If you’ve read this far and are excited at the process of running a mining rig, it’s time for a dose of cold reality. Bitcoin Mining is now a professional enterprise with most of the world’s bitcoin mining centres situated close to renewable energy sources in regions where electricity is cheap and plentiful.
Professional miners overclock their machines, to run them at performance levels above the manufacturer’s recommended settings. This should only be attempted by experienced miners, since care must be taken not to overheat the miners in the process, as solving one problem then creates another – the need to cool your mining operation, using up even more energy.
So unless you happen to own your own hydro electric dam or have a huge bank of solar panels, you will struggle to profitably mine bitcoin using GPUs or ASICs on a hobby basis.
Even with multiple ASICs linked together, you could toil away for weeks, months or longer and fail to discover a new block. In the meantime, you would be running up an expensive electricity bill, given the power requirements and need to mitigate the heat generated.
To solve this problem, and make mining more accessible to as many people as possible, bitcoiners have created Mining Pools. This entails a group of miners combining their hashpower (their collective computer processing power) to search for a new block together.
If any miner in the pool succeeds in this quest, the coinbase reward will be shared with all pool members proportionately to their hashpower.
If you are determined to mine cryptocurrency, you’ll need to find the right location in which to set up a rig (cool, well vented, and well insulated or isolated to prevent noise complaints), and choose the right ASIC for your needs and budget. With that done, and your mining gear on its way, it’ll be time to consider which mining pool to join.
For example, if you provide 5% of the hash power to the pool and the pool discovers a new block, you will receive 5% of the reward which (excluding pool fees) would amount to 0.3125 BTC.
It sounds like easy money, but if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it! The truth is that it is extremely hard to profit from bitcoin mining.
You can consider mining other cryptocurrencies where there is less competition, but that will have to measure against the reward.
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