Bitcoin Forum

Hi, I am complete noob when it comes to mining.
I want to learn about it, thus the question- how can one tell if the coin can be mined?

Is there an easy and fast way to determine that ?

When you say minable, does this mean simply able to mine? Or you mean profitable to mine? You can check whattomine.com  for the current list of profitable coins for mining based on gpu you have.

A lot of ways, easiest is to see mining pools, what coins they are offering for mining with their instructions and support

there are also online calculators out there to determine your profitability with your current hardware

Lastly, all POW coins can be mined

Just do what i did at first go to announcements and search for POW see if algo is gpu friendly and mine some then another one and if you want to find about older coins any coin on coinmarketcap is specified that is minable or not.

If you point your browser at coinmarketcap.com there is a list of coins and tokens which are by default ordered by the size of their market cap (how much money is invested in them). You can change the order various ways and also look at a page for a specific coin. If, for example you look at the page for Vertcoin you will see it's name, and then a list of links under it to it's official website, the ANN (or announcement) page for it on these forums and various other links related to it.

Under those links are a couple of badges, one is rank 48 (which means it's got the 48th largest market cap) another badge says "coin" meaning it's a coin rather than a "token" or "asset" and a third badge which says "minable".

So that means it is mineable, but then you need to do your own research into how to mine it.

Using the same example of Vertcoin - I can tell you (because I mine it myself) that it is mined using the Lyra2rev2 (or just Lyra2v2) algorithm and the best way to do that that I am aware of is to use Nvidia GPUs (I use 5 x 1060s and 4 x 1070s) and the latest version of ccminer which uses cuda 9, and find out which P2Pool vertcoin node is closest to you (or at least has the fastest ping time) and configure the ccminer to mine on that pool node, with your Vertcoin address as username and x as the password. If you do use a P2Pool node (there are P2Pools for many different coins, it was originally used for bitcoin I think) you should be mining to an actual wallet on one of you own computers and not to an exchange address.

As someone else pointed out - you can also look at whattomine.com and see a list based on what GPUs you have and how much you pay for power - of SOME of the coins out there that may be profitable to you. They don't list all of them however - currently it's telling me that Feathercoin (FTC) would be my most profitable option but I happen to know that I'm doing better mining Bitcoin Gold (BTG).

If you just want some easy way to get your GPUs to earn for you you can download Nicehash's software and it will benchmark your GPUs then supposedly mine whatever is most profitable but that is based on Nicehash's market demand and not on the actual profitability of the open market.

I was thinking that not all coins/tokens are minable , minable as in giving your computing power in exchange for coins/tokens. And how to tell of they are mineable.


Thank you very much for your extensive reply , it is very useful!