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

miner

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 = $24043.18 USD  (via Coinbase)
1 ETH = $1904.45 USD  (via Coinbase)
1 LTC = $62.03 USD  (via Coinbase)
Quotes delayed up to 2 minutes.

Saving Private Keys From The Courts

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 12

Bitcoin, Bitcoiners, Truth, Beauty And Love

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 11

Bitcoin Miner Genesis Digital Secures 708 MW Capacity, Expects To Create 600 Jobs

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 11

Philippine Central Bank Halts Bitcoin, Crypto Service Provider Approvals For Three Years

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 11

World’s Largest Asset Manager BlackRock Launches Spot Bitcoin Private Trust

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 11

The War On Financial Privacy Is Escalating

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 11

What The Sanctioning Of Tornado Cash Means For Bitcoin

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 11

Tips For Surviving The Bitcoin Bear Market

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 11

LFG = Landfill Gas: Bitcoin Mining Can Turn Gas From Garbage Into Money

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 11

Despite Challenges, Nigerian Bitcoin Miners Are Poised To Profit

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 10

Vinteum Launches Funding Bitcoin Developers In Brazil, Latin America

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 10

All Eyes Are On The Consumer Price Index

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 10

OpenNode, Launch Cart To Launch Bitcoin Payments For Ecommerce Companies

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 10

U.S. Inflation Slowed To 8.5% In July. Bitcoin Claims $24,000

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 10

Tropic Square To Launch Prototype For Open-Source Chips Used In Bitcoin Hardware

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 10

Motiv Inc. Launches 16 Circular Bitcoin Economies In Peru

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 10

Finding The Path To A Parallel Bitcoin Economy

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 10

Treasury Sanctions Open-Source Software

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 10

Tales From Europe: Eurozone Crisis Shows The Argument For Bitcoin

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 10

The Stablecoin Monster: CBDCs Are A Red Herring

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 09

Building Nigeria’s Bitcoin’s Village

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 09

Methane-Capturer Vespene Energy Raises $4.3M To Help Cities Mine Bitcoin

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 09

Bitcoin Mining Company CleanSpark Acquires 86 MW Mining Facility

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 09

Bitcoin Helps Poor Countries Survive When Government Bonds Are Worthless

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 09

Bitcoin Is Money. Central Bank Digital Currencies Are Not.

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 09

Lightning Network’s Advantages As Payment Technology

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 09

The Dawn Of The Bitcoin Art Renaissance

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 09

Voltage Now Offers One-Click Inbound Liquidity For Lightning Nodes

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 08

Bitcoiners Are Building The Future They Want To See: Experiences From 30 Bitcoin Meetups

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 07

Border Wallets: A New Way to Create and Easily Memorize Bitcoin Seed Phrases

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 06

Bitcoin Price Continues To Drop With Seven Daily Red Candles

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 06

Which Developed Country Will Be The First To Adopt Bitcoin?

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 06

The Great Wall: Why China’s Central Planners Can’t Handle Bitcoin

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 06

Tapsigner Bitcoin Hardware Wallet: Security Meets Convenience?

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 05

The Bitcoin Conference 2022 Pitch Day Showcases The Next Generation Of Bitcoin Startups

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 05

Hut 8 Maintains HODL Strategy, Adds 330 BTC To Treasury In July

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 05

We Haven’t Even Begun To Scratch The Surface Of Potential Bitcoin Jobs

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 05

A European Debt Crisis Is Bullish For Bitcoin

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 05

The Globalists Are Bluffing And It’s Time To Call Them Out

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 05

What Happens To My Bitcoin When I Die?

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 05

Binance And Mastercard To Launch Bitcoin Rewards Card In Argentina

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 04

Conservative Advocates Condemn U.S. CBDC Development, Encourage Bitcoin Adoption

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 04

Pepe

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 04

BlackRock To Offer Bitcoin Trading, Custody In Coinbase Partnership

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 04

ZEBEDEE Launches Instant Cross-Platform Money Transfers Using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 04

New York’s Proof-Of-Work Ban Violates Bitcoin Miners’ Right To Free Speech

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 04

The Path Is Clear: Bitcoin And Freedom Or International Communism

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 04

Simplifying Bitcoin Addresses Using DNS

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 04

Foundry Digital Donates 1 BTC To Developer Working On Bitcoin Mining Pools

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 03

Oxford City Football Club To Accept Bitcoin In Partnership With CoinCorner

Bitcoinmagazine
Aug 03

Latest Crypto Fear & Greed Index

Tags

adapad airdrop asic binance bitcoin bluezilla bluezille bnb bscpad celsius coinbase cryptopolis earn eth ethpad exchange fait faucet free free bitcoin gamezone giveaway gleam gpu IDO igo kitchenft litecoin metavpad miner mining move2earn movez nft nftlaunch polypad promotion 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

  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • 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