digital-coins.net
  • Visit us on
  •  Twitter
  •  Medium

digital-coins.net

Bitcoin, Altcoins and more

Free Bitcoins?

Get them here…

Menu
  • Home
  • Introduction
    • Overview
    • Wallet
  • Invest and earn coins
    •  How to get coins
    • Free (Bit-)coins
    • For Publishers
    • Investing your Bitcoins (update required)
  • Mining
    •  Mining Overview
    • CPU Mining
    • Cloud Mining
  • About

asic

What is an ASIC device actually?

21. March 2014 by digital-coin.net Leave a Comment

Specially when it comes to Bitcoin mining you read everywhere about these ASIC devices. What is that actually?

ASIC stands for “Application Specific Integrated Circuit”. ASIC’s are specially designed pieces of hardware for performing dedicated tasks only. Nothing else. But this as efficient as possible. So when it comes to the hashing algorithms necessary to mine a specific digital coin and verify hashed transactions, ASIC’s are designed and manufactured to perform exactly the necessary hashing only and nothing else.

 

 Advantages of an ASIC

  • fast; specially at release date
  • energy efficient

Disadvantages

  • investment costs can be pretty high

What other software do I need to get an ASIC to mine?
Here the usual suspects are to listed again: cgminer and bfgminer are your chosen tools to power your ASICS. I plan to do a little tutorial soon showing you how to get a simple USB ASIC to start mining.

Posted in: News Tagged: asic, bfgminer, bitcoin, cgminer, litecoin, miner, usb

Evaluate an ASIC Device

16. March 2014 by digital-coin.net Leave a Comment

When you played around with CPU mining, you shouldn’t too much anyway as it is not worth it anymore, and you are still interested in mining digital coins, then it is time to invest in some mining hardware: Either GPU based or ASIC device based. Which one you choose, is up to you. There are a few things to consider when evaluating the appropriate device(s).

Here are a few bullet points to consider to pick the best device at this point in time:

Timing is everything
The most important is to get the right miner at the right time: fast hashrate processing using as less power as possible. This is important to get back your invested money as soon as possible. When I was reading though forums and tutorials and did some calculations it took most miners about 4-6 months to get back their investment before earning money.

Availability
Make sure, the device is available when you order a product. There are many ASIC producing companies promising the latest and greatest mining rig soon. This ‘soon’ can be in a few days or in a few months. It does not help, if the rig got can process the ideal hashrate as per today if they deliver it finally in a few months when the mining difficulty increased and the rig it is outdated, it will take ages to get even the investments costs back (if at all). To be fair, many companies offer then better hashrate processing, but do not take that as a given.

Profitability calculation
There are many sites offering some calculations based on the currency you are mining. Here are a few to do your first calculations. There are many more site around, just use your favorite search engine to find more if you like.

  • http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
  • http://www.vnbitcoin.org/bitcoincalculator.php
  • http://www.coinwarz.com/calculators/bitcoin-mining-calculator
  • http://blockchained.com/profit/
  • http://btcinvest.net/en/bitcoin-mining-profit-calculator.php

All of these profitability calculators take different parameters, so pick the one which suits your needs best.

Example
Lets do an example here: Lets assume we buy a miner today having the following specs:

  • Miner costs: 3’199 USD
  • Hashrate: 320GH/s
  • Power usage: 320W/h

The electricity costs here are around 0.13 USD/kWh. You will find these numbers probably on your providers or community/city’s homepage. So if we do the calculations for 90 days we would get the following:

  • Income for 3 months: 1281.22 USD
  • Daily income: 7.57 USD
  • Bitcoin per day: 0.01 BTC

After around 3 months we would have our investment back and then can really start earning money. Sounds like a good deal.

Posted in: News Tagged: asic, bitcoin, calculations, gpu, miner, mining device, mining rig, profitability

First try with CPU Mining (incl Tutorial)

24. November 2013 by digital-coin.net Leave a Comment

After getting a quick overview of digital coins, having collected one or the other free coins, we want to give it a try to mine our first coins. Lets have a look at that topic:

To mine coins we got the following options to mine with:

CPU Mining: This is the easiest way probably to try mining for coins as a first run. The requirements here are pretty basic: You need a CPU. Luckily every computer got that. And you need a program called cpuminer. Cpuminer is also known as “minerd”. Sign up to join a mining pool and you are ready to go. Advantages of mining with your CPU are pretty obvious: almost no requirements, no additional hardware besides your CPU. Disadvantage is the performance of you CPU: it is pretty slow compared to the other methods. Your energy costs will eat up all of your profits.

GPU Mining: Mining with your GPU is already a much more efficient way to mine coins and was the next step after CPU mining. Compared to your CPU the GPU is able to solve the hash values much more efficient; you get way more out of your energy bills. To mine with your GPU you need a modest graphics card which is supported by the GPU miners like cgminer. Most modern Radeon or Nvidia cards are supported. Requirements compared to CPU mining are only the additional graphics card you need – or even better several of them – and mining makes much more fun.

ASIC: ASIC hardware are specialized devices produced for only one task: To mine coins. But this in the most efficient way: This gives you the best hash rate/power consummation ratio of all of the three methods mentioned. However, you have to have access to such a device so there is an additional cost.

To jump directly into mining and gain my first experiences, I have chosen for the first option, the CPU mining way.

So, these are the steps we will follow:

  • Download cpuminer for your OS
  • Join a mining pool
  • Run cpuminer with appropriate parameters for your pool
  • Watch the numbers and have it run for a while

That’s it really. So lets have a look at this in detail:

Download cpuminer
Depending on your operating system, you have to download cpuminer (minerd) from this site or you use the OS internal packing system (like apt or yum). If you have to download it, make sure to pick the right architecture (eg x86 or x86_64), download the archive and extract it to a directory of your choice.

To install with a Debian based system like Ubuntu you simply run “sudo apt-get update” and “sudo apt-get install cpuminer” and the system does the magic.

Join a mining pool
There are several mining pools out there, all with different rules like fee’s and payout models.

  • Bitcoin mining pool comparison
  • Litecoin mining pools comparison

I tried my luck with a Litecoin pool and picked minersdream.com: most green boxes and no block fees. So browse to your chosen pool’s website and register your account. When done you have to add a “worker”. You need a worker for each of your device you will have to support your mining activity. As we just give it a try with our cpuminer, you need to add only one for the time being. Remember the name and the password of your worker, we need it in a second.

When you got your worker, we will start our miner soon. Depending on your OS, open up a terminal or command prompt and type in the following command:

minerd –url=stratum+tcp://stratum-eu.minersdream.com:3333 –userpass=USERNAME.WORKER:PASSWORD

(Please make sure to redirect to the correct path for your minerd binary. Replace USERNAME, WORKER and PASSWORD with you own values)

When you typed in everyt correctly, you should get an output like this:

cpuminer running in commandline

cpuminer running in commandline

 

Perfect, our first test is running successful; our CPU miner is mining.

Tip to have minerd  running in the background
To have cpuminer running in the background while you are  working, you can decrease the priority of it. In Windows you start up the task manager, tab “Processes” and then right-click on minerd and select priority “lowest”. (Not having windows, hope this all correct…)

In Linux you run the command like this:

nice -n 19 minerd –url=stratum+tcp://stratum-eu.minersdream.com:3333 –userpass=USERNAME.WORKER:PASSWORD

This sets the minerd task to the lowest priority and have it running in the background.

 

Posted in: Tutorial Tagged: asic, bitcoin, cpuminer, for dummies, gpu, litecoin, miner, minerd, mining, mining for dummies, newbie, tutorial
Earn Free Bitcoin

1 BTC = $30538.72 USD  (via Coinbase)
1 ETH = $2084.08 USD  (via Coinbase)
1 LTC = $70.80 USD  (via Coinbase)
Quotes delayed up to 2 minutes.

Five Stalls That Caught My Attention At Bitcoin 2022’s Bitcoin Bazaar

Bitcoinmagazine
May 16

How Bitcoin Should Be Upgraded In The Future

Bitcoinmagazine
May 16

Bitcoin Songsheet: Wind And Solar Are The Altcoins Of Energy

Bitcoinmagazine
May 16

Bitcoin Gaming Studio Pnkfrg Raises $3 Million For Mobile Games

Bitcoinmagazine
May 16

Brazilian Stock Exchange To Begin Trading Bitcoin Futures This Year

Bitcoinmagazine
May 16

Texas Pacific Land Corporation Announces New Bitcoin Mining Venture In West Texas

Bitcoinmagazine
May 16

Market Mayhem and Calling the Bitcoin Price Bottom

Bitcoinmagazine
May 16

Coinsource Partners With Kwik Trip To Launch 800 Bitcoin ATMs

Bitcoinmagazine
May 16

Japanese Broker Nomura To Launch Bitcoin, Crypto Subsidiary: Report

Bitcoinmagazine
May 16

Hoseki To Launch Open Beta For Bitcoin Proof Of Assets Product

Bitcoinmagazine
May 16

Luna Foundation Sold 80,000 Bitcoin Amid UST Crash

Bitcoinmagazine
May 16

President Nayib Bukele Announces 44 Countries To Meet In El Salvador To Discuss Bitcoin

Bitcoinmagazine
May 16

The Role Of Art In The Bitcoin Renaissance

Bitcoinmagazine
May 15

An Open Letter To A Bitcoin-Doubting Friend On Wall Street

Bitcoinmagazine
May 14

The Financial Dark Ages Are Ending Thanks To Bitcoin

Bitcoinmagazine
May 14

Major Increase In Bitcoin Trading Volume

Bitcoinmagazine
May 14

Going Against The Flow With Bitcoin

Bitcoinmagazine
May 14

How To Lock And Protect Away Secret Files With GNU Privacy Guard

Bitcoinmagazine
May 13

Seven Companies You Wouldn’t Expect To Be Mining Bitcoin

Bitcoinmagazine
May 13

Norwegian Bitcoin Mining Ban Was Struck Down

Bitcoinmagazine
May 13

Japan’s Largest Broker Nomura Now Offers Bitcoin Derivatives

Bitcoinmagazine
May 13

Bitcoin Price Tests Critical Support Levels

Bitcoinmagazine
May 13

What Terra’s Collapse Teaches About ‘Crypto’ and Bitcoin

Bitcoinmagazine
May 12

Bitcoin Utility Grows During The Bear Market

Bitcoinmagazine
May 12

Is Bitcoin Changing The Way The Left Thinks?

Bitcoinmagazine
May 12

How Bitcoin Helps Solve Unemployment In Africa

Bitcoinmagazine
May 12

Former Meta Lead Launches Bitcoin Lightning Company, Lightspark

Bitcoinmagazine
May 12

Record Mining Difficulty Shows Industry Growth Despite Bitcoin Bear Market

Bitcoinmagazine
May 12

Brazil’s Largest Broker XP To Launch Bitcoin Trading

Bitcoinmagazine
May 12

Swiss Exchange Relai To Release A Bitcoin Debit Card

Bitcoinmagazine
May 12

Bitcoin ETFs Launch In Australia As Market Goes Red

Bitcoinmagazine
May 12

Reminder: Withdraw Your Bitcoin Off Exchanges

Bitcoinmagazine
May 12

Welcome To Liberland, A Nation Created By Bitcoin

Bitcoinmagazine
May 12

Bitcoin Plunges To Lowest Level Since January 2021

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

What Sets Bitcoin Apart From Other Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

Why Use An Air-Gapped Computer (AGC) For Bitcoining?

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

No One Understands The Monetary System, And That’s Not OK

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin State Of Mind

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

Warren Buffett-Backed Digital Bank Nubank Buys Bitcoin, Adds Trading In App

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

Grayscale Met With SEC On Approval Of Spot-Bitcoin ETF

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

Continental Diamond Becomes Minnesota's First Jewelry Store To Accept Bitcoin

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

City of Mobile, Alabama Approved Its First Bitcoin Mining Project

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

Coinbase-backed MARA To Advise Central African Republic On Bitcoin Adoption

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

Bitcoin Price Falls Below $30,000 With Unexpected 8.3% Inflation Report

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

Exchange Inflows Spike As LFG Moves Bitcoin Reserves

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

Bitcoin Mining Hash Price Hits Multi-year Lows

Bitcoinmagazine
May 11

The Sky Is Not Falling: Why The Bitcoin Price Doesn’t Matter

Bitcoinmagazine
May 10

God Is Dead, Bitcoin Lives

Bitcoinmagazine
May 10

Bitcoin Is Venice: Sustaining The Unsustainable

Bitcoinmagazine
May 10

NYDIG Partners With Jack Henry & Associates To Offer Bitcoin Services To Banks

Bitcoinmagazine
May 10

Latest Crypto Fear & Greed Index

Tags

adapad airdrop asic bfgminer binance bitcoin bluezilla bluezille bscpad celsius coinbase cryptopolis earn ethpad exchange faucet free free bitcoin gamezone giveaway gleam gpu IDO igo interest invest kitchenft litecoin metavpad miner mining nft nftlaunch polypad promotion review reward souls of meta trading tronpad trustpad tutorial velaspad wallet whitelist

Latest Platform Reviews

Celsius
Coinbase
Crypto.com (updated)
OKX

Cloud miner reviews

Hashing24.com
HashFlare.io
Genesis-Mining

Archives

  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • May 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • August 2016
  • December 2014
  • March 2014
  • November 2013

Disclaimer

This site contains referral links to described websites. Thanks for your support.

None of the sites content is financial advise. Do your own research, please.

Copyright © 2022 digital-coins.net.

Magazine WordPress Theme by themehall.com