Hey guys, I'm pretty new to mining and not super familiar with the gear needed. I'm really into crypto, so I'm curious... What's the best way to get into mining and learn more about it?
A good thread to start with is here. The key takeaway from that thread is to take all 'advice' from so-called 'Experts' you come across on youtube, twitter, et al with a large dose of salt.
Beyond that - spend a few days scanning through the various thread here in the Forum. Most often the titles will give a good hint to what they are about.
Before you dive into mining better check your current electricity rate since you are in the Bitcoin mining section almost all ASIC miners are power hungry you can't able to make any profit if you don't have a cheap electricity rate.
And actually, most of the ASIC units are Plug'n'Play you just need to set up the pool and it's ready for mining.
If you decided to mine bitcoin then start reading this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4636521.0
This is a bad season for a newbie to jump into crypto mining but it's a good season to learn about mining, crypto mining is less profitable right now unless you have access to free or nearly free electricity, also right now mining BTC is the best advice I can give you, do not go near GPU mining.
But it's a good time to buy and accumulate that mining gear at a good price before everything spikes up during the bullish market. You don't want a newbie buying mining gear at the peak of the market because they got scared buying it during the bearish market.
Why? Are there no other altcoins to mining using GPUs just because ETH went POS?
1st step is learn how to setup a CPU miner on your laptup or PC and mine some cpu-based cryptos.
Once you do that, you can experiment with GPU miners or Graphics Card mining.
Still interested? Perhaps invest in an Asic Miner and scale from there.
Mining is not profitable for most people. That's because they spend high retail prices for equipment, pay top dollar for electricity, and don't understand crypto markets.
You should start out spending the least amount of money possible, and learn for fun as a hobby.
Once you are experienced and knowledgeable you will know how to scale from there.
Good luck!
Yes there are still scads of shitcoins that can be mined using GPU's. Of course most are also worthless or damn close to it.
Thing is -- this is the Bitcoin area where the sole topic of discussion is BTC. Not the altcoin mining area where all discussion of alts belongs.
Understanding and following some of the tips you get here will give you a good start to mining, but don't get your hopes up too much because there are still obstacles that you will face. Having this understanding is going to help you not to get discouraged or give up if you feel like it
Recommend the braiins calculator and the https://smokinghopium.io calculator to establish REALISTIC expectations. https://www.minerlist.com/bitcoin/calculator here's another one I made that attempts to simplify the calculation.
With mining as with crypto, super important to manage expectations
This is exactly what I am thinking, the market fluctuates so much. No one is making much mining right now, I even saw news stories about mining companies going under. But it would be a great time to get a discount on mining hardware. I always wanted to mine, but the price of electricity is too much where I live, it would be very difficult to break even let alone make a profit. Plus, I got tiered rates, so using a miner makes all the electricity in the house more expensive, which must be calculated in to the cost. Good luck!
Hey,
I saw your instructions so when I open up bfgminer.
For URL I enter: stratum+tcp://btc.f2pool.com:1314
For username I enter: my F2Pool username login (not the worker name)
For password I enter: my F2Pool username password
Is this correct? How does F2Pool know my worker name if I don't assign one? The app is working fine for me in terminal and I can see it is finding new blocks but f2pool doesn't seem to connect to any of it so I'm not getting credit. What do you think is my issue?
For a start, one issue is running bfgminer...
Who's instructions which are located where?
Using bfgminer raises the question of what are you trying to mine with? A GPU?(if so - wrong area as GPU's are beyond useless for mining BTC but can work for some altcoins) Some very very old ASIC-based miner that requires an external controller?
We don't have crystal balls to know what hardware you are using and something like that is rather vital information you need to provide...