Here’s how anyone can mine Bitcoin.
Firstly you have to understand that the amount of coin that you mine is all dependant on something called hashrate. The best hashrate obviously is through mining with dedicated hardware, which I will come on to later in this article.
I will also add that you may have better opportunities mining other cryptocurrencies if you don’t have good mining hardware. I’ll explain that later as well.
Important note, remember to correctly check out the cost of mining, it may be cheaper just to buy and hold cryptocurrency. Remember that some mining hardware has high electric costs. Although 70% of Bitcoin is mined from solar power, reducing the costs there is still the initial outlay so work out your return on investment before diving in.
Web Browser and Phone App for mining.
The Easy way – through your phone or web browser.
I will warn you this is very slow – unless you pay to increase your hashrate. But there are free options. –
Stormgain – Browser-based trading app – also on the phone that has a mining option but you have to restart it every 4 hours.
Cryptotab Browser – Browser-based – actually their own app you install which is pretty easy to get started with.
I run both of these at once. If you don’t want to spend money to increase your hashrate you can go ahead and
Generally, it doesn’t load the system up too much.
Renting Mining Hardware through the web
Another way of mining is to rent mining hardware. Provided you can make a profit out of it this means you don’t have to invest in your own hardware/computers or pay for electricity.
Genesis mining is a good option but they are currently out of hash power for rental.
Be careful with these though – there have been a lot of fake mining sites that are honeypot scams, where they take the money and provide a return, but one day disappear completely with your investments. If you are unsure please contact me for more information as most of them use the same website template. Anywhere offering free hash power can be dangerous.
I notice eBay are offering mining options but I am very concerned that a lot of these are scams. Check that the return from the mining contract on eBay actually is not more expensive than going to buy the crypto directly through eToro or another broker.
For example, I saw this advert for 500 Dogecoin at £349.00.
To buy 500 Dogecoin right now on eToro would cost you only $168.00 (price correct at time of writing). So this person would effectively double their money.
Let the buyer beware! Generally, I would avoid doing this as a method of mining because it’s so open to scammers. Is it even possible to tell what is real and what is fake?
Nicehash has a mining pool where you can rent hash power. But again, make sure that the cost you are paying actually provides a return.
Mining on your PC
Mining on your pc will be only effective depending on what hardware you have. So if you have a high powered graphics card you are more likely to make money using this method.
Nicehash is the easiest way they offer some really good packages. Including a Nicehash miner bootable USB – which I love I can just boot to it with my PC when I’m out or asleep and let it collect the money.
Nicehash is a mining pool where you can mine as part of a group.
I like Nicehash because it’s easy for anyone to set up – ok it only runs on Windows unless you use their operating system (best option if you want to mine). My gaming PC actually is running Nicehash right now.
I am using the Mining OS because obviously not running anything else apart from the miner is the most efficient route. You can download the flash operating system and copy it to a flash drive then boot your PC or Laptop with it.
Nicehash has been around a long time. Note:. you have to turn off Windows Defender if running under windows because Microsoft (what a surprise, not) think that Bitcoin mining is a virus. Again make sure the electricity that you use covers the cost.
This is my gaming PC that just started up.
As you can see it only reckons on making 1 euro every 24 hours. It probably better to mine something else apart from Bitcoin – but nicehash only supports Bitcoin. I’m going to do another post on mining individual cryptos like Monero.
Note that using most retail computers to mine Bitcoin is probably not financially viable unless you have powerful graphics cards (NVIDIA preferred). But the best way is to simply try it!
Dedicated Mining hardware
There are essentially three types of dedicated mining hardware, note you can use Nicehash to combine your rigs.
ASICS
ASIC stands for “application-specific integrated circuit”, this is simply a piece of hardware that is superficially designed for a task. So in this case a USB key built to mine up to a proper mining rig. ASIC’s range from the tiny USB miners you plug into your PC (if you can even find one, but they are probably nowhere as good as using a big graphics card), to miners that cost thousands of pounds.
Again buyer beware, you may have to pay out more in electricity than you get back in mining.
Graphics Cards
One of the main shortages of graphics cards is simply caused by Bitcoin mining – you can rig up graphics cards to provide hash power. Again you could use Nicehash to manage your rigs if you just want to mine Bitcoin. By using a rack of graphics cards you can achieve some great mining results provided you can cover the electricity. There is quite a large outlay to start this up so your ROI may not come for several months.
Raspberry PI
These have very low power consumption, if you were to power them from solar power and mine something that is not Bitcoin you may get some success because the outlay is very low and you would have no electricity costs (assuming you wrote off the cost of the solar system). Effectively you could have a bank of them running but they are *VERY* low powered so it would take a long time to make any money.
