For about a year and a half or so, I've been paying attention to and learning about cryptocurrency. I've learned quite a bit, but it's all been about the market/trading side of things. I understood the basics of the tech behind it, but never went much beyond perusing git repos to make sure a particular coin was still being actively worked on before buying a bit.
Recently, a friend of mine mentioned that he used to mine bitcoin, but got out of it years ago. He said he still had some equipment, and I was welcome to it if I wanted to learn about mining. I jumped at the chance.
So, armed with an Antminer U2, and an old Mac Mini I had, I started learning. The first question was what to mine. I was limited to SHA256 coins, because that's all the U2 can mine. I settled on DGB because of it's short block time and potential price upside.
Then I had to decide on some mining software. Keeping in mind that my equipment was all from 2014/15, I wanted to stick to a light command line interface, and my research indicated that BFGminer was the way to go.
The last real piece of the puzzle was deciding whether to solo mine or join a pool. My reading indicated that for a low power operation like mine, solo mining wouldn't make sense, as I'd likely never receive an actual block reward, and the most I could hope for would be a shared fraction of one in a pool. Because this is my first foray into mining, I thought the ability to pivot as I learned more would be a good thing, so I wanted a pool that offered multiple coins and algorithms (if I decide to try out other mining hardware). Multipool seemed to fit the bill.
It took a lot of googling, but I finally was able to get it up and running. I think my biggest obstacle was trying to do this on a Mac. I had issues with the miner installation, and getting my Mac to recognize the USB device on the virtual serial port. I think if God had intended us to micromine on a Mac, He wouldn't have invented the Rapberry Pi. But I was committed to making this work with equipment I had, and I was able to accomplish that.
As it stands, I'm now mining DigiByte, I learned a lot about the process, the software, and the hardware involved in mining, and my only cost is the small bit of electricity used to power the rig. I'm pretty happy with these results.
If anyone has more detailed questions about what I did, feel free to hit me up. I don't know a lot, but I am certainly willing to share what I've learned if it can be helpful to someone.
