How to mine?

[JeLAime13]

I am completely new to this and pretty much need my hand held through it.

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[antgrinder]

go to the coin website that you want to mine and there will usually be instructions on how to mine

[paul44]

The initial cost of hardware is fairly significant and you aren't guaranteed to make that money back unfortunately (but but sure sounds fun!).

[ocean59]

I am completely new to this and pretty much need my hand held through it.

It will require many hours of reading and research. A cursory level understanding of command line prompts (Linux or Windows) will help. Google and these websites are also your friend, but there are no shortcuts.

Luckily, several guides do exist that are designed to hold your hand. However, since each coin is different, there aren't many 'universal' guides (although many guides for one coin may also work for another, depending on the technology involved).

[forbitz]

I was able to get up and running on Linux mining following this guide:

http://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php?topic=321.0

I then just changed the addresses to whatever mining pool I joined.  This for for cpu mining though, most people seem to do gpu mining as its more profitable.  I only wanted to setup cpu mining as I have access to a free vm that has been doing nothing for a year!

[paul44]

Thanks for pointing out that guide, looks like it could come in handy for me on a buntu box I have

[Itun]

Well, there are many many answers to your question since it's very broad.

If you want to mine btc, you have to either buy a good ASIC mining rig or buy shares of cloud mining.

- When you are buying a mining rig, make sure you get a really cheap USD to GH/s ratio. Otherwise, you will never get ROI.
   - I can't find a mining rig with good value right now. You'd have to search for it.
- When you buy cloud mining, prices are going to be higher per GH/s, but these are more like stocks (so you can easily sell and buy these whenever price changes for your advantage) so you might get more money from buying/selling than from mining, but you can surely keep those just for mining.
   - There are many cloud mining websites, but cex.io is a notable one

[Itun]

Oh I forgot,

I don't know much about mining scrypt alt-coins, but I know that you have to buy good GPU for mining.

For both kinds of mining, you have to download programs (which will be provided on pools) and you need to invest money.

Good luck mining!

[dwdoc]

Buy one usb stick to mine for fun and buy bitcoin with your remaining stash.

[Itun]

Buy one usb stick to mine for fun and buy bitcoin with your remaining stash.

Yes, exactly.

If you are planning to buy a usb ASIC miner, don't think about its profitability because it won't be profitable at all.

[Acidyo]

As said above several times, most pools give you the instructions pretty well, or atleast a link to where you can download the mining software which (usually) leads to these forums and there will be instructions how to set them up.

I would recommend guiminer for a newbie, like a friend did for me.

[paul44]

I was able to get up and running on Linux mining following this guide:

http://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php?topic=321.0

I then just changed the addresses to whatever mining pool I joined.  This for for cpu mining though, most people seem to do gpu mining as its more profitable.  I only wanted to setup cpu mining as I have access to a free vm that has been doing nothing for a year!

Could you please help me out? I have setup miner on my windows box but having problems with this on buntu. I have both setup in one pool and the windows box is working fairly well but the buntu isnt creating any shares even although I know its been running for a few days. Are there any other guides you are aware of for linux? Kinda stuck.

Thanks for any help.

[NodeSeperator]

Remember: Don't trust anyone. Check the source for virus/trojan etc before using, check or ask for information before running anything you don't know anything about.

Encrypt wallets because there are some trojan's out there that swipe wallet.dat and send it off to a remote pc.

[ilou]

I am quite new to this as well, but FWIW, my advice would be:

- If you are asking how to get started from scratch, stay away from Bitcoin mining which requires dedicated hardware that may be obsolete by the time you receive it (unless you make really big investments but then it is not for newbie)
- I don't think buying cloud / mining contract is profitable either (why on earth would people sell these contracts if they could make more profit by using it themselves ? IMO opinion, most of them are trying to get ROI on their -obsolete- hardware investment this way)

So you are, imho, left with alt coins mining amongst which Litecoin is obviously the more well known (but probably not the most profitable). Most of these are base on a different algorithm (scrypt) which (as of today) is ASIC proof and can still be run on non dedicated hardware.
- You need a decent GPU for this. You can still have a go to it as a proof of concept with something like HD6870. But something more high end would be needed if you are serious about it (r9 280, r9 290 ...)
- If you are OK with command line cgminer is not very hard to use.
- You need a wallet for your currency of your choice (typically litecoin to start with)
- You will join a pool (mining solo except if you are running a big rig and / or mining a low difficulty coin is not an option IMO, especially as a starting point)
- So some example of putting things together can be watched here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4FFf_rO3Ho

Next possibilty is to mine some "CPU capable" coin, amongst which Ripple / XRP is quite an interesting concept. You share you CPU for good aims (like cancer research scientifixc calculation for instance), you'll be rewarde with some coins (XRP) at some point. more on this https://ripple.com/ Don't expect to get rich this way though (unless XRP comes out to be a good concept and starts rocketting ...)

hope this helps.