The Basics of Mining Cryptocurrency...A Perspective

About two years ago I had seen a mini video game system at a department store that had about 60 games from my childhood (in the 1980’s). The system cost about fifty bucks, looked like an older system (like Nintendo and Sega), and had controllers that seemed authentic. I told my buddy that I was thinking about getting one of them, and he replied that the graphics weren’t that great and that the controllers were quite cheap and unresponsive.

After doing a little “Googling” I learned that people were buying these little computers, called a Raspberry Pi, and programming them to be full of hundreds, if not thousands, of games that felt and looked just like those of my youth. Cheap enough to buy and really fun to program and learn with, I spent hours having a blast with my Raspberry Pi...so much that I ended up buying a bunch of them and have programmed them to do random things around my house!

To make that long story a little shorter, I learned how to program a Raspberry Pi to play thousands of games using a very familiar PlayStation controller. I was very proud of myself, but unfortunately those games became quite stale and, after a little while of reminiscing and playing, became tremendously boring. No disrespect...I still have my gaming going on...I've actually made a 5-inch and 7-inch handheld gaming device to keep me having fun on the go (and people are always wondering what the hell I have in my hands!)

While doing searches about how to program the Raspberry Pi, I noticed a lot of search results were showing things about Bitcoin mining and a bunch of programs used for mining. Obviously this sparked my interest and I wanted to further challenge myself and see if I could do this! It sounded a lot more rewarding than playing a video game and only getting high scores; not potential income?!

I researched all the ways to mine, and discovered that my best bet would be to purchase some USB stick miners to try this whole mining thing out. I also learned that many of these machines required large amounts of power so I purchased a high powered USB hub to ensure that my miners wouldn’t be under-powered.

After many tries, I was able to get Cgminer to recognize my GekkoScience 2Pac stick miners and lights were flashing! I let my mining rig run for a few days in a mining pool before I decided to check to see my earnings. When I finally checked my earnings, I was surprised to see that I had actually mined something. A tiny amount, but still I had some amount of Bitcoin mined.

As with many, I was feeling proud but wasn’t feeling totally satisfied. So of course I hunted and hunted and stepped up my game and began to run my original rig alongside an Antminer S3+. I was getting more than five times my original hash rate (at this point I was getting about 500 Gh/s plus 90 Gh/s from the stick miners) and of course I still wasn’t satisfied.

I was lucky to get my hands on an Antminer S7, and sold my old Antminer to help cushion the cost. Woohoo! With my old sticks running with my new Antminer I began to mine at about 5 Th/s and I saw my earned Bitcoin amount begin to steadily increase.

Now I've been running a few of those Antminer S7s and have been quite pleased (and have saved money on my heating bill). I was lucky back in August when the split happened and I sent one of my machines on the task of mining BitcoinCash instead. With a little patience I was able to beat the crowd a bit and get my miners to earn much more Bitcoin that I had earned in a larger amount of time.

As of recent, I have sold most of my devices used for mining Bitcoin as I feel that its not as profitable as an at-home miner. I obviously have used the money that I got from selling the machines to buy more Bitcoin and other cryptos...and I have recently started mining Ethereum...I mean...why not?

There were many great forums and websites that offered guidance on this journey. I’m happy to share the websites as well as my knowledge to help others learn more about mining and Cryptocurrency.

Thanks for reading! Please feel free to contact me, love me, hate me, or Resteem and Upvote me!

Bitcoin (BTC) Donation Address:
18gH4BGie1tCGHVXxFm7Kw8PsP9XGSGcR1

BitcoinCash (BCH) Donation Address:
1FdtrknqE7SCsFK5n6TvaCwmjUXXPnpQ16

Litecoin (LTC) Donation Address:
LRfn7uaUgLm8Bbc6ikXC1Pqo9Kd9YY3u2S

Ethereum (ETH) donation Address:
0xC437A444933BE0db7054b75a3053967c2c842E02