Hello all,
As you know, Bitcoin mining is actually under control of massive datacenters right now and it’s practicaly not profitable if you are a single miner. But Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency today; we are thankful for Litecoin to bring altcoin (Alternative Coin) idiom to the market.
Mining altcoins are still profitable and they have a massive Bitcoin exchange markets right now. But today, there are tons of altcoins with lot of different features. Which is the right coin for mining? Well it depends on our hardware! I’ll try to guide you about it.
There are 3 types of cryptocurrencies today; both has completely different working method:
- POW (Proof of Work) : This is the first type of cryptocurrency. POW coins are mineable coins and and miners always have to keep mining for keeping the coin & transactions alive.
- POS (Proof of Stake) : This type of coins does not need to be mined with hardware. All you need is to have some coins and keep the wallet online all the time. You will get some interest as long as your wallet is online and staking in network. The only hardware needed is your computer to keep wallet online.
- Hybrid (POW & POS) : This is the most favourite coin type in these days. This type of coins are mineable and also share interest if you have coins in your wallet.
POS coins is not under our radar in this article. If you are a miner, your coin type can be POW or Hybrid.
OK, so you are ready to mine some coins, right? Are you ready to go? Of course not! Now the second step is waiting for you: Algorithms. Every coin use a different type of algorithm (I’ll express it as algo from now on) to send / receive transactions; means their blocks are encrypted with this selected algo. There are lots of different algos for coins and developers always try to create different algos to make their coins more unique and valuable. But today, I will show you most popular algos, differences and right choices. We can seperate coin algos in 3 type also.
- ASIC Algos : As you know, Bitcoin ,Litecoin and Dogecoin are very, very popular coins. While people were mining these coins and growing, finding blocks get harder day by day. People was using CPUs for mining these coins but energy consumption got very high and block finding got very slow. As an alternative, much faster and energy efficent solution; special chips manufactured for decrypt some special algos. ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) chips are created just for this jobs and they are thousands time faster than CPUs. That’s why it’s suitable to use just ASIC chips with this coins. 3 type of algos are suitable with ASIC miners:
1- SHA256
2- scrypt
3- x11Remember; ASIC algos are still mineable with CPU & GPU (Graphics Cards) but ASIC miners are very powerful devices with huge hashrate will change coin block finding difficulty very very hard. That’s why your hardware will have practicaly “0” chance to mine coins but if the coins network does not have ASIC miners and general hashrate is low, you can still mine coins with your CPU & GPU.
- GPU Algos : GPU (Graphics Cards) algo coins are suitable to mine your graphics card power. All of latest graphics cards (except onboard solutions like Intel Graphics) are programmable chips and can be used for computing operations. GPUs have lot of little computing interfaces inside and that’s why they are great for decryption jobs. If you have an high-end GPU, you are ready to mine some coins. Here are some popular GPU algos:
1- Ethash
2- Groestl
3- Equihash
4- Nist5
5- Blake
6- Lyra2Of course they are lot of different algos for GPUs. You can easyly find in forums which i’m going to share at the end of the article.
- CPU Algos : There are very few algos left for CPUs because GPUs are nearly suitable for every type of algos. But some algos does not let ASIC and GPU chips because of huge memory needs which can only be handled by CPUs. If your energy expenses are low and have some computers are not in use, CPU coins are waiting for you to make earn some money. Here are active CPU algos:
1- Yescrypt
2- cryptonight
Let’s Start Mining
Finally you are ready for mining if you select your coin which is suitable with your hardware. You select your coin, right? Now you have 2 options. Solo mining & pool mining.
- Solo Mining : Is as it’s written, you mine the coin just for yourself. You can set your wallet as a server and you can send your hash power to your own wallet. If you will find a block, you will get every coin for this block. Well, i’m not going to explain solo mining, it’s a very unusual method now because coins have lot of miners and solo mining generaly ends up with ruining your hashing power & electricity and time with “0” earning.
- Pool Mining : This is the most popular method for mining with all community. Pool mining provides collective hashing which results with easier block finding and earning. The logic is; pool has a wallet and acts like a single miner. Miners which uses the pool sends their hash power to pool and this combined power used for this single wallet. In result, the total hashrate is huge and pool wallet can find blocks easyly. The total generated coins distributed equaly after the calculation of attendee’s work ratio. This is actually advantageous for every miner because lots of people are mining in these days and single miner does not have any chance to earn coins alone and with pool mining even little miners will get some coins at the end of the day.
So, let’s find a pool first. I recommend CoinMiners as altcoin pool. You can get CoinMiners with this link : http://coinminers.net
It’s time to select coins for suitable hardware. I’m going to select 3 coins for every type of hardware:
- CPU Coin : Globalboosty (Yescrypt)
- GPU Coin : SolarisCoin (Nist5)
- ASIC Coin : CommunityCoin (SHA256)
Time To Mine a CPU Coin
For mining CPU coins, you will have to have a CPU mining software. You can get from clicking here : YeScrypt CPU Miner
So, I downloaded Globalboosty wallet and my wallet address is : YEuVEN8cMfNxnMinMymBESKEnqfShRFPbC
Now it’s time to visit CoinMiners Getting Started page to learn ports and difficulty settings. Here is for Globalboosty:
Update : Globalboosty has been removed from CoinMiners. Here is the reason : Twitter Post
As you can see, there are 2 types of ports. varDiff and Static. varDiff ports are active mining ports and the difficulty is managed by pool’s hash power calculation. If you have a miner with very low or very high hashrate varDiff is your suitable port. Static ports are for non changable difficulty ports. Low diff ports are suitable for small miners, Med is good for strong miners and High is generally for high-end systems.
So we have a PC with single CPU, then varDiff or Low Static port is suitable for us. Let’s extract the cpuminer.zip to a folder and edit the Miner.bat file. Then enter these commands to begin mining:
minerd.exe -a yescrypt -o stratum+tcp://coinminers.net:3406 -u YEuVEN8cMfNxnMinMymBESKEnqfShRFPbC -p 1234
Here are the command meanings:
- -a : algo (we use yescrypt)
- -o : pool address (we use port 3406 for static diff)
- -u : username (CoinMiners does not need registration. Your coin address is your username and pool pays to it)
- -p : password (You can give whatever you want)
After you save this bat file and execute, you are good to go! Like below:
Once the pool finds some block, it’ll send coins to your wallet address.
This Time We Try to Mine a GPU Coin
For mining GPU coins, you will have to have a GPU mining software. However Nvidia and AMD cards use different technologies for computing; that’s why you will need different software for chip based.
- For Nvidia, you can visit : http://ccminer.org/
- For AMD, you can visit : https://github.com/genesismining/sgminer-gm/releases
CCMiner (For Nvidia) and SGMiner (For AMD) has same command prompts like CPUminer. That’s why you will do the same steps like we do before. Lets check SolarisCoin port information:
Let’s imagine that we have a strong GPU (Like Nvidia GTX 1080Ti). So we will use ccminer and medium port is good for this single card. You really need to have a huge GPU rig for high difficuly port. Suitable port is 3230. Our *.bat file for ccminer should be like written below:
ccminer.exe -a nist5 -o stratum+tcp://coinminers.net:3230 -u SEuVEN8cMfNxnMinMymBESKEnqfShRFPbC -p 1234
Here are the command meanings:
- -a : algo (we use nist5)
- -o : pool address (we use port 3230 for medium static diff)
- -u : username (CoinMiners does not need registration. Your coin address is your username and pool pays to it)
- -p : password (You can give whatever you want)
Finally, Let’s Mine Some ASIC Coin
Ok, If you have an ASIC miner hardware, you don’t need this article, because you already have enough knowledge about mining. So, I’m going to explain the most popular and reasonable solution for ASIC coins.
Renting a Miner
Yes, you can rent a miner for every type of algo in these days and mining rental is very popular especially for sha256, scrypt, x11 & x13 algos because these coins are ASIC minable coins and ASIC miners are expensive and hard-to-find hardwares unless you have a friend in China and/or Taiwan. Rentals are not very expensive but they are expensive for Bitcoin, Litecoin & Dogecoin mining. So you will have to find a new coin or a coin with increasing market value.
For my experiences, the best miner rental webpage is MiningRigRentals. You can CLICK HERE to visit.
MiningRigRentals (I’ll express it as MRR from now on) is very clear, easy to use, most of times cheap and fast service with great support team behind.
So let’s rent a miner and mine CommunityCoin!
Once you register to MRR, you will need to deposit some BTC to your MRR wallet. You can easyly learn your wallet address if you click your username on top right and select Balance, FUND YOUR ACCOUNT menu will show your MRR wallet.
Ok, you sent coins to MRR, now your wallet has some BTC. Good! CommunityCoin is a sha256 algo coin, so we will need a sha256 miner.
Click Rigs on the top menu and find Sha256 Rigs. We are good to go! Now we will find a suitable miner for our needs. I’m going to select one and explain how do you rent & run:
I’m going to select this little Antminer with clicking Rent Now! button. You can sort miners for Hashrate, Price, Rentals hours etc. and can filter to find your exact needs.
Ok. Now it’s the first step of rental. You can check general stats of this pool and set hours here.
- 1- RPI score is important. RPI shows the quality of this service. Always consider to choose more than 85% RPI.
- 2- You can set how many hours you would like to rent this pool. Every pools min & max rental hours are different. I choose 3 hours for this pool.
- 3- Here you can see how much you are going to pay for this rental.
- 4- Clink Rent Now! for the last step of rental & payment.
Now it’s time to enter Add a pool to MRR and finish setup of rental. Click Add a pool button.
Let’s check CoinMiners.net for CommunityCoin ports. Well, we are renting a little miner, so the low difficulty port 3171 is good for us. Once we click to Add a pool button, a Define a Pool popup appears. So:
- Pool Host : Is the pool’s address with port entry.
- Workername : Is my CommunityCoin wallet address. As i mentioned before, CoinMiners uses wallet addresses as username and makes direct payments to wallets.
- Password : Whatever I want. I selected 1234, huh who cares.
- Finally clicked Save to finish pool add operation.
Now our pool config is listed at right and the only thing we need to do is clicking INSTANT PAY NOW button!
You can visit the mining process with Workers menu in the same page.
Congratulations, now you are mining a coin which is suitable for ASIC miners without owning an ASIC miner 🙂
So We are Good to Go Now
I hope this article (or guide) is helpful for everyone. There are tons of coins in market and everyday a new one is showing itself. Please follow my Altcoin Forum for new coin announcements and don’t hasitate to ask questions if you have. Please follow the social bookmarks shared below and keep our communication alive!
AltcoinForum – Alternative Cryptocurrencies Forum
CoinMiners – Altcoin Pool
Twitter Accounts : coolindark / AltcoinForum / CoinMiners
All my love to the community of cryptocurrencies,
coolindark
First of all, let me introduce myself;
