Looking for a way to earn some money or crypto by doing almost absolutely nothing? Mining cryptocurrency is a great way to do this. When you mine cryptocurrency your computer is doing its very best to try and solve hundreds of computer calculations every second to contribute to the block chain.
Why Mine Cryptocurrency?
When your share of hashes are accepted you earn a small amount of that cryptocurrency that you are mining for a reward in contributing to the block chain. Wondering why mining needs to be done? Well you probably have sent a crypto transaction before. Notice the text on the wallet or blockchain explorer that you use says something like, confirmed 0 times, right after you send it? Well when your transaction is confirmed it means that miners around the world solved valid computer calculations to add your transaction to the blockchain. One block on the bitcoin blockchain can contain approximately 3500 transactions and miners mined to add those transactions inside the blocks to the chain. Now if nobody was mining crypto your transaction would never be confirmed making crypto completely useless.
What Hardware Should You Use?
It really depends on what cryptocurrency that you plan on mining. If you want to mine Ethereum you want to mine with a GPU. If you want to mine bitcoin you want to mine with a GPU and a CPU. If you want to mine Monero you probably want to use a CPU. All the cryptocurrencies use either a GPU or CPU or both. How would you know which one to use? Well usually the hardware needed to mine the cryptocurrency is listed on the mining pools website. If you want to know what GPU or CPU to mine with, there are plenty of websites that can help you calculate your profits including electricity costs and similar things you need to pay for. It all really goes down to one thing, that your hardware is capable of mining with a profit and your not losing money because your hardware uses to much electricity and you end up paying more for electricity than you mine. So make sure that you keep that in mind while you are purchasing the right hardware.
The Best Mining Software
In order to mine with your hardware, you need a program or mining software to communicate between your components and the mining pool. There are several different programs out there but they all have different features. Some mining programs have a GUI while others are operated through a terminal or through CLI, some have higher fees than others, and some have faster mining speeds. What miner should you use then? Well I have 3 miners to tell you about. The best crypto miner for your computer is NiceHash. NiceHash has been one of the leading crypto miners for a while now. They offer better mining speeds and higher profits as you mine any cryptocurrency but get paid in btc when mining on their pool. NiceHash can also be configured to mine on different pools. So if I was you, I would pick the nicehash miner. NiceHash also has a easy to use interface and they automatically detect and install the firmware or software needed to mine with the hardware you have. XMrig is my second choice for mining because its the best cpu miner out there. It mines RandomX coins mainly but will also mine a couple other coins. It only has a 1% dev fee and they have the fastest mining speeds out of all the other crypto miners. XMrig even runs on a raspberry pi its so good (if you want to learn how to install that on a raspberry pi go check out this other article). It's not as easy to set up but once you get it set up its super powerful. The next miner is T-Rex because it's one of the more known gpu miners out there. Its super fast and it only has a very small developer fee. Now choose the miner for the purpose you need because you can mine a GPU cryptocurrency with a cpu miner!
What Pool To Use?
There are even more mining pools out there then there are miners. It's much more difficult to find the right mining pool then it is to find the right miner. Now I have a mining pool to tell you about but if you have your own pool in mind you can just skip this part. If you are new to crypto mining, you should go with . This is one of my favorite mining pools as you don't want to mine for a pool that has the majority of the mining power as that is called centralized and you want decentralization. 2Miners is also my favorite because they allow you to mine many cryptocurrencies and you can solo mine. I currently mine XMR with my Raspberry Pi 4 non-stop and I make about 0.02 a day. This is going to be one of the best pools that you mine at. Now just to WARN you do NOT mine at MinerGate. They are a scam and they steal most of your profit after stealing most of your hashrate. They claim to be a better mining pool but do not mine for their pool. Just going to say this real quick PPS stands for pay-per-share and it speaks for itself and PPLNS means you get paid for your contribution to the block when it is added to the chain. PPLNS is the more profitable payment type so I would stick with this.
How To Start Mining Cryptocurrency
Once you have everything you need you can start mining cryptocurrency. The first think you need to do is install the miner of your choice. Then you need to configure that miner and for some nicer mining software they will do this automatically but for XMrig you want to head over to their configuration wizard and make a configuration and then download the config file and move it to the build directory of xmrig. Then you just need to start the miner. Now if you are mining with XMrig on linux and you are not mining with a raspberry pi go to the scripts directory and run the enable 1gb hugepages and the randomx boost scripts. They just boost your hashrate and when you go to start XMrig run it with sudo as this boosts your hashrate quite a bit. On most miners if you need to figure something out just go to their site and they should list how to start mining with it.
Conclusion
Now that you know how to mine cryptocurrency go ahead and mine it. Make sure you are making a profit though and that you are having a good time while doing so.
