My humble gaming-turned-mining-rig circa 2014
Back in the days when I was still looking for passive income on cryptocurrencies, I had explored mining altcoins. Mining Bitcoin primarily would be hard since each block difficulty has increased exponentially over the years, so I thought - there had to be other coins that I could mine that would net a profit right?
Luckily each video card has a set of algorithms that would be better for them to solve, mining Ether or Monero might be profitable but say AMD's video cards do better on the Cryptonight algorithm while if you had NVIDIA cards you'd do better mining Zcash. Take note each videocard has a certain hashpower - kinda like how car engines have their horsepower - it defines how powerful and fast your rig is.
Of course you wouldn't be doing good mining alone, thus there are these mining pools - Nicehash, Minergate, Miningpoolhub and etc. (those are just some of which I joined). They pay out on a per share basis, each of you miners complete solving these algorithms for a block, and you get paid based on your share completing that block on the blockchain. These pools pay you your share of the coin which you mined, and exchange them on certain exchanges like Cryptopia, Bittrex, Poloniex - in which you get Bitcoin in return.
Blah blah blah - technical stuff aside, let's jump to the part where everyone's waiting for, profitability. I wouldn't really recommend mining nowadays (except if you have access to free electricity, and the area has sufficient cooling - as maintaining mining rigs can make your place so hot that it would seem like you have a 24/7 heater!)
I'd say if you started out years ago, yeah it was pretty profitable for a good investment. You'd invest on mining hardware - video cards, risers, power supplies - and electricity (since you'll leave your rig on for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week). And if you'd look for more, you'd be trading them on different exchanges whilst HODL'ing on to other coins (of course not all coins have their fair share of purposes - thus came sh*tcoins)
But now, in order to get big payouts, you'd need a stronger rig, with stronger hardware - and with stronger hardware comes a much expensive price tag, and with that price tag comes more electricity - you get the gist.
So if you're looking to mine as an investment, think otherwise! You may be probably better off investing your money elsewhere, say cloud mining, Bitcoin faucets where you could win the hourly/weekly lottery, or trusted HYIPs such as MIKO - Mag-Invest Ka Online
