My experience beginning mining Cryptocurrencies

in #aussie7 years ago

Now, I'm no hardcore miner. I've just bought a new PC and installed an Asus nVidia GeForce 8Gb Turbo 1070ti graphics card in it to see what it's all about.

I tested out NiceHash in the past and it's a very easy to set up and use mining application. Just go to the website, create an account, download the software and away you go! NiceHash is for nVidia cards only and is an awesome mining application if you are starting out. The UI is easy to navigate. Basically, you enter the email address you signed up to NiceHash with and click Start. It'll do some benchmark tests to see which of the available algorithms work best with your card and then start mining. The website interface is very user-friendly and you can quickly see how much your computer is generating, even if you're away from home and not able to see the PC screen yourself. NiceHash will mine multiple coins (whichever is most profitable) and at the end of the day convert them into BitCoin.

I next tried out AwesomeMiner as one of my friends highly recommends it. He has mining rigs and desktop computers all set up with AwesomeMiner and mining away happily. You can set up multiple Mining Pools and configure the software for Auto-Profit Switching.  What this means is AwesomeMiner will keep checking sites such as WhatToMine.com and find out the value of cryptocurrencies. Then, along with the benchmarks you run on first install, it finds the most profitable coin and starts mining it.  The software is less intuitive than NiceHash but still usable. You could even select NiceHash from the list of Mining pools and use AwesomeMiner to do the mining and profit-switching, then connect to the NiceHash mining pool and deposit the coins in that account. You could set up AwesomeMiner to connect to MiningPoolHub - another Mining Pool and configure it to convert to one of several different cryptocurrencies. AwesomeMiner is usable on both AMD and nVidia cards. If you have the free version of AwesomeMiner you cannot see what your machine(s) is/are mining remotely unless you install something like TeamViewer. However, for a reasonably low fee you can purchase an AwesomeMiner licence and get statistics on a webpage and set up email alerts for device overheating / machine rebooting / etc.

The last Mining software I have tested out and am currently using is NemosMiner. NemosMiner is for nVidia cards only and is less user-friendly looking than any of them. Basically, you see a CMD screen output in text only. Both of the previously-mentioned miners have Windows GUI interfaces - very nice to use. NemosMiner is all text-based and so may scare some people away. It's still easy enough to use if you follow some YouTube videos as I did. The video I linked to is handy, tho I'd recommend setting Playback to 1.5x as he talks slow. Still, the information is spot-on.  I've read several posts on Reddit praising NemosMiner and so it is the mining software I'm going to use for now. I may change at a later date but we'll see.  It currently says I can mine 2.564 USD / 0.00031 BTC per day. That's about $3.29 AUD which is my currency. It's not a lot, but you can't expect a lot from a single 1070ti graphics card. That works out to close to AUD$100 per month. It will take about 7 months for my 1070ti to pay itself off. At some stage I may purchase another 1-2 cards. I can fit 3 cards in my Asus ROG Strix motherboard so we'll see what happens.

I quite like the MiningPoolHub. I can set the final currency my mining will pay out to one of several coins. I've selected LiteCoin as its network is quite fast and fees smaller than most other coins.

It is possible using software such as AwesomeMiner to mine across multiple pools in multiple coin types, but from what I've read it's not recommended. You will be switching pools before your work has been completed and may miss some payouts.

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