How to Mine Bitcoins

Also known as the King of the Digital Wealth, Bitcoins sits atop the cryptocurrency pedestal as one of the most sought-after digital coins. There are two mainstream ways by which you can get your hands on BTC; one is by buying from an exchange system, secondly is through ‘mining.’ Mining, in this case, is essentially verifying a definite number of other bitcoin transaction in exchange for BTC. In the coming features, we will be covering what an initial coin offering is, such as the Kepler ICO.

Invest in Mining Hardware

A few years ago – 2009/2010 to be specific – it was possible to mine bitcoins using only your desktop’s original GPU and CPU. Fast-forward and a few years later, it is virtually impractical, if not impossible, to do this on your PC. You may end up spending more footing the electricity bill to sustain such an operation than you would earn from the mining process itself. That’s the reason you need customized hardware from brands such as Bitcoin Ultra, Butterfly Labs, CoinTerra, etc. to boost your PC’s performance. A complete mining machine could set you back anywhere from a few hundred bucks to several thousands of dollars depending on its capability and potential.

Obtain and Secure your Wallet

A bitcoin wallet is simply a digital wallet that is used and encrypted to store and protect your money. Remember that the wallet can either be local or online depending on your preferences. That said, it’s best if you keep your money in a local wallet to reduce chances of loss should something catastrophic such as a server failure occurs on their end. Again, don’t ever leave your coins in a temporary exchange system such as LBC or Coinbase. The only downside to using a local bitcoin wallet is that it could take a day or two to sync the blockchain associated with your coins to this local wallet. Nonetheless, there are a few semi-local bitcoin wallet apps that do not necessarily require the downloading and synching of an entire blockchain. This includes Armory, Multibit, and BitcoinQT.

You can Mine Bitcoins Independently or Join a Mining Pool

You have two options when it comes down to actually mining the coins. One of them is to pool your hardware resources with other minors in exchange for a fraction of the rewards or go at it alone. Mining alone can be lucrative ( in terms of the profits accrued ), but it is quite taxing and arduous. On the other hand, some mining pools require just a small fraction of your proceeds ( about 2% ) to allow you to join their clique. Compared to mining solo, joining a bitcoin mining pool rig can bring you faster results as getting new coins is becoming highly competitive by the day. After this, download a reliable bitcoin mining software such as BFGminer and CGminer and start churning out coins.

It is imperative to constantly keep an eye on the expenditure-to-profit ratio of your mining progress. After all, it makes no sense to spend more money maintaining and running your mining artillery than the amount of cash accrued from selling the coins.