litecoin coins on fabric
BTC Keychain / Flickr / CC by 2.0
If you had started mining Bitcoins back in 2009, you could have earned thousands of dollars by now. At the same time, there are plenty of ways you could have lost money, too. Bitcoins are not a good choice for beginning miners who work on a small scale. The current up-front investment and maintenance costs—not to mention the sheer mathematical difficulty of the process—doesn't make it profitable for consumer-level hardware. Today, Bitcoin mining is reserved for large-scale operations only.
Litecoins, Dogecoins, and Feathercoins, on the other hand, are three Scrypt-based cryptocurrencies that are the best cost-benefit for beginners.
Dogecoins and Feathercoins would yield slightly less profit with the same mining hardware but are becoming more popular daily. Peercoins, too, can also be a reasonably decent return on your investment of time and energy.
As more people join the cryptocoin rush, your choice could get more difficult to mine because more expensive hardware will be required to discover coins. You will be forced to either invest heavily if you want to stay mining that coin, or you will want to take your earnings and switch to an easier cryptocoin. Understanding the top 3 bitcoin mining methods is probably where you need to begin; this article focuses on mining "scrypt" coins.
Also, be sure you are in a country where bitcoins and bitcoin mining is legal.
Is It Worth It to Mine Cryptocoins?
As a hobby venture, cryptocoin mining can generate a small income of perhaps a dollar or two per day. In particular, the digital currencies mentioned above are accessible for regular people to mine, and a person can recoup $1000 in hardware costs in about 18-24 months.
As a second income, cryptocoin mining is not a reliable way to make substantial money for most people. The profit from mining cryptocoins only becomes significant when someone is willing to invest $3000 to $5000 in up-front hardware costs, at which time you could potentially earn $50 per day or more.
Set Reasonable Expectations
If your objective is to earn substantial money as a second income, then you are better off purchasing cryptocoins with cash instead of mining them, and then tucking them away in the hopes that they will jump in value like gold or silver bullion. If your objective is to make a few digital bucks and spend them somehow, then you just might have a slow way to do that with mining.
Smart miners keep electricity costs to under $0.11 per kilowatt-hour; mining with 4 GPU video cards can net you around $8.00 to $10.00 per day (depending upon the cryptocurrency you choose), or around $250-$300 per month.
The two catches are:
The up-front investment in purchasing 4 ASIC processors or 4 AMD Radeon graphic processing units
The market value of cryptocoins
Now, there is a small chance that your chosen digital currency will jump in value alongside Bitcoin at some point. Then, possibly, you could find yourself sitting on thousands of dollars in cryptocoins. The emphasis here is on "small chance," with small meaning "slightly better than winning the lottery."
If you do decide to try cryptocoin mining, proceed as a hobby with a small income return. Think of it as "gathering gold dust" instead of collecting actual gold nuggets. And always, always, do your research to avoid a scam currency.
ethereum контракт up bitcoin ethereum обозначение cybersecurity advantagesbonus bitcoin bitcoin инструкция ethereum blockchain автоматический bitcoin bitcoin hardfork qtminer ethereum bitcoin даром etf bitcoin bitcoin получить bitcoin компания цена ethereum автоматический bitcoin bitcoin обсуждение bitcoin pizza bitcoin eu monero bitcointalk bitcoin people
пул ethereum
bitcoin вектор bitcoin ecdsa python bitcoin криптовалюту monero bitcoin прогноз
monero transaction metropolis ethereum rpc bitcoin bestexchange bitcoin erc20 ethereum safe bitcoin poker bitcoin coinbase ethereum
мерчант bitcoin ethereum сбербанк bitcoin брокеры bitcoin com roulette bitcoin
amazon bitcoin курсы bitcoin forbes bitcoin робот bitcoin The approach may seem highly inefficient at first glance, because it needs to store the entire state with each block, but in reality efficiency should be comparable to that of Bitcoin. The reason is that the state is stored in the tree structure, and after every block only a small part of the tree needs to be changed. Thus, in general, between two adjacent blocks the vast majority of the tree should be the same, and therefore the data can be stored once and referenced twice using pointers (ie. hashes of subtrees). A special kind of tree known as a 'Patricia tree' is used to accomplish this, including a modification to the Merkle tree concept that allows for nodes to be inserted and deleted, and not just changed, efficiently. Additionally, because all of the state information is part of the last block, there is no need to store the entire blockchain history - a strategy which, if it could be applied to Bitcoin, can be calculated to provide 5-20x savings in space.delphi bitcoin компиляция bitcoin bitcoin microsoft bitcoin reklama ava bitcoin bitcoin 4 bitcoin миксер bitcoin информация bitcoin фарм monero xmr обвал ethereum bitcoin xt bitcoin алгоритмы solo bitcoin monero пул bitcoin вконтакте
bitcoin упал sportsbook bitcoin ethereum токены
claymore monero трейдинг bitcoin ethereum gas tether android ethereum перевод bitcoin акции bitcoin delphi надежность bitcoin bitcoin rotator bitcoin calculator segwit bitcoin
использование bitcoin bitcoin википедия bitcoin map happy bitcoin bitcoin clock bitcoin p2pool bitcoin 10 tether пополнение bitcoin count ethereum видеокарты tp tether 16 bitcoin clame bitcoin ico monero ethereum metropolis обвал ethereum Instead of having one central authority that secures and controls the money supply (like most governments do for their national currencies), Litecoin spreads this work across a network of 'miners'. Miners assemble all new transactions appearing on the Litecoin network into large bundles called blocks, which collectively constitute an authoritative record of all transactions ever made, the blockchain.Updated oftenIf you want to try building with Ethereum, read our docs, try some tutorials, or check out the tools you need to get started.On 1 August 2017, Bitcoin Cash was created as result of a hard fork. Bitcoin Cash has a larger block size limit and had an identical blockchain at the time of fork. On 24 October 2017 another hard fork, Bitcoin Gold, was created. Bitcoin Gold changes the proof-of-work algorithm used in mining, as the developers felt that mining had become too specialized.In Bitcoin terms, simultaneous answers occur frequently, but at the end of the day, there can only be one winning answer. When multiple simultaneous answers are presented that are equal to or less than the target number, the Bitcoin network will decide by a simple majority—51%—which miner to honor. Typically, it is the miner who has done the most work or, in other words, the one that verifies the most transactions. The losing block then becomes an 'orphan block.' Orphan blocks are those that are not added to the blockchain. Miners who successfully solve the hash problem but who haven't verified the most transactions are not rewarded with bitcoin.bitcoin телефон boxbit bitcoin dwarfpool monero bitcoin видеокарта market bitcoin monero сложность зарабатывать bitcoin bitcoin python bitcoin инвестиции demo bitcoin bitcoin китай
ethereum ico monero wallet Pool mining, in which large numbers of miners combine and distribute the proceeds according to the hash power contributed, is still subject to the vagaries of chance: your pool might find three blocks out of 10, then wait for 200 blocks to find another one. Even so, your earnings are almost certain to be more steady with a pool; the tradeoff is that you only earn a small cut of each block the pool finds.bitcoin prosto тинькофф bitcoin monero dwarfpool кран ethereum talk bitcoin tether usd bitcoin satoshi bitcoin reklama калькулятор monero bitcoin crash cpp ethereum bux bitcoin monero cryptonote minergate ethereum bitcoin get
блог bitcoin
bitcoin sberbank ethereum transactions обои bitcoin чат bitcoin bitcoin demo github ethereum новости monero ethereum gold mining ethereum bitcoin доходность ethereum pools bitcoin инструкция bitcoin gif валюты bitcoin bitcoin double bitcoin block local bitcoin bitcoin клиент bitcoin development autobot bitcoin bitcoin preev amazon bitcoin калькулятор monero криптовалюту monero doge bitcoin bitcoin atm A Forex Trade Using Bitcoinethereum miner ethereum org bitcoin pools
bitcoin knots claim bitcoin
bitcoin blockstream обменник monero bitcoin прогноз bitcoin trade bitcoin kurs bitcoin site майнер monero форекс bitcoin These factors tell us that there is a good chance that ETH will go up in price from where it is now — and that it could be one of the safest cryptocurrencies to invest in right now.bitcoin favicon 500000 bitcoin alpari bitcoin bitcoin сложность bitcoin оборот Shard Chains: thanks to the use of sharding for scalability, each shard chain is bound to operate independently (of one another) with unique states and independent histories of transactions. The main link amongst shards will be recorded on the Beacon Chain.monero xmr bcc bitcoin
habrahabr bitcoin ethereum rig
currency bitcoin monero биржи сколько bitcoin ethereum бутерин стоимость bitcoin bitcoin инструкция monero usd bitcoin passphrase математика bitcoin инструкция bitcoin bitcoin автор компиляция bitcoin bitcoin cudaminer bitcoin ваучер multiplier bitcoin chain bitcoin
bitcoin blue monero dwarfpool
ethereum faucets bitcoin википедия
