Have you ever wondered what the hell mining crypto currencies actually mean? Well what you are doing when you mine coins is that you use your computer hardware to make some calculations to create a notch that will be inserted into the blockchain. OK what the hell is a blockchain? Just imagine a chain with links. Each link is a set of transactions that some math was done to create a link to be added to the chain. You get paid for doing the calculations that are added to the chain.
You might ask yourself how the hell do I mine and where do I get the software and find a place to get the assignments to calculate the stuff to make the link in the chain. Boy that was a mouth full. Well you need to join a mining pool. Generally if you are using a computer to mine a coin you need to join a pool to make sure you get paid for your work. You are probably asking what the heck. So the thing is you need to have the right amount of computing power to beat everyone else in the creation of the link or what is called a block that will be added to the blockchain. I hope that all makes sense.
The next thing you need to do is choose a coin and an algorithm to calculate. OK now you are probably like what the hell are you throwing at me now. Well there are literally thousands of different coins. The most common coins and well known are Lite Coin, Bitcoin, Etherium, and BitCoinCash. Most everyone knows about these coins. All the other coins out there are what are called "Alt Coins". These are traded with mostly Bitcoin. So Bitcoin uses Sha256, Litcoin uses Scrypt, Etherium uses Eth algorithms. Each algorithm can be calculated best on certain equipment. You can try and use your computer for these most common coins but you would only really make a few dollars a month. This is because the difficulty is up so high that you need special hardware to calculate the most for your dollar in equipment and time and electricity. I tend to choose newer coins that have a really good development team and a really good bunch of participants. If that all lines up I will mine that coin. How I know what is what is because I have been reading and learning about this for over a year now. I have made some mistakes and bruised myself in wasted time a resources but after some experience I have amassed millions of coins from many different projects. This might seem like a ton but it is really only worth about 200 dollars or so. I have not even broke even on the equipment I bought and the super computer I built. This is where experience and tons and tons of reading come in.
When I find a coin I deem worth mining I will mine as much as I can for a period of time I fell is right. Now how do I know this period, well I look at the value and selling trends over time. I learned my lesson before where I wanted to mine this one coin in the very early days. I decided it was a huge mistake to try to mine this coin so I didn't. Well I could have mined around 100k of these things in a month or so, guess what they are worth a dollar now. Ha what a mistake to make for a 200 dollar investment in electricity and 6k in a super computer. So I try and never make that mistake again. I found this one coin and started to mine it. I had around 200 of these coins worth somewhere around 75 dollars. I stopped mining because I saw the community start to dwindle. All of a sudden there was what is called a pump and dump by a group of people who own that crypto. It went to over a dollar. I spent two days mining the 200 or so coins which is nothing like 4 dollars in electricity. I missed the pump and dump because I didn't have my wallet open and when I opened it it needed to update to the full chain before I could transfer the coins. I missed it by 12 hours lol.
OK you are probably like now what. What the hell is a crypto wallet? Well these are software wallets that contains some specific information about the address you have created for that wallet. OK now I throw address at you. It is like anything else you need a way distinguish you for someone else on the blockchain. There is a specific format for each address of every coin. Some addresses are seriously long and other are manageable if needed. The reason why you use a a good software wallet is that some have capabilities of multiple different coins as addresses inside them. Allowing you to have one place for your stash of coins.
Well I hope this crash course was good for you. It was good for me, wink wink. I would love to share more about this subject. Comment below on whether this article was of any help or not. Also comment on what more information you want. Thanks for following, liking, and re-steeming. Read and check out my other posts.