Bitcoin gpu miner calculator
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Best Bitcoin Mining Hardware April Feb 1st, Updated May 12th, Mining In early there are lots of new Bitcoin ASIC miners being announced, but many of these won't be available to mine with for a few months.
Assumptions this is just if you're interested, not required reading: Block reward of Anyone with a computer can participate in mining at least one cryptocurrency, but it is difficult to make a significant amount of money from mining unless you have at the very least a single high-powered gaming PC. This post is less of a guide and more of a high-level overview of some of the concepts and considerations involved in GPU mining. In order to mine, in general, you will need a graphics card with more than 2 GB of memory, basic knowledge of how to use the command line or willingness to learn, and an Ethereum wallet or a wallet corresponding to whatever coin you are mining.
After choosing the graphics card, mining software, and pool, mining Ethereum is actually pretty straightforward. If you want some help with these prerequisites or a more detailed guide to getting started check out the Ethereum Mining Wiki. With mining, the details of how to mine and the best strategies are constantly changing, so if you want to get into mining be prepared to figure some of the details out for yourself. It probably helps to understand to some extent how cryptocurrencies work and to keep up with the latest trends in the market.
The most obvious benefit to mining is to make a profit. GPU mining is a unique type of investment that requires a relatively low up-front investment in time and money to get started. After that your computer or mining rig will generate a high rate of return without you doing much at all. If you are looking to invest more than a few thousand dollars you are out of luck unless you want to rent or buy a dedicated property for mining, and hire an electrician.
Even before that, you may be reluctant to have a monster computer with multiple GPUs generating lots of excess heat and noise in your home. What this means is that GPU mining can be a great investment up to a certain amount before it loses its appeal. That is if all of the parameters were to stay the same which they won't so it is an extremely rough estimate.
So for me at least investing in one card was a no-brainer. In addition to the profit that you can generate from mining, mining also helps contribute to Ethereum or the cryptocurrency that you are mining which I believe is a positive force in the world and worth supporting.
Outside of ETH, a miner could mine Curecoin and help the world by folding proteins, or mine Primecoin and help the world by finding prime numbers. There are also benefits to learning about the technology. I think that because you can hit a ceiling so fast on the amount that you can invest in mining, it is only worth it if you believe in these less tangible benefits to some extent and you are interested in the technology behind it.
On the other hand, if you already have a powerful home PC that you use for gaming or VR, then it is not going to hurt to have it mine at night and while you are at work. Not all cryptocurrencies can be mined profitably with GPUs. In the earliest days of Bitcoin mining long before I knew about Bitcoin , people could mine thousands of Bitcoins with their CPU alone. At some point, someone wrote a program that allowed miners to mine Bitcoin with their GPUs which allowed them to significantly increase their hash rate.
Eventually, lots of other cryptocurrencies were designed that chose to use different hashing algorithms which could not as easily be mined with ASICs. For example, Ethereum uses a different hashing algorithm that requires lots of memory. In addition miners have to execute smart contract code in order to verify blocks. Finally, with Ethereum switching to proof of stake soon, it would not make sense to design an ASIC that would work only for the next year or so.
With this switch from a proof of work consensus algorithm to a proof of stake algorithm, there is a very small window of profitability left for mining ETH. Once that switch is complete, GPU miners will have to switch to other coins. Fortunately for miners, there are plenty of other coins that can be mined with GPUs.
It is likely that GPU mining will be profitable for at least the next few years. Of course miners will have to upgrade their GPUs every years or so to stay competitive because of the Law of Accelerating Returns. In the long term, I think proof of stake will become the dominant consensus algorithm and more cryptocurrencies will use proof of stake except for the ones where the proof of work algorithm provides some useful result like Primecoin and Curecoin. This is because proof of stake is more secure and uses less electricity then proof of work.
When choosing mining software I wanted to use one of the official Ethereum clients so that I could trust that the software did not contain any hidden malware, and to ensure that it did not charge any fees. For example, the official cpp client includes this text in their Readme:. The support for GPU mining has been dropped some time ago including the ethminer tool. Try using the fork https: To use Genoil you need download a binary from the releases folder in their repo, not the zip on the releases tab in Github.
I tried mining with Genoil and got it running fine, but was not able to find any shares within an hour. While troubleshooting the problem, I found a Github issue that suggested it may be an issue with the latest AMD drivers.
One of the replies recommended switching to Ethminer because it is more up to date. I am still not sure what caused the problem, or if I was just unlucky, but when I tried Ethminer I was able to successfully find shares. Ethminer is a fork of Genoil which seems slightly more active in terms of development. I downloaded the latest version and was able to successfully get it to mine. I am now comparing my results against Claymore's Miner which is the first miner that I used for a few weeks.
I recommend Ethminer because it charges 0 fees, is open source and seems to have one developer who is actively making commits to the project. Claymore's miner is a bit easier to use, but the shadiness of the app makes me want to use something else. It seems that this is a mining client associated with Nanopool. I was hesitant to use this miner for a number of reasons.
Fist, the code is not open source. The Github repo belongs to Nanopool and when you look at their website there is no information about whether a company or individual owns it. The fact that it is closed source and seemingly developed by a person who does not want to use a real identity is slightly suspicious. Another shady thing is that apparently, Windows Defender recognizes it as a virus.
From the Claymore Readme:. Windows 10 Defender recognizes miner as a virus, some antiviruses do the same. Miner is not a virus, add it to Defender exceptions. I write miners since Most of them are recognized as viruses by some paranoid antiviruses, perhaps because I pack my miners to protect them from disassembling, perhaps because some people include them into their botnets, or perhaps these antiviruses are not good, I don't know.
For these years, a lot of people used my miners and nobody confirmed that my miner stole anything or did something bad.