The crypto currency mining resources below will help you gauge your mining needs. You will be able to determine if crypto mining is profitable for your situation. Then determine which mining pool to use, which miner software to run and where to purchase new mining hardware.
Determine if mining is profitable
Is mining profitable? This question is constantly debated. Should you mine or just buy the coin / token. Use the links below to help determine if mining is profitable. These online resources will calculate an estimated daily profit by using current price, current mining difficulty, electricity rates and other variables. Keep in mind these are guide that will help you determine a general direction.
Also note that these calculators are not that accurate for the following reasons:
- No miner is up 100% of the time. Consider 20-30% downtime.
- Difficulty is constantly changing based on the number of miners on the network
- The price of the crypto currency is constantly changing
Asic miner profitability sometimes looks great but by the time you get your miner from over seas profitability tanks. Please do your own independent research. Nothing here is a recommendation.
Mining Pools and resources
The links below contain information on the most active mining pools on the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks. Popularity does not mean trusted. Mining pools implement various services to provide transparency for their customer (for example real-time dashboard, alerts, etc.) to help gain trust. Miners should research different mining pools to determine:
- which pools operate in a transparent manner
- Mining pools that have a payout that make sense for the miner
- which pools have a good reputation
- Pool stability and resiliency
This BTC graph shows the market share of the most popular bitcoin mining pools.
This ETH graph shows the top 25 miners by the number of blocks each miner mined and the percentage mined on the Ethereum network.
Bitcoin Mining Software
- CGMiner – One of the oldest bitcoin mining programs still running
- BFGMiner – Designed for FPGA and ASIC mining
- MultiMiner – Developed using the mining engine of BFGMiner with a nice UI
- Awesome Miner – lets users manage multiple mining rigs and miner’s pools
Ethereum Mining Software
- Team Red Miner – is an optimized miner for AMD GPUs
- GMiner – Supports multiple algorithms and cryptocurrencies. Works with both Nvidia and AMD, but it gives preference to Nvidia
- T-REX Miner – multi-algorithm mining software optimized for NVIDIA GPUs
- lolMiner – multi-algorithm mining software developed for AMD graphics cards
If you are a small miner with only a few GPU’s you can try NiceHash. Their software scans your PC’s hardware and determines the most profitable coin to mine. Read this tutorial on how to setup NiceHash and learn about potential profitability.
Mining Hardware
There are several important factors to look at when determining what mining hardware to buy. These factors are hash rate, efficiency and price.
- Hash rate – How many hashes per second can the Bitcoin miner produce?
- Efficiency – You’ll want to buy the most energy efficient bitcoin mining hardware possible.
- Price – How much does the bitcoin miner cost?
Bitcoin Mining
Bitcoin miners are purpose built machines that use Asic hardware. An Asic (application-specific integrated circuit) is a type of circuit that has been designed for a single specific purpose. A few popular Asic (application specific integrated circuits) hardware mining companies are:
Bitmain – Bitmain makes the AntMiner line of Bitcoin miners. They are based in Beijing, China and also operates several mining pool.
MicroBT – MicroBT is a Chinese ASIC miner manufacturer, based out of Shenzhen.
Canaan – Canaan put the very first commercial Bitcoin ASIC miner to market. In addition to making Asic mining machines Canaan also has a suite of blockchain tools and business solutions.
Ethereum Mining
Ethereum miners are built using standard computer with 1 or more GPU’s (graphics processing unit). Due to a GPU’s power potential vs. a CPU, or central processing unit, they have become more useful in blockchain mining due to their speed and efficiency. Computer parts and GPU’s can be purchased from any computer store or Amazon.
To build a mining rig you need the basic parts to build a computer (motherboard, memory, cpu, power supply, mining frame and GPU. If your motherboard supports multiple PCIE lanes you can run multiple GPU’s (which increases your efficiency).
We hope the crypto currency mining resources above helped you become more informed about the process.
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