Hey guys,
First off I'm entirely new to cryptocurrency (I think I get the basics of it?) and have never mined a coin in my life. I am however in a fairly nice position whereby I work in architectural visualisation, so have access to a lot of heavy-duty machines (CPU mostly) and a few with some decent GPU's. I'm looking at mining monero (have just started on my quadro M4000 and a separate 1080 ti strix). Obviously the hardware costs and power costs are covered by the practice, so in theory it's "all profit".
I guess I have a lot of questions.
1 - Provided I'm doing it correctly on this (currently) modest setup, how long can I expect to see some coins (or fractions/denominations of) coins in my account/wallet? Is it a thing that I can expect to see incrementally creep up every hour, or day, or week? I have no idea on the timescales to expect.
2 - What difference does it make being in a big/small mining pool? Is it even feasible to go-it-alone?
3 - I'm sat looking at the command line interface scrolling away whilst the GPU calculates things wondering what it all means. Will it give me any kind of indication when I've "mined" something, or it's "paid out"?
4 - Assuming I've mined a coin, or percentage of one. What now? How do you exchange it for money?
Any help is much appreciated.
1 - I think really depends on how many GPU's you have to start with. CPU mining is just very very low profits in my opinion. So how many GPU's and what GPU's are they? As the model will make huge difference.
2 - Most you will use a pool to guarantee payment and combine your hashing power with others. You can solo mine but many coins it will be hard to have enough hash to not be more of lotto mining. So high likelyhood of you using a pool.
3 - Which miner program are you using? Hard to say in general but in most cases it will say speed and you can use a mining calculator to see how much you should be making, and also can check pool your mining to for stats.
4 - Again depends on a coin but you would go to a exchange and do this part best exchange depends a lot of what country your in for what is best. If in US a lot is KYC laws and you need to be verified to pull out cash to your actual banking account.
