Simple and Easy Cryptocurrency Mining

Mining Cryptocurrency is not a simple and budget friendly task anymore,but what if you just want to get a hang of it and use your PC with few GPUs and put them on mining ? Even after following this guide you may not be able to mine Bitcoin (BTC) but you can mine many of the available Alt coins (Monero, Fantomcoin ) or even the famous ones (Ethereum)

This Guide is still applicable in Year 2023 and has been checked to be accurate till 22 February 2023.

Easy Method to Mine Crypto

The service which I am going to refer to you is called NiceHash (NiceHash was earlier known as MinerGate. This service has a mining pool with convenient GUI miner. Zcash, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bytecoin, Monero, Dashcoin, DigitalNote Aeon & more coins are available for mining with an easy to use GUI based miner, it supports multiple mining of coins with support of varies GPU card support.

I call this “Mining for the Poor” – those who can not invest $2500+ for ASIC miners. Lets go ahead and start mining

How to Start Mining using your Home PC

With this technique you can go about mining with a normal PC with or without a GPU

• Open NiceHash and register yourself
• Once you have created your account, Download NiceHash GUI Miner
  Note: NiceHash supports Mac,Ubuntu,Fedora along with Windows
• Install and run NiceHash Application
• Sign In on your NiceHash Application (Menu > Sign In)
• On “Smart Miner” tab of the application select the number of Cores you want to using and click on it and the mining will start
  

GUI Miner Features and Advantages

• Supports merged mining – mine two coins with same hash rate power
• You can check your System Hash Speed from “Benchmark” tab so you can test how much you will make out of your system specs
  
• Inbuilt Wallet and Transaction record

What the numbers mean while Mining ?

if you are using this service you will see some words and numbers, lets see what they mean.

Numbering in GUI Application

Good shares – Total amount of correct shares to be rewarded
Last share – Time from receiving last share
Bad shares – Total amount of incorrect shares or shares which were sent too late. These shares are not rewarded
Shares difficulty – The current value of difficulty for each sent share
Currency balance – Total amount of confirmed coins available for withdrawal
Unconfirmed balance – Amount of mined coins which are waiting for confirmation from our servers
Reward method – PPS or PPLNS reward method you have selected in your account`s Dashboard
NOTE: For newbies it is advisable to use PPLNS reward method
CPU cores – Select quantity of your CPU cores which will be used for mining
Merged mining – Merged mining allows you to mine Fantomcoin (FCN) or MonetaVerde (MCN) in addition to the major coin without reducing its hashrate

Numbering on website Dashboard

You – Your estimated hashrate
Status – Shows whether you are online or offline
Total mined – Total amount for the account history
Unconfirmed – Amount of mined coins which are waiting for confirmation from our servers
Blocks – Number of blocks you found
Total shares – Amount of shares you have sent
Good shares – Total amount of correct shares to be rewarded
Bad shares – Total amount of incorrect shares or shares which were sent too late. These shares are not rewarded
Pool – Estimated hashrate of NiceHash.com
Miners – Number of people who mine this currency on pool
World – World’s hashrate
Blockchain height – The current blockchain height for this coin
Difficulty – The current difficulty for this coin

Supported GPUs on NiceHash / MinerGate

NiceHash supports NVidia cards with CUDA version 7.5, compute capability >2.0 and AMD cards with OpenCL 1.2; which would need latest driver updates.

If you plan mining Ethereum, your card should have at least 2 GB of RAM. This is because of Ethereum main net blockchain DAG file, which is constantly growing. Although with Eth 2.0, PoS isn’t a thing for ethereum so it has stopped working.

If you think you have a compatible GPU, but is not detected by NiceHash App,you may contact support with the logs, which you will find in the menu bar of the application > Logs > NiceHash.

NiceHash Pool with other Console Miners

NiceHash pool currently allows multiple blockchains to work on their pool.

Enough Talk Where is My Money

You will be able to see your mined currency in your wallet when it reaches the minimum transaction amount (anything above coin network fee). The same can be checked from the website dashboard

I ran miner with 2 CPU cores for 8 hours at the night and it earned me Monero of 0.00001240 BTC value . Tonight I might give GPU mining a try . or maybe get my 3 old laptops and a desktop running – Oh Raspberry Pi 3 would also work as Linux is supported by this App.

This might not give you serious returns but again there was no effort put into it aswell ? . If you happen to have solar electricity and a bunch of Old PCs, you can make something out of it. Did I mention it also supports Mobile mining and has an App which after you sign in with your account will work in parallel of the website. Maybe you can make something like Samsung Bitcoin Miner in their latest Galaxy Upcycling project display in Samsung Developers Conference 2017, where they connected 40 Galaxy S5 Devices which had better results than a i7 Desktop. But please do not use it for mining Bitcoins , It just won’t work.

For starters and those who want to get a hang of it , there is no harm in giving NiceHash a try and if you want to get into Cryptocurrency you can always buy from Safe Places. Do your research and always ask before you jump in.

Types of Ethereum Mining

If you’re trying to decide on how to mine ethereum, there are 3 main ways of doing it:

• Pool Mining : This is one of the best ways to mine ethereum, especially if you are starting out. In pool mining, you work with other people and get rewards even if you have a bad week as people will share their rewards with the pool. If you choose this way of mining ethereum, keep an eye on the pool size (the more people, the bigger chance for rewards), possible minimum payout (how much you need to mine before you get some in your wallet), and the pool fee (usually 1-3%).
  Tip: if the pool fee is 0% or higher than 3%, look for another pool.
• Mining Alone : While this way lets you keep all your rewards for yourself, it usually has a smaller chance for profit. Moreover, to mine ethereum alone, you will need more than 100 graphic cards, you will use a lot of power and get high electricity bills. Usually, the costs of mining alone are much higher than the profits.
• Cloud Mining Services : Another good choice for beginners, as you pay somebody else to mine and get their profits. But while this sounds great, it does have some cons: even if Ethereum price drops, you are paying for the actual mining work, so in this case you will lose money. In some cases you might even need to pay for the hardware repairs (if it’s specified in your agreement).

Overall, the most profitable way of mining Ethereum is usually pool mining. You can mine alone, but then it would be best to set up and offer your own Cloud mining services to at least get some of your costs paid before you get rewarded with Ethereum. NiceHash works perfectly in 2023 aswell but be mindful of the the damages to the system.