Learn how to make bitcoins from your computer and earn money
With traditional money or fiat currency, the issue depends on a central bank, in the case of bitcoin there is no centralized entity that prints bills: cryptocurrencies are created through mining.
Currently there are more than 16.7 million bitcoins circulating and the maximum total that will be generated will be 21 million, as determined when this system was devised, in 2009. When you reach that top you will no longer be able to mine or create more bitcoins .
"Unlike the monetary policy of the countries bitcoin is totally predictable and can not be modified, which increases its usefulness as a reserve of value in the long term," he says, in dialogue with Infobae, Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar, president of the Bitcoin Latin America Foundation and co-founder and CEO of RSK.
What is mining about? When an operation is carried out in bitcoins (payments, collections or investments) a validation of the network that makes up this ecosystem is required. To process these operations, a complex mathematical equation must be solved. The power to reach that resolution is provided by the miners, who use specialized hardware and software.
"By solving this mathematical formula, the miners earn the right to write a new sheet (block or block) of the bitcoin book (blockchain or chain of blocks) and in doing so they get as a reward the 12.5 new bitcoins that are created in that sheet and in addition a commission for the transactions that register in that new sheet. For this reward to be valid, the thousands of nodes of the bitcoin network have to audit the new sheet and incorporate it into their independent blockchain copy. This decentralized audit is the reason why bitcoin is not hackable. On the other hand, the economic incentive motivates the miners to do their job well and remain honest, "Gutiérrez Zaldívar explains.
What is needed to mine bitcoins
The first step is to have a suitable device to mine. It is essential that you solve the calculation in the shortest possible time and with the lowest cost of energy for the user.
"Formerly it could be mined with CPU and GPU. Nowadays the bitcoin mining software no longer supports these two methods because it does not make sense in economic terms. Then you need the bitcoin mining equipment that is the Asics that is a specific hardware to mine bitcoin; details Gutiérrez Zaldívar.
It also requires software that connects to the network. There are different options such as Bitcoin Core, Easy Miner and BFGMiner, among others.
The bitcoins wallets or purses are spaces where the private keys that the user needs to access their bitcoins and do with them what they want are stored. There are desk purses, mobile applications and also in the form of hardware such as cards or memories.
These wallets are needed to store the bitcoins that are generated through mining or that are acquired in the market through the sale of products or services; or as an asset to invest. That is to say that anyone who treasures this cryptocurrency needs it.
Although the bitcoin network itself can be considered reliable throughout the group audit process on which it is based (blockchain), these wallets can be violated. In fact recently a millionaire hacking was released to NiceHash. So to keep assets safe you have to take certain precautions such as using double authentication factor, backing up the information and making sure the wallet is encrypted.
It is profitable?
When bitcoins are mined several factors come into play: the investment in the components, the electricity consumption and the hash rate, which indicates the mining power that will be obtained with the equipment that is destined to do these tasks.
This data can be reviewed in specialized pages, where the hash rate of the different hardwares is compared, such as the asics, which are currently used. In short: the higher the hash rate, the greater the possibility of mining bitcoins.
"You have to bear in mind that today bitcoin as cryptocurrency, because of the difficulty in generating resolutions and the number of miners in the network, is practically not viable or profitable to do alone", analyzes Camilo Gutiérrez Amaya, Director of Research and Awareness of Eset Latin America.
In the case of wanting to mine from a computer, you could use USB, such as Gekko Science, which is worth USD120. With this device, which has a capacity of 9.5 Gh / S and an efficiency of 0.33 W / GH, it would take more than 78 thousand days to generate a bitcoin, according to this calculator.
The possibility of making a profitable business with mining from a computer is ruled out. One could, on the other hand, try other more powerful options, which are not connected to the PC or the laptop, but are a mining team in itself.
Such is the case of AntMiner S9, the most powerful hardware for this type of task. With this device, a hashrate of 14 TH / S would be obtained, with an energy consumption of 1375 W, an efficiency of 0.098 W / GH (watts per gigahash) and a cost of 0.12 Kw / h. If you take into account that this equipment is around $ 6,500, according to the calculations on this page would have a return of USD 730 (to a price of USD 14,909) just in month 11, discounting hardware costs.
Keep in mind that the value of electricity varies by country and that, when acquiring this type of gadgets also requires an extra power supply that can cost USD 150. In turn, we would have to subtract the commission from the pool of mining that is approximately 2%.
And finally, it should be noted that the difficulty to reach the correct result is increasing according to how the network is growing, with which, those 730 dollars that are calculated according to the difficulty of the current network, can vary in a few months. The growth of the network in 2017 was dizzying, as shown here.
If in any case you want to do mining, even if it is not to have the experience, then you can resort to mining groups or mining pools such as AntPool, BTC or Slush, which are some of the best known. There a network of miners work as a team and get an income in bitcoin that is proportional to their contribution to the resolution of the algorithm or mathematical problem.
This type of mining is not profitable for the common user either. The ones that really make money with mining are the large mining farms (as the spaces are called with hundreds of mining equipment working in a network), many of which are in China, where the value of electricity is cheaper that in other parts of the world, Gutiérrez Amaya concludes.
Bitcoin mining is worth it if it is understood as a learning process or an experience but it is not recommended to generate money. At least, it is not convenient if it is done domestically.