There are pros and cons to each pool, but for the most part it won’t matter which one you choose. There are different pools for each altcoin, though some pools switch between different currencies, based on rising and falling values. The rest of this guide will assume that you’re mining in a pool. You can choose to mine solo, but for anyone just getting into altcoin mining, a pool is a better choice-especially if you’re not mining with a room full of powerful PCs. This streamlines the reward structure and makes your payments more reliable. In a mining pool, many users join forces to mine as a group, and all reward payments are split up among the group, according to how much computing power they’ve been contributing. If you’re not running a bunch of super-fast mining computers, it’s possible you’ll never be the one to hit the milestone and receive the payment. Instead, they’re given out in big chunks when particular milestones are hit, to whoever hits those milestones. When Bitcoin mining, payments aren’t received in a steady, gradual flow. The first is whether to mine solo or participate in a mining pool. To pool or not to pool, that is the question You can join a mining pool before this process is done, but because you might need to run it overnight you should start now.īefore you start mining there are two important decisions to make. Once the client is installed it will have to download the entire blockchain for the altcoin. Go to the homepage for the currency (Litecoin’s site is at ) and download the client, which allows you to store coins in a “Wallet” on your computer. You can pick any coin you’d like (we chose Litecoin for this article), but the process will be virtually identical for any other coin. It’s only a few steps, which you muist follow exactly to ensure success.įirst, select a currency to mine-you can find a list of the most active altcoins at CoinMarketCap. The mining process involves writing a short script to run in the command prompt. Altcoins are great way to learn more about cryptocurrencies, but we wouldn’t suggest you quit your day job just yet. Turning altcoins into cold, hard cash is also more difficult than monetizing bitcoins. You can then spend the altcoins or swap them for bitcoins at a cryptocurrency exchange. Unlike most altcoins, bitcoins can be spent at a number of e-tailers like and Tiger Direct.įor obvious economic reasons, the ease of mining an altcoin is basically inversely proportional to that altcoin’s value. It’s still possible to be successful at altcoin mining using traditional PC graphics cards, like AMD’s Radeon R9-280.īecause altcoins are less popular, and because many altcoins use a different kind of mining algorithm called “scrypt” that can’t be solved by the ASIC boards, you can still feasibly earn these altcoins by running the mining program on your personal computer. Even the burliest desktop PC with huge gaming GPUs won’t be able to generate enough money mining bitcoin to cover the cost of the electricity used in the process. These chips, called ASICs, are so good at mining that it’s pretty much impossible for normal, general-purpose hardware to compete. As a result, companies have designed chips solely for running the cryptographic algorithms bitcoin uses for mining. In order to incentivize people to participate in this transaction-verifying network, bitcoins are periodically generated and awarded to the machines engaged in maintaining the public ledger.Īs bitcoin values have soared over the last couple of years, bitcoin mining has become a very lucrative business. Bitcoin accomplishes this using cryptography (hence the “crypto” in “cryptocurrency”), in a process that requires many computers, all connected in a single peer-to-peer network. It has to be impossible for anyone to record a fraudulent transaction. If you try to send somebody else 5 bitcoins tomorrow, that transaction will be rejected because it’s a matter of public record that your wallet doesn’t have the coins.įor the system to work, the public ledger has to be completely trustworthy. For example, if you have 10 bitcoins in your wallet and send 7 to someone else, that transaction goes in the ledger, and everyone knows that your wallet only has 3 bitcoins now. The Bitcoin software works this way: Every time somebody spends a bitcoin, that transaction is recorded in a public ledger. What it means to mine a bitcoin or altcoin
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