There are several different ways to mine. Your hard drive, CPU, GPU, and Raspberry Pie/USB drives. We're going to look at .bat for CPUs, and GPUs. These days you don't need to download a ledger to your hard drive. Unless you are looking at SSD mining. I recommend joining a mining pool instead of soloing. Yes, they get a small cut, but you are guaranteed the coin when the job is done. They keep track of your progress. No fears of black outs.
First download a miner. This is the tricky part. You want to choose a site that is updated on a regular basis like Github. If the site hasn't been updated in years. It probably isn't safe anymore. Hackers will inject their own malware into the files. You'll see stuff like this...
Before you install/unzip your miner make sure you run a virus scanner on it. Look it up. You want recent news. Most miners are simple.
They have a help file, a .bat and a exe. When you edit the .bat make sure it matches the code on the mining site, make sure it's the .exe that the pool uses. Some miners are able to be used with different coins. Remember there are miner exes for the CPU, GPU, and GPU manufacturer. AMD, Nvidia. They are rarely interchangeable.
Open up the file by clicking edit. You can also create a text file and save it's extension as a .bat.
The code is straight forward. However... If you make a single mistake anywhere, misspell, add in the wrong address, it won't work. This is where the hair pulling begins. So make sure you have a test run on a very quick to mine coin. Mona for example can take up to 6 hours on a GTX 1060 before you finally see progress. Siacoin can take 5-15 minutes.
Once you confirmed a number gain. Make sure your cash out address is to a wallet. It can be an offline wallet, a coin exchange. The offline wallet will need it's own password. This transfer can take 24 hours, and most sites automate the cash out process once you hit 1, 1.1, or 1.01 coins. Every coin has it's own address. You don't be able to stack Ethereum and Siacoin into the same address.
It seems complex. But all you're doing is lining up what you need. Think of it like bringing the right tools. When complete you merely have to double click the .bat file to start mining. You can close out the program with a ctrl+c then a, y for yes. If you have any additional questions, ask them in the comments section.
