Most people have heard of Bitcoin, as it is quickly growing in popularity and taking over the cryptocurrency market. The idea behind Bitcoin is having a decentralized banking system that isn’t dependent on any one government or source. Transactions are verified by anonymous miners all around the world to confirm the validity of any sent payment or conversion of currency on what is called the blockchain. This basically takes your data (the money/cryptocurrency) that you are sending and distributes it in “blocks” across the large network of miners. This protects each transaction because all of your information is never in the hands of a single entity. Like the American stock market, users are able to see real-time graphs and track trends.
I decided to try my hand at another cryptocurrency called Ethereum. This currency is most effectively mined using NVIDIA GTX 1070 graphics cards (for normal people) and can most easily be accessed by using an operating system called PiMP.
Once downloaded, hobbyist miners (like myself) have the best luck joining a mining pool. This is basically where a whole bunch of miners from around the world pool their resources (mining capability) and each person takes a percent of the profits made by the pool depending on how much they contribute.
I chose to use Nanopool because it is a fairly large pool that doesn’t charge a very large percent of your earnings. It is also an easy pool to find helpful information for beginners. Because I was just learning about this for the sake of loving to gather new information, my mining farm is relatively small. The most avid of miners have entire rooms dedicated to running their graphics cards without ever stopping. Depending on the stock market of cryptocurrencies and the price of your power, the amount of money you can make changes daily. You can easily track how much you will be making per day, week, month and year using sites like this one.
Check out my little rig and feel free to share your knowledge with me! There’s always more to learn, and I’m just getting into the world of cryptocurrency!
