We have stepped far ahead, now there is no need to use entire chains of intermediaries to perform simple operations, losing interest at each stage. This article is more focused on beginners who have difficulty getting started with the system.
So, let's begin. Before you start receive treasured BTC, we need to prepare storage for them. There are two ways - to use third-party online services to store such as online wallets, or a Bitcoin wallet on your computer. We strongly recommend that you keep your funds only with yourself, as practice shows, third-party services can be hacked, or their owners can pocket your funds. Therefore, we go to the official page of the bitcoin project and download the wallet program for our version of the operating system.
When you first start the program, blocks will be downloaded, this can take a rather long period: about an hour or more, depending on your Internet connection speed, a rather large amount of data is downloaded, and you need to wait until the process is completed.
So, while the blocks are swinging, we will tell you how you can get bitcoin:
- Buy from people who have them. The main problem is to trust the seller, and not run into scammers.
- You can use special Bitcoin exchangers.
- You can exchange your funds for bitcoins on exchanges.
- You can start accepting BTC for your services or goods.
- You can use your computing power to participate in mining (bitcoin mining).
We downloaded the wallet according to the instructions at the beginning of the article, after synchronization we go to the “Receive” tab in it, click the “Create address” button. This address can be labeled, given that you can have as many addresses as you like, it is convenient to enter the address for each service from which you plan to receive funds.
Mining can be done on a wide range of computing devices, but at the moment, adequate earnings can only be obtained on specialized ASIC miners. You can see the approximate speeds for various hardware in this table and calculate earnings on the calculator. For example, it is unprofitable to mine Bitcoin on central processors or video cards, you will pay more for electricity than you earn.
It is also worth considering that for many Bitcoin forks there are no ASIC miners yet, and they can be earned on central processors and video cards. Many forks are designed in such a way that it is difficult for them to manufacture ASIC miners. So a workaround for those who do not have specialized equipment can be mining forks that can be exchanged for Bitcoin on exchanges.
The standard paper currency is gradually losing its relevance. In 2017, the time has come for cryptocurrencies - bitcoins. For those who are not familiar with this concept, let us explain that a cryptocurrency is a currency in the virtual space, the most popular representatives of which are bitcoin. Perhaps, only those who did not get out of the bunker, did not watch TV and did not use the Internet did not hear about bitcoins. It seems that we have a new currency of the future, which captures the virtual space.
Everyone is trying to make money on it, and the main topic is bitcoin mining. Not surprising, because the rate is impressive and constantly growing. Knowing how to work with these fluctuations, you can put together a fortune. In the meantime, until you know this, we will try to consider this topic in as much detail as possible. Perhaps something in this article will give a future financial genius an idea on how to get the maximum profit using bitcoins.
What is bitcoin
Perhaps it’s worth starting with the simplest - indicate,. It is a decentralized electronic currency. It was developed by a Japanese programmer named Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2009, but became popular in relatively wide circles not so long ago. In principle, the wave of its popularity is just beginning to rise, so we have every chance to be surprised how popular this type of virtual funds will become.
The name bitcoin can be translated into Russian by dividing into its constituent words “biti”, that is, a bit (a unit of information) and “coin”, that is, a coin. It turns out that we have money that exists exclusively in the virtual space and is universal for almost all the money in the world. This makes it incredibly easy to transfer funds from one subscriber to another, especially internationally.
In addition, this name applies not only to the currency itself, but also to the wallet where it is stored and to the network in which it is created. But quite often on the Internet you can find the abbreviated name of the currencies in question, which in the English version looks like “BTC”, and in the Russian version “BTK”.
But before proceeding to find out how the type of currency in question is mined, it is advisable to clarify what its features are and how it differs from the money we are used to:
How to mine
If you decide to start mining, mining bitcoins will not be cheap. Of course, this is a profitable business, but the competition here is high. Moreover, the competitors are not some beginners, but experienced specialists who, in this case, have eaten more than one dog. Without proper training, it makes no sense to compete with them - it will be ineffective. But the instructions that are posted on most sites, to put it mildly, bear little resemblance to accessible and understandable instructions for a beginner. They are for advanced users, programmers and other people who are already literally fused with the computer.
We tried to create a guide that will look at the process of mining currencies from the very beginning, showing how to get more bitcoins, but without getting confused by the instructions.
- The first step is to purchase special equipment.
Previously, it was possible to use an ordinary computer, as in principle now, only if then there was at least some sense from this, now the chances of earning bitcoins are almost zero. This is due to the high competition in this industry. Therefore, equipment designed specifically for currency mining — ASIC miners — went on sale. All this will cost no less than two thousand dollars, and this is only for minimal calculations.
- The second step is to create a wallet for bitcoins.
If a person gets money, even if it is virtual, they need to be stored somewhere. Therefore, you will need to create a virtual bitcoin wallet. When the process of creating it is completed, do not forget to save the address. It is important that there is an open, public address.
What is especially important, you can create a wallet both online, using special services, and by downloading and installing an offline wallet on your computer. In the latter case, there is one feature so that your bitcoins do not sink into oblivion if the computer breaks down, it is important to copy the wallet.dat file. Then you need to print it and hide it in the safest possible place, because this piece of paper opens access to your wallet, which helps to restore information and earned money.
- The third step is to join the joint generation pool.
Of course, you can try to work alone, but the bottom line is that it is almost impossible to achieve high results. But in the pools it is much more convenient and efficient to search, and the participants share the remuneration among themselves. It's very simple - some pools even require pre-registration. But registration provides a lot of advantages, such as the ability to track statistics, choose convenient options for withdrawing bitcoins, etc.
But before you stop at any option, pay attention to:
- The fourth step is to install a special program on the computer.
Many professional computers already have such a program, but if not, then it must be installed. But be careful, because different programs are suitable for different software. The most popular of the programs is Bitminer. But if you prefer to work on Mac software, then you can use MacMiner. If you are a PC client, then BFGMiner or 50Miner will probably suit you. After the programs are loaded, you can start working.
Today, many people think about how to get at least some bitcoins. However, this process is fraught with certain difficulties. Of course, they can be exchanged for regular money, but out of sports curiosity: are there methods to get bitcoins for free? In this article, we will reveal 5 such methods.
Faucets
The nuances of the operation of various bitcoin faucets vary, but the general principle of operation is the same for all. The faucet user receives a free cryptocurrency for performing any simple operation - viewing an advertisement, filling out a questionnaire, etc. The reward in most cases varies from 0.000001 to 0.00001 BTC for each action. Sometimes earnings are accrued in satoshi or bits, but most often the payment is made in BTC. On some faucets, the user can additionally win a large reward (up to 1 BTC). To insure themselves against scammers, faucets pay out bitcoins to users at regular intervals. In most cases, this interval is from 15 minutes to 1 hour. The list of available bitcoin faucets can be found.
To start working with these services, you must disable all ad blockers in your browser. Some faucets immediately transfer earned bitcoins to your wallet, while others require you to collect a certain minimum amount. In any case, working with cranes will bring you some income (albeit a small one). In addition, it is you who can win a big prize. Most likely, making money from faucets will not compare with the income that your main job brings, but this is a good option for earning additional income in your spare time.
Mining
Of course, the times when you could earn decent money on mining have already passed. However, it is too early to put an end to this method of obtaining bitcoins. If you want to get into mining, then we want to warn you: the chances of making money are higher if you work in a pool with other miners. But now it is not at all necessary to invest in the purchase of expensive equipment and pay huge bills for electricity. Almost all mining companies have already switched to cloud mining technologies. You can see the list of pools. Mining bitcoins is a rather complicated occupation, and today for most it is just a hobby. The complexity of cryptocurrency mining is constantly increasing, and this activity requires more and more computing power. Please note that this is only a minimum of information about mining, and if you want to get more in-depth information about the bitcoin cryptocurrency, then read.
Work for bitcoins
“Free” this method can be called, of course, very conditionally. But there is more and more work being paid with bitcoins. The popularity of cryptocurrency is constantly growing, and many employers are starting to consider Bitcoin as a way to pay salaries to their employees. To earn money in bitcoins, you can refer to this subreddit on the Reddit website. Here you can do a little work and get paid for it. For example, private companies often place orders to create logos, etc., and the work done is paid in BTC. Here you can find many tasks of another type. Often the attention of users is attracted by services like WorkForBitcoins , however, it should be borne in mind that in this area people are often offered to spread spam or other dishonest ways to earn money. We think that it is still not worth clicking on suspicious links and doing such things. You can also receive a salary in cryptocurrency at your main place of work. Talk to your employer, they can pay employees in bitcoin using the Bitpay service.
Tips
Getting a person to tip you is hard enough. But if people are ready to reward you for something, they can tip you using the ChangeTip service. Let's say you write interesting and useful articles, and some of the visitors really like your stuff on Twitter. He will want to thank you, and for this he will just need to mention @changetip in the response to the tweet, and indicate the desired amount. The service itself will write off the money from his account and credit it to yours. The average tip is no more than one dollar.
Haircut Coupons
This type of income has its advantages and disadvantages. By lending bitcoins, you can make a good profit. But it should be borne in mind that, having given money to a scammer, you will not be able to return it. Work in the field of loans is built only on trust. For safe operation, you should choose only reliable and proven P2P platforms.
You can compare reviews of different sites and choose the safest one for yourself. If the service is suspicious, or has just launched, then it’s still worth looking for another service where you can invest your hard-earned bitcoins. As reliable and trusted sites, we can recommend
Alexey Russkikh
If you are stuck in 2010, when mining at home was still relevant, then this article is especially for you. Now we will talk about whether it is possible to mine digital currency at home, how to do it, and whether mining cryptocurrency on a home PC is profitable at all.
How to start mining on your home computer in 2017
If you are a beginner and do not know how to approach cryptocurrency mining, what to do and, in general, why it is needed, then mining at home is a great way to learn all this.
For those who are wondering where to start mining:
- choose a cryptocurrency;
- open wallet;
- choose a service;
- Download program;
- start mining currency.
Since it will not be possible to mine cryptocurrency alone without large capacities, home miners are often combined into pools. These are several machines that combine their efforts to find the required block. After this block is found, the reward is distributed according to the power.
For those who do not understand anything about mining, there is a Kryptex service. It allows you to download the program and it will extract cryptocurrency in the background and exchange it at the current rate. On a powerful PC, you can earn up to 4 thousand rubles a month.
Mining on a home computer only makes sense if you don't understand it at all. For beginners, this will be an opportunity to explore the kitchen of cryptocurrency mining first hand.
How much can you earn
Now to the question of possible earnings with a conventional computer. Modern cryptocurrencies require power that only one part of a computer can produce - a video card. You can forget about cryptocurrency mining and a hard drive. And therefore, how much you get per day directly depends on the power of your video card.
The best for mining right now are NVIDIA GTX. For example, the NVIDIA GTX 1070 video card. An overclocked card brings about $ 1.5 per day. If you overclock and connect normal equipment, then the figure will be about 2-2.5 dollars a day with due luck. And this is if the computer will work 24/7. Agree, not the most impressive figure.
If you want to see how much this or that video card will bring, use ours. Choose your card and see the score for each algorithm.
Having determined the hashrate, you can calculate the full payback period of your card on the Whattomine service - http://whattomine.com/calculators. Additionally, you must specify the price for electricity and the power of the device. The service periodically updates the information (including increasing the level of complexity, reducing the fee for decrypting blocks), so you don’t have to worry about the relevance of the data.
Why you shouldn't mine on laptops
Now a little about mining on laptops. In 2010-2011, it was possible to mine cryptocurrency on almost everything. Probably, somewhere there would be craftsmen who could make a farm out of toasters. But now everything has changed a lot. There are a lot of miners, the algorithms have become more complicated, and now, in order to mine 1 bitcoin a day, a computer of crazy power is required.
Mining on a laptop is unprofitable. From the word at all. Especially in Russia. With the surge in the dollar, technology has become very expensive indeed. The average laptop in which the video card will have at least 2GB of memory now costs at least 50,000 rubles.
At the same time, the same GTX 1060 will cost from 13 to 20 thousand. And it has 3GB of memory, and other characteristics are noticeably higher. Even a PC will cost less: 30 thousand rubles, against 50.
It is precisely because of the high cost of equipment and complete inability to mine that laptops are now simply useless for mining cryptocurrency. And given that even powerful PCs cannot mine expensive cryptocurrencies, laptops for mining cryptocurrencies are completely dead.
PC or farm - which is more profitable
Mining at home is an extremely unprofitable undertaking. And this is due to 2 factors:
- home PCs and laptops have extremely low power for full-fledged mining;
- home electricity is quite expensive.
As mentioned above, only a video card is needed to mine cryptocurrency. That is, if you buy a full-fledged gaming, powerful computer, the cost efficiency will be 30-40%. And this is a very unprofitable investment.
And if we add to these costs the increasing costs of software, electricity and a cooling system, it turns out that cryptocurrency mining on a home PC is 3-4 times more expensive than a regular farm.
Few numbers. In order to assemble a PC that will support 2 GTX 1070 video cards, you will need 100 thousand rubles. A full-fledged farm on 4 GTX 1070 cards costs 140 thousand rubles if you buy cards on Amazon. That is, 2 times stronger mining power costs only 40% more. And the worse the PC, the greater the difference.
That is why it is simply unprofitable to mine bitcoins, ether, lightcoins and other expensive currencies on a home PC. Let's look at alternatives to mining cryptocurrency on a home PC.
Home PC Alternative
If you want, then it's better to make your own mining farm. In terms of volume, it occupies no more than 1 cubic meter, does not emit strong extraneous noise and, with proper cooling, does not even heat up.
The price of budget farms ranges from 120 to 200 thousand rubles. And such farms pay off if you buy them from Russian parts, all other things being equal, in 170-180 days. But if you order video cards from abroad, then the price will drop by almost 2 times (primarily due to retailers' markup), and the terms will be up to 100-110 days.
Producing bitcoins on budget farms is a controversial undertaking. It makes sense to look at other currencies like Ethereum and Litecoin.
There is also another option - . It works according to the following principle:
- A large company buys equipment.
- Configures it specifically for mining.
- Sells power to ordinary users.
In fact, this is renting the power of a mining farm at no additional cost. You just buy a certain % of the performance of the equipment along with other people, paying for its work. This is beneficial for those who do not have money to buy a full-fledged mining farm.
You can use the services:
- Genesis is one of the leading providers of remote mining power.
- HashFlare is a cloud mining service that allows you to remotely complete the process of mining digital currency. You can choose from several coins: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash.
- IQmining is an online power market that appeared in 2016. The equipment is set up to extract the most profitable altcoins with subsequent exchange for bitcoin.
Cloud mining generates an income of about 1% of the costs per day. That is, the payback period is about the same as that of full-fledged farms - 100-120 days. The only difference is that cloud mining requires from 2 to 200 dollars, and the farm will take 3-4 thousand.
Related video (NiceHash Miner):
Conclusion
Purely technically, now you can do mining at home. The only problem is that due to the large number of miners, more and more powerful equipment is needed, and already ordinary computers are not able to cope with such loads normally.
Home mining will be profitable only in one case, if you mine a new cryptocurrency. Then you will not need high power, and even an old laptop can handle it. But if you are aiming for a guaranteed income and want to make mining your business, then it is better to consider alternative options: building your own farm or cloud mining.
We tried to answer the main questions of cryptocurrency mining at home. The production of bitcoins, like any investment, must pay off and make a profit. Does it make sense to mine on a computer at home? Probably, this is already a question of profitability and risks.
If you decide to start mining bitcoins for investment and profit, most likely you will encounter one serious problem: most of the sites on this topic are designed for advanced users. If you are not a professional programmer, you have no experience with Ubuntu and Linux, and only a little experience using a Mac or PC, this text will help you start from the basics.
1. Buy Bitcoin Mining Hardware
In the past, bitcoin mining was possible on a regular computer or with a graphics card (this was called GPU mining). However, today this type of activity has become so competitive that you will need ASIC miners - special computers designed exclusively for bitcoin mining.
2. Get a bitcoin wallet
First of all, you will need to choose a bitcoin wallet. Since bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, you will need to store your money somewhere. Once you have a wallet, make sure you have a wallet address. It is a long sequence of letters and numbers. Different wallets have different methods of obtaining a public (open) bitcoin address, but, as a rule, it is all very simple. Please note that you will need a public bitcoin address, not a private key, which is the password to your wallet.
If you have an offline wallet (i.e. you have downloaded the program to your computer and are not using an online service), there is one more very important thing to do. Copy the wallet.dat file to a flash drive, print it out and keep it all in a safe place. The fact is that if your computer breaks down and you don't have a copy of the wallet.dat file, you will lose all your bitcoins. They will not go to another user, but simply disappear forever, as if you burned banknotes.
3. Choose a mining pool
Now that you have a wallet, you are probably itching to start mining, but if you really want to earn some bitcoin, your best bet is to join some kind of pool. A mining pool is a group of bitcoin miners who have pooled their computing resources to mine more bitcoins. The meaning of teamwork is that the reward is issued for blocks - as a rule, a created block costs 12.5 bitcoins - and a single user must be very lucky to get this money.
In the pool, you will have to execute smaller and less difficult algorithms, and thanks to the collective effort, you will have a better chance of executing a large algorithm and earn bitcoins, which will be distributed among the pool participants in proportion to their contribution to the common cause. As a result, you will be able to earn more bitcoins, and your investments will soon start to make a profit.
When choosing a mining pool, ask yourself the following questions:
- On what basis is the remuneration calculated?
- What is the commission for mining and withdrawing bitcoins?
- How often do they find blocks (i.e. how often will you be rewarded)?
- Is it easy to withdraw bitcoins?
- What statistics do they provide?
- How reliable is this pool?
Most of these questions are answered in the excellent text on BitcoinTalk. In addition, a detailed comparison of mining pools is available on the bitcoin wikipedia. For example, consider the pool Slush "s Pool. After registration, you will receive a username and password, which you will later need to enter to work in this pool.
Follow the link to the site, click on "Sign up here" at the top of the screen and follow the step-by-step instructions. After you create your account, you will need to add an "employee" (Worker). Actually, for each miner computer you will need to register a separate ID so that the pool can track your contribution to the common cause.
4. Install mining programs on your computer
Now that the preparations are over, you are almost ready to start mining bitcoins. It remains only to install a client program on your computer to manage your mining equipment. Different computers require different software. Many pools have their own software, for example,
