How do I actually mine (eth)?

[Mark Kaine]

So I was looking here - I get it that's not guaranteed, but still roughly what I should expect, 7$/day... 

https://whattomine.com/gpus?cost=0.2&button=

 

 

Now the difficult part is how do I actually start...? 

 

What programs do I need, how do I choose a wallet, and do I really need a pool - doesn't that significantly change how much I can expect to earn / day - what if the pool sucks...? And how do you cash out, idc to have ETH in my 'wallet' I care about the promised 250$\month (which realistically would only be half of that because there's no way I let my pc mine 24/7... 12h/day is doable tho I suppose)

 

I really need a step by step tutorial I'm afraid, I have no idea where to start even. 

 

 

 

 

[Dedayog]

Use a miner like Nicehash and they have walk thrus to get it all set up and working, the mining and the wallet, etc.

 

[Dedayog]

Someone even just put up a guide for you...

 

Nicehash for Noobs (How to start mining) - Guides and Tutorials - Linus Tech Tips

 

[tikker]

You download a miner

 

Jokes aside, that is the gist of it. A set and forget option would be NiceHash, but that doesn't get you ETH so perhaps not what you are looking for. It pays you BTC though, which you can also sell. So yeah, short way: get NiceHash and accept their fees. If not, things you'll need are

1. A wallet
2. A miner
3. Somewhere to mine

Mining wise there is solo mining and pool mining.

 

Solo mining

No.

 

Pools

In a pool you collectively mine to find blocks and get paid based on how much you contributed. Pools are plenty, just pick one you like. Things to look out for are: pool fee and minimum payout. Pool fee is what they take as their cut and the minimum payout is the minimum you need to mine before they allow you to withdraw to a wallet. I have seen fees from 0.5% to 2% and minimum payouts from 0.05 ETH and up.

 

I have used Ethermine a little in the beginning. They recently changed their minimum payout balance to >0.01 ETH every 14 days, >0.05 ETH every 7 days and >0.1 ETH daily, so keep that in mind. Now I mine on the Binance pool to my Binance wallet, so that I can immediately trade with them.

 

Miner

A matter of taste. They're all doing the same thing, so they should all perform the same. I use T-Rex miner. Note that your antivirus will flag any miner as a miner virus (because well they are) and probably put it in quarantine or delete it. Double triple quadruple check the wallet address you mine to, as funds are irreversibly lost once sent.

 

Wallet

You'll probably be dealing with two wallest: your personal wallet and an exchange wallet. I use MEW Wallet on my phone as my personal wallet and the Binance exchange wallet for mining and trading. There are also hardware options depending on how serious you are. Keep in mind the crypto adage of "not your keys not your coins".

 

Exchanges

This is where you trade your coins for other coints or convert to fiat. Again somewhat a matter of taste. Big ones are Binance (US), Coinbase (Pro) and Kraken. Check if they support the currencies you are interested in and regulations where you are to see which one you can use. I know Binance has separate versions for the US and the rest of the world for example. Note that you'll have to go through a KYC process to withdraw any meaningful amount of money.

 

Transaction fees

This one is important. Transferring funds from and to your wallet incurs a transaction fee and for ETH they are rather high at the moment. If I'm not mistaken on Ethermine the pool pays these for you on payouts. However, you'll need to get them from your wallet to an exchange. According to MEW for ETH it's about a $6-7 transaction fee currently. That's why I started mining on the Binance pool so I could mine to the exchange wallet there and trade directly.

 

Finally temper your expectations on earnings as we are all at the mercy of the market. Both ETH and BTC are still growing and so is everything as it's bull market right now. Sites like whattomine only show you what the revenue today is. Difficulty will slowly increase, price will fluctuate and it could theoretically all collapse tomorrow.

[Mark Kaine]

5 minutes ago, tikker said:

You download a miner

Thats what I thought, yeah...........

 

 

5 minutes ago, tikker said:

Finally temper your expectations on earnings as we are all at the mercy of the market. Both ETH and BTC are still growing and so is everything as it's bull market right now. Sites like whattomine only show you what the revenue today is. Difficulty will slowly increase, price will fluctuate and it could theoretically all collapse tomorrow.

Oof, okay thanks for the explanation... it seems really difficult / daunting, I'm not sure why it has to be so difficult, you'd think download a miner, set up a wallet and you're done...! but in practice this seems just not easy. 

 

And yeah I know, it's not guaranteed, but apparently a lot of people do this and if it's just 100-200 bucks per month it would be worth it (especially since I don't pay for electricity lol) 

 

Btw, I just tried to download Quantumcloud - just to try it out, but defender says it's a 'trojan' I suppose that's normal then but any idea if quantumcloud is 'safe'? 

 

I don't really care if it's worth it, as long it's safe... I just wanna try it out lol.

[tikker]

31 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Oof, okay thanks for the explanation... it seems really difficult / daunting, I'm not sure why it has to be so difficult, you'd think download a miner, set up a wallet and you're done...! but in practice this seems just not easy. 

Yeah I mean those are the steps, but they do require some attention as the keys and stuff are important. In the end it's just like creating a few accounts and editing some configuration files, nothing too complicated, just that it's basically a bank account you are dealing with so you'd like your funds to go to your account and not a random other one.

 

31 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

And yeah I know, it's not guaranteed, but apparently a lot of people do this and if it's just 100-200 bucks per month it would be worth it (especially since I don't pay for electricity lol)

I mean, I'm mining on my 1080 Ti. It's just over $1 a day, but it's magical internet money and "free" space heating.

31 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Btw, I just tried to download Quantumcloud - just to try it out, but defender says it's a 'trojan' I suppose that's normal then but any idea if quantumcloud is 'safe'?

Never heard of Quantumcloud. It seems to mine Q-Coin though and not ETH. Of course I can't say it is 100% safe, but if I download a miner than I expect defender to flag it as a trojan/miner or whatever. Just make sure that it's a legit miner and that you got it from the official page.

 

If you don't mind the type of coin you can always try NiceHash first. It pays out to your internal Coinbase wallet every 4 hours. It's just that NiceHash is a hashpower market place so you rent out your GPU, others use it to mine ETH (most likely as that is most profitable at the moment) and you get paid in BTC in return. It's a bit less profitable and they take a 2% fee, but you'll have it in your wallet and get a little taste of it. You can even trade it for ETH if that's what you really want, but both are valuable currently.

 

I think Coinbase Pro is where you go for the "actual" trading then with lower fees and more options. Never used it myself though.

 

At the very least when you withdraw actual money you'll need to to through KYC no matter the exchange, so that'll be like ID verification, address verification that sort of thing.

[Mark Kaine]

6 minutes ago, tikker said:

I mean, I'm mining on my 1080 Ti. It's just over $1 a day, but it's magical internet money and "free" space heating.

that's another thing I thought of, I kinda doubt these numbers they're telling you are true and it'll be less in the end, but who knows... 

 

7 minutes ago, tikker said:

Never heard of Quantumcloud. It seems to mine Q-Coin though and not ETH. Of course I can't say it is 100% safe, but if I download a miner than I expect defender to flag it as a trojan/miner or whatever. Just make sure that it's a legit miner and that you got it from the official page.

Ah, alright well I just asked about eth because that's what everyone is talking about so I think it's the most profitable (currently) but something like nice hash will be probably easier to get in so that's fine too... and quantumcloud was just an idea because it seems really simple and I see now it makes sense defender flags it as trojan / virus, would be nice if they had better descriptions, it should just say 'this is a miner, do you like money?' or something like that. : P

 

 

 

 

[Mick Naughty]

Just easy way, register for a wallet. I used Coinbase myself. 
Then get nicehash and let it run. When you’re ready to transfer or have enough, then send it to Coinbase, flip the Bitcoin to usd then send it to your bank account. 
The hard part is setting the card up if you plan to mess with the power and clock speeds. Or just let it run however. 
 

Not sure what’s wrong with letting it do it 24/7. Kinda the point of hardware. 

[Mark Kaine]

17 minutes ago, Mick Naughty said:

Just easy way, register for a wallet. I used Coinbase myself. 
Then get nicehash and let it run. When you’re ready to transfer or have enough, then send it to Coinbase, flip the Bitcoin to usd then send it to your bank account. 
The hard part is setting the card up if you plan to mess with the power and clock speeds. Or just let it run however. 

hmm, thanks that's a good, simple answer, kinda what I was looking for. Though I'm in Europe maybe coinbase doesn't work here? and looks nice hash is the way to go otherwise. 

 

17 minutes ago, Mick Naughty said:

Not sure what’s wrong with letting it do it 24/7. Kinda the point of hardware. 

Well if you don't play games then maybe ... it's just I really let my pc idle a lot so might as well mine and make some money, if this works out I might use it to build another pc, I was planning that already anyway as I have quite some parts already (need cpu, motherboard, case, my old 1060, ram and psu will do just fine, maybe just not for mining lol) 

[Mick Naughty]

19 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

hmm, thanks that's a good, simple answer, kinda what I was looking for. Though I'm in Europe maybe coinbase doesn't work here? and looks nice hash is the way to go otherwise. 

 

Well if you don't play games then maybe ... it's just I really let my pc idle a lot so might as well mine and make some money, if this works out I might use it to build another pc, I was planning that already anyway as I have quite some parts already (need cpu, motherboard, case, my old 1060, ram and psu will do just fine, maybe just not for mining lol) 

Not sure on the geographical limitations on Coinbase. Plenty of other wallets out there though. I game on mine, just have it mining when I’m not, which tends to be 18-20 hours of the day now. Really depends. 
If the 1060 is a 6gb model, might as well put it to work. I did with mine. Sold it recently given the bad availability lately. 

[Mark Kaine]

17 minutes ago, Mick Naughty said:

If the 1060 is a 6gb model

heh, yeah if I game on the main rig this one can take over lol 

[tikker]

8 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

that's another thing I thought of, I kinda doubt these numbers they're telling you are true and it'll be less in the end, but who knows...

Yeah it may be a bit overestimated, but not too far off in general. For me whattomine is fairly in line with what I get. Coinwarz not so much. NiceHash will also give you a real time estimate when it's running. It will depend on your actual hashrate and the current price which can both vary. You'll only know once you start.

 

4 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

it's just I really let my pc idle a lot so might as well mine and make some money, if this works out I might use it to build another pc

Same here haha. It's on anyway, might as well let it do something.

[wkdpaul]

here are old guide for mining ;

 

 

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

26 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

here are old guide for mining ;

thanks for that! generally should I just follow the nice hash guide or both guides? (if I want to use nice hash which after all seems the easiest method) 

 

Also, bummer : coinbase is not available in Germany (we're not allowed to have good things here) so this is going to be a pain to find an alternative... (which I kinda expected because we are definitely not allowed to have good things here... ) 

[wkdpaul]

1 minute ago, Mark Kaine said:

thanks for that! generally should I just follow the nice hash guide or both guides? (if I want to use nice hash which after all seems the easiest method) 

 

Also, bummer : coinbase is not available in Germany (we're not allowed to have good things here) so this is going to be a pain to find an alternative... (which I kinda expected because we are definitely not allowed to have good things here... ) 

NiceHash is really a set and forget option, but it's not as profitable, so if you're interested in some sort of an edge, mining coins directly, (ETH or other), is a better option.

 

I'm sure there are other alternatives to Coinbase, but not for free transfers out of your NiceHash wallet. I'm still using NiceHash but I've since stopped using Coinbase as I prefer having my coins in a wallet I own (having your coins on an exchange wallet can be risky, but I haven't had any issues personally).