How To Start Mining Bitcoins
Bitcoin mining has been a pretty lucrative venture for years now and with its continued growth in popularity as both a digital currency and an investment tool, those who aren’t as familiar with it and are interested in getting involved should understand how to start mining bitcoins. Most sites you will find online are all specific to helping out advanced users so beginners would be lost if they tried to read their explanations. Well to combat that trend, this article will help those interested in learning how to mine bitcoins. A kind of step by step guide to bitcoin mining if you will.
Break out the picks and shovels!
The first thing you need to do is figure out if you can benefit or profit from mining bitcoins and the best way to do that is to use what’s called a bitcoin calculator. You will plug in the specs of the bitcoin miner you are interested in and check to see how long it would take you to start making a profit. To accurately gauge this you have to make sure you have a good chunk of money to spare. At least a couple hundred dollars.
From there you can choose the bitcoin mining hardware that you prefer but it’s worth noting that bitcoin mining is so competitive nowadays that you will need ASIC miners, which require you to have a computer that is specific to mining bitcoins.
The next step is to get yourself a bitcoin wallet, which literally acts as a wallet for your digital currency. You will be given an address that will read as a code of various numbers and letters and this will be what you use to pay for things. The address is specific to you and you will also be given a private key which acts as a password for your wallet.
Step three is to find yourself a mining pool. This is where you will start making money from bitcoin as a mining pool is a group of different bitcoin miners who join forces to make more bitcoins. This is necessary because bitcoins gain worth in what are called “blocks”. These are files in which data on your bitcoin network is recorded so it acts as a ledger for your transactions. They are usually grouped together in clumps of 12.5, and you usually won’t get any of those.
In this pool, you will be working only part of the algorithm and not the whole thing. Which makes it easier and faster to solve than if you were mining by yourself. Your combined work in the pool will allow provide you an easier path to solve the larger algorithm and that’s where you will earn bitcoins spread around the pool. In a nutshell, the number of bitcoins you make will be more consistent and your investment would be more lucrative in a pool.
Next, on your bitcoin mining agenda should be adding a program specific to mining on your computer that allows you to control and follow your mining rig. The software required really depends on the rig you are using but a lot of mining pools usually have their own but that’s not always the case. Mac users like to use MacMiner, and PC users usually use BFGMiner or 50Miner but it’s personal preference usually.
Now that you know how to start mining bitcoins, you can now begin your mining experience. All you have to do is connect the mining option you chose to your computer, turn it on and open up the mining software. You will then be asked to enter the mining pool you are in, insert your username, plug in your password and you are good to go.