💡 TIPS – Bitcoin is becoming the most popular asset in the world today. Not only because of the advancement of technology, but also because the price is very high. Well, there is a certain way that can make you get bitcoin, namely by mining bitcoin.
What is bitcoin mining? Simply put, bitcoin mining is a way to get new bitcoins by cracking and working on the codes obtained from every transaction that occurs in the bitcoin blockchain network.
So, miners or more often called miners will get rewards from the results of solving and answering existing codes. Like solving math problems, you have to be able to work on the questions to get certain rewards.
The function of the miner itself is as a verifier of every transaction in the bitcoin blockchain network. In the bitcoin mining process, there are at least three ways of mining bitcoin, namely solo mining, pool mining, and cloud mining.
Here’s a little explanation of the three bitcoin mining activities. Come on, see the explanation!
Solo Mining
Solo mining means that you do mining activities or bitcoin mining yourself individually. So, everything, both hardware and software needed, you take care of yourself.
Well, you do have to spend quite a lot of money to do solo mining. There are several steps you can take to start solo mining, namely by choosing some of the hardware and software below:
- Choose a Computer Tool for Mining
For the computer tool that you will choose, as much as possible choose one that can reduce electricity costs and also maximize revenue from bitcoin mining. That way, you can get big profits with little capital.
- Mother Board
For beginners, you can use a motherboard that has 2 PCI-E slots with low specifications. If you have excess money, you can choose a motherboard with 6 PCI-E slots to make it more capable of mining.
- CPU
In the bitcoin mining process, the CPU is actually not that important because it relies more on the GPU. You simply use a CPU with i5 or i7 specifications for the mining process.
- Hard Drive
The hard drive you use is at least 250 GB for mining beginners. That, too, is more than enough. You can also use an SSD with a capacity of 60 GB – 120 GB for mining beginners.
- RAM
RAM is not really used in the mining process. However, you need to prepare 4 GB of RAM to run programs from the computer that you have prepared.
- Power Supply
If you want to do low-spec altcoin mining, you can use a power supply with only 700W of power. However, if you use two graphics cards, you can use the 1000W one.
- Graphics Card
Well, this section is arguably the most important for a mining computer. Graphic cards that you can use as a beginner miner are R7900, GTX1060 6GB GDDR5. However, you can also use AMD and NVIDIA products for better results.
Usually, the graphics card used by the miners from NVIDIA is the GE FORCE 1070/1080 type. Meanwhile, the graphics cards from AMD that are often used are the AMD Radeon 470/480, 570, and 580.
- Cooling Fan
The cooling fan is very important because it is useful for reducing heat from the performance of your mining computer. You have to look for a powerful processor fan to be able to cool the computer.
In addition, you also have to set the room you will use for mining as cold as possible. In fact, if you can, you should place it in an air-conditioned room to reduce the heat generated.
- Mining Software
There are many mining software that you can use. Especially for bitcoin, there are names, such as bitcoin miner, BTC miner, easy miner, CG miner, and BFG miner. As for Ethereum, you can use Ethminer and Geth.
Pool Mining
Literally, pool mining has the meaning of mining in a pool. The pool here means a container for a group of bitcoin miners. So, you can join the container to become a miner.
You will get rewards from the mining process carried out by other miners, even if you are not mining. That’s because the miners agree to various rewards equally.
The advantage that you can get by mining through a pool is that you don’t need to prepare many devices such as solo mining. However, there are some things you can consider before joining a particular pool.
- Pool Size
For novice miners, joining a pool of many miners might be lucky enough. You can be sure to get rewards and very small electricity costs.
However, the rewards you get are certainly small because of the many miners who get rewards from the mining process.
- Minimum Withdrawal
As a novice miner, of course you want to be free to take whatever minimum withdrawal is from a pool. Therefore, you can look for the pool that offers the lowest minimum withdrawal.
- Pool Fee per Mining
Especially for the pool fee per mining, it will usually be deducted when you do the mining process. If you really want your profits not to be cut a lot, you can look for a pool that doesn’t charge a lot of money.
Cloud Mining
Cloud mining is literally mining on the cloud. That means you’re mining on something you don’t directly manage. So, in the concept of this third mining method, you just quite to rent CPU power from a data center that has the capacity to do mining
So, you don’t have to be responsible for the hardware for mining. You also don’t need to spend a lot of money to buy software or hardware that is used to mine bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
You only need to use an existing cloud mining service by paying an upfront fee and using the service. However, cloud mining has the potential to be hacked by hackers.
In addition, you also need to anticipate the decline in the value of bitcoin someday. Of course, with the fees paid up front, you could be mining at a loss if the bitcoin price continues to fall.
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Author: Muhammad Zaki Fajrul Haq
Follow me at @mzfajrulhaq (Instagram) or @ZakiFajrul (Twitter).