This article showed up in my email as part of a Newegg email update. I read through it and posted the below reply. I think it was deleted instead of approved (no surprise right). I was probably too harsh in the beginning but I don't see how his statements could be mistakes and not shilling expensive products for Newegg that are not necessarily in the end users best interest. The title is also misleading. It was also difficult to cover much of what he said in a short comment (I hadn't intended as much information as I ended up with).
Not sure what else I can do but put it here and hope some people come across it. This may have been better in https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=39.0, if so my appoligies.https://www.newegg.com/insider/building-a-cryptocurrency-mining-rig-how-to-keep-costs-small-and-profits-big/Ben, I hope you are just out of date and not trying get people to buy inefficient hardware for far too much money.
First, I am glad to see articles out there that try to inform people of what the general concept is. In a very basic generalized sense you are correct.
There is a lot more detail that needs to go into understanding the concept of a "wallet". I won't put any links here but will provide search criteria examples for people. When trying to find a wallet or how they work searching for things like "what is the best wallet for bitcoin" and "how do bitcoin wallets work" are a good start (replacing bitcoin with whatever cryptocurrency is being looked up).
CPU - As far as mining coins goes the CPU these days is not very important, there are a very few that a CPU is still good for. Search with terms like this "what cryptocurrencies can be mined with CPU". A high end CPU will generally not be worth the money as most of the hashing these days is done by GPUs or ASICS.
GPU - Generally GPUs are the best options and right now NVIDIA GPUs are on top (years ago ATI GPUs were hard to find and NVIDIA were easy to get). Searches like "best cryptocurrency to mine with gpu" and "Mining Profit Calculator for Video Card (GPU)" will bring up sites that talk about what to mine and have calculators that determine based on the cards being used what the best currencies to mine are.
FPGA - FPGA miners were dedicated miners that were better than GPU miners for some cryptos but are not as good as ASICS. If anyone says they are selling FGPA miners please ignore them as there are ASICS miners available for the same cryptos. This was a thing before ASICS made it to market.
ASICS - ASICS are purpose built chips for doing one process. This is why when they are used with a MATCHING (pay attention to that before buying) cryptocurrency they are so efficient. A CPU and GPU are multipurpose and can run many different algorithms. Power efficiency is most important with ASICS as they draw much more power than GPUs do. The efficiency is rated (at this point) in Joules per TeraHash or J/TH. At the moment (February 2021) the most efficient unit is the Bitmain Antminer S19 Pro at ~110TH with a ~29.5 J/TH efficiency rating, this unit sells from Bitmain for approximately $3,500 but is out of stock and is listed on ebay for between $10,000 and $12,000. This is a little more expensive (on eBay) than the listed WhatsMiner ($8,500 on Newegg) but that unit is only 33TH and an efficiency of ~68 J/TH (averaged between the 2200-2300W). The Bitmain Antminer S9 that is being compared is from 2017.
TIME/POWER - When mining it needs to be clarified that the efficiency and profitability of a unit goes down quickly. A unit that is 1+ years old is probably no longer current and the efficiency from release is at least cut in half. If a miner cannot break even including power in less than a year it may never be profitable, search "bitcoin hashrate calculator". As newer ASICS and GPUs are released the hashrate goes up and the power efficiency is increased, search "what does hashrate mean".
EFFICIENCY - Efficiency is partially a mathematical equation and partially a personal preference/interest/goal. I often tell people "At this point mining is a trade in value. The expense of the miner and the cost of power for the trade to the cryptocurrency you want to own. There is no longer a get rich quick mining scheme.". There are multiple things to consider as well with mining. What is efficient for the hardware being used. Does it really matter which coin is being mined/where can that coin be traded for the one wanted.
The hardware available will have a large effect on what is mined (look up the hashrate/hardware calculator information above). As far as does it matter what is being mined, that is something that must personally be decided. Do you want to mine your own coins? Are you ok with mining an efficient coin and trading on an exchange for the coins you want?
EXCHANGES vs WALLETS - A wallet is a pair of public and private "keys" that are stored in a file on a device (computer, phone, tablet, etc). An exchange "owns" all the cryptocurrency on the exchange, it is in their possession. The point of the wallet and blockchain is for an individual to own their cryptocurrencies, this is only accomplished by having a wallet.
RISK - There are a lot of risks that need to be understood with owning a wallet. Search "risks of a bitcoin wallet", "backing up a bitcoin wallet", and "securing your bitcoin wallet".
I hope this helps people make educated decisions to keep from losing their investments and making poor/uneducated purchasing decisions.
