Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies - Exploring Lesser Known Algorithms

Today's lesson on Cryptocurrency Mining for Dummies is Exploring Lesser Known Algorithms.

Previously we used Whattomine.com to get a quick analysis of which coin to mine for the most profit. But there is a drawback to this procedure, only 12 of the most popular algorithms are used in this analysis. Today we will go a step farther and show you how to the Coins tab to analyze other coins that use new or less popular algorithms and in the process possibly uncover a hidden diamond of a mining opportunity.

To start, navigate to Whattomine.com and enter your mining equipment, in this case we will be using a single EVGA GTX 1050 Ti.

Enter your electricity rate and click calculate to see the most profitable coins to mine for the 12 default algorithms.

As you can see, using the Equihash algorithm, Zencash is currently the most profitable coin to mine at 42 cents per day. Now click on the Coins tab.

You will see a list of over 200 coins that can be mined with either a GPU or Asic rig. Currently coins that can be mined only with CPU are not included. Scroll through the list of coins or enter the name of the coin you are interested in. In this example we are going to take a look at Smartcash because it has had a significant price increase recently and because new mining software was recently released with significantly improved mining performance for the keccak algorithm used by Smartcash. You can download the software here from Cryptomining-blog.com (a great source of news and updated software for crypto mining).

To get an idea of the profitability of mining Smartcash with this equipment, I created an account in a mining pool, then downloaded and configured the new mining software to use the pool. If you're not sure how to do these tasks, you can reference my previous Cryptocurrency Mining for Dummies -Lesson 3 which covered each step. Once the software is configured, go ahead and launch it and let it run for a few minutes until you get a stable hash rate displayed.

Now you can enter the hash rate for this algorithm into the Smartcash form on Whattomine.com along with your electricity rate and the estimated power consumption of your rig.

Then just click Calculate to see the estimated reward for mining Smartcash.

As you can see the daily estimated profit for mining Smartcash is 63 cents. This is 50% more profit than mining Zencash, the highest profit coin using the default algorithms, so I will be mining Smartcash for now. I hope you found this lesson educational and profitable.

Until next time...