Thursday 9 February 2017

Newbie Mining Precautions

Is he happy or sad!!

Do's and Don'ts

while mining cryptocurrencies from your home. This is a small post about mining risks and other related things, which every new cryptocurrency-miner should know. So, read all points carefully, before attempting to mine any coin.

1) Mining basically requires electricity and processing power of your computer/equipment to produce new coins. So expect an increase in your electricity bill and an extra wear and tear of your CPU, graphics cards etc.

2) Mining produces a lot of heat, due to the intensive use of processing power of your computer. So, it is must that you keep an eye on your system temperature, especially your CPU and GPU (graphics card) temperature. Most motherboards have softwares to show these temperatures. For example, modern Gigabyte motherboards come with Gigabyte App to show the system, CPU temperature. For GPU temperature, you can refer to their respective softwares.

3) Heat is one main issue in mining, so make sure your PC has enough ventilation to keep it cool for longer period of times.

4) Since heat is a big factor, do not mine on laptops. As obviously, there aren't many options of ventilation for them. But you can do mining for small period of times, like 15-30 minutes, if you just want to try out mining.

5) Although, there are some softwares which allow mining on your smartphones, but DON'T even think about it. I repeat DON'T even think about it, unless you want to blow off your smartphone. Not  even the best smartphone on the earth is suitable for mining, as mining will produce heat, and smartphones just don't have any ventilation.

6) Even on desktop, it is suggested that you don't mine continuously for very long periods of time, especially if you have processors below the i series of intel or any equivalent of AMD or other processors. Same is for GPU. The reason is that the older series processors and graphics card get hot very  early and easily. Keep a check on their temperatures at all times.

7) When attempting mining at home, do remember that most equipment don't allow any profitable mining, even if you have cheap or free electricity. Mainly because, they just don't provide good enough mining power. Suggested processor for CPU mining is latest generations of Intel i-7 and for GPU mining, you can try latest, high-end AMD graphics card like R9 390, HD 6950 etc. So if you have older equipment, then you can do hobby mining for gaining knowledge about mining, without worrying about profits.

8) One way of utilizing your current equipment for mining is that you can do background mining. That is, if you have  multi core processors, then you can dedicate half or less for mining purpose and rest for your own work. For example, I have intel i5 CPU at my home. It has 4 cores in it. I dedicate 2 cores for mining and rest I use for my other work, like net surfing, creating documents etc.

9) One thing to add to the above point is that do not do background mining, if you are doing heavy processing work; like video conversions, playing desktop games or browser games with high quality graphics, animation etc.

10) With this I would like to tell you one last point. As of now, you can't mine Bitcoins from your home using your computers or even any of the latest graphics cards. Even if you have a super computer at home, don't even bother to do Bitcoin mining from that. Bitcoin mining has reached an advanced stage, which requires totally different kind of hardware, based on ASIC architecture. Recently there are some scam sites popping-up, which claim to have softwares, which can mine bitcoins on your normal PC for you. Do not download such programmes, as they are surely box full of virus, malwares etc. If this was possible, everyone could become rich. So just leave Bitcoin mining to the professionals! But you can mine other coins like Lunacoin, zcash etc. from your home. Or you can rent mining power from sites like nicehash, and then do Bitcoin mining. Nicehash is one of the most trusted and resourceful site in this field.



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