All of us can mine cryptocurrencies. It doesn't require a lot of skills and one need not be technically sound to do this. A decent budget and a few facilities (mainly optimized electricity) are the major requirements to set up a mining rig to mine currencies. Starting off with, what is a mining rig/PC? It is basically a powerful computer (PC) powered by a strong internet connection and continuous electricity supply and also, dedicated hardware (miners) have been manufactured to process mining.
Earlier, when cryptocurrencies weren't popular, the mining was even possible on a Raspberry Pi 3. Students residing in hostels used to mine coins using their raspberries but as mining became more common, the process became complex and hence it started requiring high-end devices. As mentioned earlier, dedicated devices are present in the market, the most popular being Antminer (for mining bitcoins). They work very efficiently but are very costly (they start at more than ₹100,000). Therefore, the work is carried out on a PC which we also call a Mining Rig.
The next thing is that what exactly means a powerful PC in this case? Cryptocurrency mining uses the GPU to process the coins. And an entry-level GPU that is present in a laptop is not sufficient to mine because a lot of power is required to mine coins. We require a dedicated GPU that has at least 8GB memory (AMD Vega 64 is a good and economical option) and these GPUs emit a lot of heat while mining. We can even use multiple GPUs for less heating. Now, let me cover the different aspects of mining individually. Starting with electricity, mining is done using the Internet and Electricity. The Internet today is very much affordable in major parts of the world but electricity isn't. The unit price of electricity is not very high in India and countries around but is costly in the US. The profitability and the breakeven point for mining different currencies can be calculated here. The electricity and the internet charges cover the operating cost of the mining rig.
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| An Antminer which is manufactured by Bitmain |
The next factor required to calculate the profitability is the setup cost of a PC (which is the capital cost in this case). We can minimize this cost by not spending a lot on less important parts. For monitor, we can use a television from our home or go for an entry-level monitor (which can be bought for less than ₹4000). Mouse and Keyboard combos are really cheap today and can be bought for less than ₹1000. The next part is setting up the CPU. RAM is not the most important factor in the case of a mining PC and a 4GB DDR4 RAM is sufficient in this case which is priced around ₹2000. We need secondary storage that can either be an HDD (500GB) or an SSD (256GB). Then we need a motherboard and a processor and a power supply. These parts need to be compatible with each other which can be simulated on different websites on the web. The next important step is getting a cabinet to join the parts. Since the GPU emits a lot of heat while mining, an open cabinet is preferred which is very cheap. All of these hardware parts, when joined together, form our mining rig. The next part is the software. We can either use Windows where all the mining software is easy to setup-up (recommended for beginners) or we can use any free Linux distribution if we are familiar with the OS.
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| Components of a PC to be Assembled |
If one is an expert with the Hardware, the GPU can be overclocked for a better mining rate but this is not recommended. Once both the hardware and operating system part is done, the mining software can be installed which can be done using this website. And we are ready to mine the coins. While mining coins, one thing is important that the PC does not sleep because this will interrupt the process and the same happens when the internet is not stable. The mining software sends an Email every time mining gets interrupted so that, we can manually resume the process.
Since bitcoin is a very popular currency in the current digital currency market, it's difficult to mine them on a mining PC and thus we require a miner for better results but most of the other altcoins can be mined using a PC. Once we are ready to mine the currencies, we need a wallet to store the coins about which can be read on my other post.
That's it, every required step for mining is covered.
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