Start Mining Cryptocurrency in 3 easy steps

Lately my interest has been in the realm of Cryptocurrency, specifically mining any form of cryptocurrency. After reading a few articles on Bitcoin hitting record highs ($4197.87 at the time of writing this article), Ethereum is beginning to be adopted ($300.02) in the market, mixed with all of the attention cryptocurrencies have been getting lately, I have decided to give it a go and share what I have learned so far.

Current PC specs.

I built this computer a little over a year ago, and I have never really used it to its full potential except when playing VR games. I was curious to see how well my PC did mining altcoins.

Processor: i7 6700k

Motherboard: MSI Z170A 3X LGA 1151

Graphics Card: Nvidia GTX 970

CPU Cooler: H100i V2

Power supply: CX750m

Case: Nzxt S340 (White)

Lets get started.

1. Create a Minergate account

Minergate is a cryptocurrency mining pool that has made it extremely easy to get started mining multiple altcoins. They support Ethereum (ETH), Ethereum Classic (ETC),  Bytecoin (BCN), Dashcoin (DSH), and many others. The pool is very active and payouts happen very quickly. Also by signing up for an account it takes away the headaches of having to create all those digital wallets and keeps them all in one place. Minergate also has a really user-friendly dashboard to see how many currencies you are mining and at what hash speeds (I am not sure how accurate they are but hey it’s pretty cool). This is a really great place to get started on your mining journey.

2. Download the Minergate GUI (Graphical User Interface)

Once again Minergate has really made all of this super simple. After you log into your account, look at the top navigation and head into the “Downloads” section. The downloads page suggests the version you should download, it is a very quick download that should take longer than a few minutes.They support four different operating systems, which are Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, and Fedora. The image to the right is a screen shot of the download page.

3. Start Mining

Once you have the GUI open all you have to do is select which coin you want to mine and press play. That’s it! It really is that simple…. Minergate supports both CPU (Processor) and GPU (Graphics card) mining. A feature I found useful myself was the ability to control how intense you wanted to mine with your GPU. The intensity options are between 1 and 4 with 4 being the most intense. They also give you control to how many CPU cores you’d like to use when mining with your CPU. Payouts happen every time a block has been confirmed (Once the pool has received payment), which happens a couple times a day depending on what you are mining. At the time of writing this article, I have already mined Bytecoins, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Monero, and few others. What are you waiting for, start mining now?

Results.

I have been mining off and on for the last for days and here are my results:

Bytecoin: 403.39143734 confirmed, 6.55584021 unconfirmed

Monero: 0.000278980585 unconfirmed

FantomCoin: 0.000728481747 unconfirmed

Ethereum:  0.000513726119969971 confirmed

Ethereum Classic: 0.000067277406651360 confirmed

As you can tell I spent most of my time mining Bytecoin, I like to mine the currency I could get the most of :p.

So lets talk about experience, what minor gate has accomplished is brilliant. They have made a very complicated task into such a simple thing that anyone can do. Leave your computer on at night, collect a few coins and play the market a bit. You never know what could happen.

I hope everyone reading this article enjoyed learning about how to mine cryptocurrency as much as I did. I would love to hear from anyone reading along, how did you machine do? What are you trying differently? And also any feedback on what you’d like the next topic to be? Should we continue with cryptocurrency?? Let me know in the comments below.

Bonus.

You can mine from multiple computers and it will all be tracked in the Minergate Dashboard. There is also a Smart Mine feature which take prices, trades, and other factors into consideration to provide a suggestion of what altcoin is the best to mine at the time. I personally have been mining Bytecoin (BCN) and once I get enough I will be exchanging them for Ripple coin (XRP).

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