Bitcoin mining he's probably been hearing about this everywhere especially given the barren wasteland that is trying to find any decent AMD GPU for sale new or even used I did a quick fun video a few days ago about how I use the mining ring to keep my room and a few of you were interested in me doing a beginner's guide to get started with mining so here is said video a lot of stress that this is strictly a beginner slash guide to mining and it won't be diving into anything too complex like flashing bios's under volting or manipulating your GPU in any way let me know though if you're interested in such a video down below in the comments but for this video we're going to stick to the basics let me give you some background on mining Before we jump into the how you do it portion I'll do my best to keep this brief and simple but that will mean I'm sacrificing nuance for ease here the goal isn't to get you to understand how everything works just a general idea of what you'll be messing with so while the world is discussing Bitcoin mining that's actually a bit of amisnomer bitcoin has become a catch-all phrase for most types of crypto currencies kind of how like a hook and loop strap is known as velcro or gelatin is known as jello or tissues are known as Kleenex there's various types of crypto currencies even if they get referred to as the generic trademark of Bitcoin so when you see everyone using their arcs 480 or 5 80s for mining they're likely not mining Bitcoin exactly but a Bitcoin alternative known as alt coin there's a bunch of different types of allah coins such as light coin dogecoin z cash and the most popular one for mining at this point a etherium okay so with that out of the way here's the super rough not entirely accurate broad understanding of how you mind for these currencies essentially you take your computer flip on a program and that program uses your computer's horsepower to validate certain metrics in a data set and then based on how much data you process you in return get paid for your services again not entirely correct by the simple picture the closest thing I could compare it to is like folding at home you dedicate your hardware to help
process information with regards to
protein folding with distributed
computing but instead of helping save
lives you make money well you don't
exactly make money you earn the
cryptocurrency Bitcoin aetherium
whatever and because other individuals have determined that those crypto
currencies can be used to make a transaction there's monetary value
attached to the jeez I've already poorly explained cryptocurrency mining and now I'm giving you a crippled understanding of fiat currencies anyways
summation you give the cloud your GPU they give you currency you sell the currency for cash okay forget me trying
to explain things now it's time to move on to how to actually do it there's a thousand different ways to set up a miner but I'm going to go over one of the most popular ways and then also show you some of the limitations of it the incredibly simple ways to download nice hash miner from the website in the video description and just run the program the
few things you'll need to get started
are your computer obviously but then
also a Bitcoin address which is
essentially where nice hash should
deposit the currency that you earn how
do you get a Bitcoin address well you
need a wallet which is principally where
you're going to store your
cryptocurrency there are a thousand
different wallets you can set up online
but I keep mine with a Bitcoin exchange
as that allows me to transfer the
cryptocurrency into dollars in my
american bank account through your own
research on where it's best for you to
store the currency whether that be in a
dedicated wallet or if you just plan on
hoarding your coins or in an exchange
because you want to trade it within to
your local currency I'll put some links in the video description to help you
guys make that decision wherever you end up storing your coins it'll generate the
address that you need to put into the nice hash miner in order to start
earning once you have that address here's the super simple part the miner
automatically detects which Hardware you have you click on benchmark and the program will check your hardware against roughly ten or so different types of
actual cryptocurrency miners to see how
well your PC performs once the
benchmarking is done and you start the
actual mining nice hash will run the
miners for you and also switch to
whichever type of currency might be most
profitable for your system to be mining
at any given time the nice hash miner
converts whatever currency remaining
directly into Bitcoin and will only
deposit Bitcoin to your account you can
set the program up to do a whole host of
things like only mine once it reaches a
certain profitability level or run when
the computer is idle so it will turn on
whenever you've stopped using your PC
which is a nice feature if you're
forgetful about turning this kind of
stuff on which I know I am super simple
super easy you click start and you're
off to the races earning money using
your PC hardware for distributed
computing
however with anything that's simple
there's nuance that's left out that you
may or may not want to know
for example nice hash only pays out in
Bitcoin which may not be your preferred
currency to keep also pay out times vary
from either every day or once a week
depending on how much Bitcoin you
actually mine which could be too
infrequent or too soon depending on how
you want to be paid however overall if
you just want to set it and forget it
option nice hash is a superb program for
that I keep it running on all the
computers in my office and I'm currently
earning in the neighborhood of like 30
to 35 dollars per day depending on the
given exchange rate which comes out to a
thousand dollars a month at the current
exchange rate which isn't too bad
however if you don't want the simple way
you can run the individual miners
yourself by downloading them and setting
them up I'll be in a less user friendly
manner if you want to make sure you're
only ever mining one specific altcoin
or you prefer different payment
structures or you just want more control
over what each program is doing but then
you also have to get into the idea of
mining pools which I'll include a link
in the video description for but I'm not
going to address that here this all
sounds really great and almost too good
to be true you use your electricity and
your PC to generate cash where's the
catch well it's in several places so
let's spend the time to talk about that
the most obvious is that you have to
make sure that the cost you're spending
on electricity is less than the value of
what you're mining in the currency
otherwise you're upside-down and just
spending more money on electricity then
you're getting back you can definitely
choose to do that if you think that the value of the coins in the future will be
worth the cost that you're putting into it right now but that's a gamble so I
personally only mind if the profit fro the currencies exceeds my electricity costs so with that let's take a look at
the GPUs I currently have on hand the gtx 1060 GT x 1080 with updated memory
and RX 480 and 2rx 580 s1 with 4 gigabytes of VRAM and one with 8 gigabytes let's take them and throw them
at noise hashes profitability calculator and determine their value this is just going to be a quick and dirty
calculation not going into nuance just using the data that nice hash themselves provide to us for any of the GPUs that I mentioned based on the speculated cost and amount of dollars per day you can earn with the cards the time to pay off
each dpu is between 57 days and 91 days depending on what your card you're talking about or 2 to 3 months and that's even with taking the normal cos tof electricity in
consideration not too shabby definitely
seems worth it however while this is a
super helpful chart to determine current
profitability of the GPUs that's
basically all it does and that's a big
problem if you're looking to invest into
mining right now what do you mean by big
problem Brett I'm glad you asked
Internet person there are two major
variables that these calculators
typically don't take into account
because they're super difficult to
predict those are the future price of
the currency and the difficulty
increases with mining the price
fluctuation should be an obvious idea to
everyone the market determines the value
of the currency which varies wildly on any given day last week Bitcoin peaked at $3,000 per coin but then straight up plummeted closer to the $2,000 region shortly after but is now again in the mid 2000s that's some straight-up scary volatility if you ask me a lot of people are agreeing right now that the price of cryptocurrency is basically inflated due to a speculative bubble which means it could end these prices high prices at any moment and bring everyone back to an unprofitable mining status or much less profitable mining status although that's again entirely speculation and not a guarantee the prices are hard to determine how the second factor that I mentioned is the difficulty of the mining itself as more and more people come in and start doing this distributed computing calculations the difficulty of the calculations increase and your current hardware isn't able to get as much of
the share due to it now being slower in terms of the hash rate this difficulty change is inevitable and it isn't something that's easy to predict as the scene of mining is changing so rapidly however there are some basic calculators
that you can use that take a generic difficult to increase into account and
shows you what profits will be going out the overall profits from each TV you
aren't as high as you would expect even two years later and for some based on the guesswork of the difficulty increase will actually start to cost you money even less than one year out obviously the nice hash program can get you around this because it switches to mine the most profitable currencies and you canset it to only mine at a certain
profitability level but it's something to definitely should be keeping in mind then there's the other issue that the amount of VRAM on certain GPUs likely won't be enough going forwardespecially if you're mining a cerium the
dag file directed acyclic graph associated with mining a cerium gets larger all the time currently it's on pace to start
affecting four gigabyte GPUs in the near future and their ability to mine which obviously can't be accounted for in current profitability charts but may make all those four gig AMD GPUs harder to pay off which doesn't even take into account the chances of aetherium going proof a steak instead of proof of work
but that's an entirely different conversation altogether so with difficulty increases in price fluctuations and the fact that poor gigabyte cards may or may not be enough depending on the currency your mining it's actually really tough to predict what the exact time of return on investment will be for your GPU setup if the bubble burst and prices crashed the ROI could be measured in months or years
rather than days or it wouldn't be worth
it at all because the cost of
electricity will outpace the return of
value in the currency this isn't to say
don't mind
far from it actually I just wanted to
make this video to Requip you with the
basic knowledge to get into mining and
then also to keep an eye out for the impending changes that could cost you if you decide to spend a lot of money on a mining right now but on the flip side the prices can continue to go up you make a return on the hardware that you bought before it becomes unprofitable and you win and all of my negative speculation isn't worth anything however my current plan is to just run the hardware that I have on hand until the cost of electricity outpaces the profit that I make the speculative bubble just seems too risky for my tastes and I'd rather buy up the GPUs that everyone is selling dirt cheap once everythingcrashes rather than to try and get in right at this moment but I'll be including all the resources that I mentioned in this video as well as a few others in the video description down below to help you guys out and make these decisions for yourself there's definitely value in getting into cryptocurrency mining right now for many
people however it could just as quickly hurt you if you invest expecting to make a quick return and things go steps my aim isn't to tell you what to do but rather give you information to determine what you want to do but to save this video from getting too long I'm going to end it there I'm keen to hear what you guys have in terms of hardware and whether is profitable for mining altcoins or if you're planning on getting into the mining game right now and buying the hardware to do so tell me all about it in the comments down below let's have a conversation down there also be sure to hit the like button if you found this article helpful
Read next
From @funb