I have decided to take a little break from the ledger, and try Bitcoin mining! Maybe I can make some spare cash with my free time. Or not, who knows? Only one way to find out.
I know next to nothing about Bitcoin, so I am going to post as I learn, and you can learn along with me. I’m going to assume that you have some idea of what Bitcoin is, and maybe you understand that blockchain has something to do with it and there’s a lot of math. So let’s get on with it!
What is Bitcoin Mining?
Bitcoin Mining is, I am told, how Bitcoins are created. There is apparently a lot of math involved in creating a Bitcoin – something about blockchains, probably – and it takes a computer a long time. Maybe ten days? Maybe ten years, on the old clunkers I’ve got laying around that I plan to use for this.
Every time you successfully create a Bitcoin, you get some reward (in Bitcoin, naturally) for donating your processing power to the cause. This is how the money is made.
What do I need?
I have two computers that I am going to attempt this on. One is a mac, the other windows. I am not going to go into too much detail about them just yet, since this may not work at all. But I’m going to start with the mac since that is more Bitcoin-friendly as far as I can tell.
For the software, a rudimentary online search suggests that CGMiner might be an okay place to start. Their documentation says that I can start mining like this:
Single pool:
cgminer -o http://pool:port -u username -p passwordWhat’s a pool?
Okay, apparently it really will take years if I attempt this myself. So I can join a “pool”, where I’ll get a little slice of Bitcoin according to how much processing power I can chip in (hint: not much). But that’s better than waiting a few years and maybe ending up with nothing at all.
Which pool should I join?
Another rudimentary online search will provide the names of many popular pools – Poolin, F2Pool, Antpool, Slush Pool. These are all big popular ones, all based in China except for Slush Pool which as far as I can tell is in the Czech Republic. Is there a way to “Buy American” on this? All the stuff I’ve read says that it is better for Bitcoin in general to be decentralized and not have a few big players dominating the market.
Well, Marathon and Titan seem to have “North American Pools”, but it looks to me like they are geared toward high-end corporate clients. Since I’m just a shmoe and I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m going to start with Slush Pool, since they are the “original”. Signup is a snap and they have a jazzy interface, so let’s do it.
What’s an ASIC?
Uh oh, Slush Pool is telling me I need an ‘ASIC’ and that my old garbage computers won’t do very well at this. An ASIC is a specialized computer just for Bitcoin mining, and the good ones cost thousands of dollars! This is starting to sound like work. Let’s see if I can get the old garbage computers working, and make a few pennies. Then I can work my way up to the Lamborghini ASIC.
Okay, so Slush Pool has given me a URL, a username and a password. That’s all I need to run CGMiner! Wait, I need a ‘wallet’ to collect my winnings!
What’s a wallet?
That’s where you keep your Bitcoin, apparently. Slush Pool is telling me to use Trezor Hardware Wallet, and I have no idea what I’m doing, so that sounds great! One less decision to make.
Wait, what? The Trezor is a physical thing I have to buy! It’s only 60 bucks, so I could buy this thing, but isn’t there a digital option?
So I go to bitcoin.org and go through their lengthy and detailed wallet selector, and wouldn’t you know it, they recommend… their own digital wallet app! Okay, now I have a digital option and I don’t have to think. I am installing it.
Ack, there’s two of them! The one that bitcoin.org recommends has a lower rating than the other one, which is from bitcoin.com. And they both have about 5k reviews. So I’m going with the bitcoin.com one. What do I know? Worst that can happen is I lose $3 of Bitcoin. Once I get one of those fancy Trezor things I won’t need this app anyway.
Aah, fudge. It will only let me sign in with a Google account! I don’t want to use my Google account for this. I will create a new one and give it a crazy long password, and use my original Google account for recovery. That should do it.
That is for tomorrow, as it is now my bedtime. But I think I am off to a good start.