Beginners Guide to Crypto Mining?

I first heard about Bitcoin way back in 2012, my wife mentioned it to me over dinner "This Bitcoin is the future you know", I didn't have a scooby what she was going on about. She tried to explain it to me, but to be honest, my eyes started to glaze over and unfortunately for me, I didn't take it seriously, "a flash in the pan" I quietly and smugly thought to myself. If only I could rewind time and go back to that evening meal and say "what was that again, Bitcoin you say, tell me everything you know?".


Fast forward to 2018 and I'm Bitcoining like there's no tomorrow. Although I'm late to the party, and people have made lots of money from cryptocurrency, there's still life in the old virtual currency, in fact, there are lots of different cryptocurrencies out there, originally I thought only Bitcoin were the only ones at it, but there are lots of competitors to Bitcoin, one such player is 'Etherium' and lots of people prefer it over Bitcoin. In fact, JP Morgan and lot's of other large investors are seriously backing it. Then there's 'IOTA' which is looking good, described by many as the moonshot cryptocurrency to keep an eye on in 2018, the list feels almost endless.

But we don't need to worry about all that unless we're trading in cryptocurrency, the aim of a miner is to perform mathematical computations using our ever increasing amount of resource. Currently, I have a host of machines up and running and a new RIG which is currently in the process of being built. The journey has not been easy,  the learning curve is steep and getting your hands on hardware components is another story entirely, but with perseverance and lots of upfront initial investment, you will get there.

Prerequisites you should consider that might hinder your mining profits: 

Electricity - Make sure you're on the best tariff for your electricity, the national average in the UK is 14.37p per kWh, So, if you have a 200W desktop computer and use it for ten hours, you will have spent 2kWh running this device - 200(Watts) multiplied 10(hours) = 2,000, then 2,000 divided by 1,000 = 2kWh. This roughly translates to 28.74p to run over a ten hour period, mining operations are 24/7 365. The cheapest electricity supplier at the time of writing this looks to be Scottish Power.

Hardware - Don't use a laptop, it will melt under the pressure of mining 24/7 and return little profit. By all means, use it to experiment and see what site or software does this that and the other, but apart from testing, my advise would be to steer clear, sell it and put the cash towards buying a mining Rig.

GPU - Mining is all about the Graphics Processing Unit, the bigger the better, the cooler the better, the most efficient the better, the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti series have pretty much got this covered, no other GPU can currently compete, but be warned! These are very expensive to purchase and difficult to source, as soon as they become available, the stock is sold and limited to one or two per customer.

Circuit Breakers - Amperage capacity will catch you off guard if you are not careful, the typical household in the UK will come fitted with a 100amp main breaker, in some cases, this can be less. The problem here is running a typical Rig in your house with everything else going on, for example, if you were to build a Rig with 6x GTX 1080 Ti cards, that would need 2x 1000w PSU's to give you enough power and scope for overcloacking.

That's all for this post, my next post will talk about the best software for a begineer to get started.

thx