Mining Bitcoin cgminer example {Post-25}

Let’s say you’ve finally got the hardware together and are ready to mine a few bitcoins. We’ll walk you through a simple cgminer command line. At each pool you’ll get a pool URL and a PORT. Aside from that you need to get the following ready.

-->Hardware [GPUs/FPGA/ASIC]

-->Appropriate drivers installed

-->For GPUs you need to install the OpenCL package from the respective manufacturer

AMD

http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/opencl-zone/amd-accelerated-parallel-processing-app-sdk/

If your cgminer windows looks likes this once you run the command then you’ve got it right!

NVIDIA

https://developer.nvidia.com/opencl

Have cgminer installed Command line: For mining in a single pool all you need to do is use the following command line and replace the pool:port with the url given to you and the username and password with the appropriate worker ID and PASSWORD.
cgminer -o http://pool:port -u username -p password For multiple pools you need to chain the commands one after the other and create a huge command with all URLs, worker IDs and PASSWORDs. Multiple pools: cgminer -o  http://pool1:port -u pool1username -p pool1password -o http:// pool2:port-u pool2usernmae -p pool2password Press enter and if all goes well, you should start mining and see something like the image on the previous page. There are a lot more clients and covering each and every usage scenario for all of them wouldn’t be possible so it would be best to join an online Bitcoin community and find out if others with your same hardware have found a convenient software to use. That’s about it for generating bitcoins. Once you’ve started on this you need to figure out how to use that currency. The next posts will focus on usage of bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies.

Mining Bitcoin Join a pool {Post-24}

If the numbers weren’t convincing enough then we’re letting you know that solo mining is as good as dead. You need to join a pool in order to actually get something out of all the effort you’re going to be putting in. There are plenty of pools out there but you need to join up in a pool with a lot of participants. The following four have the highest number of participants and the highest output.

--> Slush’s pool (mining.bitcoin.cz)

-->BTC Guild

-->Eligius

-->GHash.IO

When you register an ID at each pool, you will be given a worker ID and PASSWORD. For each worker [i.e. individual machine] you need to create a new worker ID and PASSWORD. If you own 5 ASIC machines then 5 IDs and
PASSWORDS will be needed, one for each. You can join multiple pools as well and then gather different worker IDs and PASSWORDS from each pool.

Software for mining Bitcoins {Post-23}

The hardware is just one part of bitcoin mining. You need to worry about the software as well. There are quite a few software but we’ll mention the more popular ones that are widely supported.1. BFG            
2. BitMiner       
3. BTCMiner       
4. cgminer        
 5. Diablo          
 6. EasyMiner       
7. gMinor         
8. GroupFabric    
 9. MPBM            
 10. Phoenix          
 11. poclbm                    
Not all of them support GPUs and ASIC and lastly, FPGA mining. One that does all three is cgminer, however, it may be a bit difficult for beginners to fiddle with since there is a fair bit of tweaking involved in getting it to work. We don’t know if you’ve noticed but the GPU lists in the previous
posts did not feature recent GPUs, that is because the high end GPUs have undergone a slight architectural change and it will be a short while before these software start working on those GPUs. If you are going to be using ASIC or FPGA then you need to figure
out which software out of these is supported by your hardware. As for those you wish to mine on their computers, cgminer should be more than sufficient.

Mining Bitcoins solo-Pool-Rental {Post-22}

Mining is by no means an easy task. In the next few lines you will come to know how difficult mining solo is so why don’t we look at some numbers. Let’s say you have a good rig which can handle three AMD HD 7970 cards in CrossFire configuration. Each card gives an estimated 700 MHash/s but the CrossFire configuration will give you 1950 MHash/s on an average. The electricity cost per kWh in India is roughly 20 paise / kWh when generated. Consumer rates are even higher and vary from place to place.The current Bitcoin generation difficulty is at 1,789,546,951. Under these conditions we
can calculate the rate of generation.

As you can see, with such a configuration that has three GPUs totaling  USD 1520.68 you only end up with USD 0.01 per day after subtracting electricity costs. This is ridiculously depressing for someone who spent close to USD 1520.68 for purely mining these coins. If you aren’t part of a pool then your profitability goes down even further since you will only generate one block every 124 years. That’s right, more than a century is needed and that is why solo mining is only for those who have a supercomputer(s) at their disposal. Pool mining is another aspect where you do have the same rig but there are a lot many folk just like you who come together to form the pool. This pool then cumulatively works to solve one block and thus the success rate is much higher and increases as the number of participants in the pool goes up. While this also means that the share that each user gets is way low, it does guarantee to certain extent that you will mine some bitcoins out of the venture rather than solo mining wherein uncertainty looms over you for 124 years. The last option is to rent processing power. Imagine that there are people who can get you the hardware resources but don’t have the money to fund themselves. They turn to consumers and start offering rental services. In this method, you pay to get a certain processing power. They do everything for you so that all you need to worry about is getting your money’s worth in time. That is the problem with upcoming hardware and services. There isn’t any guarantee and some only accept payment in Bitcoins, so there is

no way of getting your money back. Butterfly Labs is one company that has delivered on their promises and are now seeking customers to buy into the rental business. They charge USD 10.53 / [GHash/s]. So if you do spend the
same amount as for the triple crossfire AMD setup then you pay close to USD 2,499. Let’s run the calculation again now. 

Now power costs are irrelevant since you are not paying for that and all you are investing is for the processing power. This means that in just 49 days you will mint enough bitcoins to break even. Everything after that is pure profit. The rental agreement lasts for one year so that means USD 16,817 of profit over a year. Seems too good to be true? Well, these calculations are based on the current difficulty rate and as time goes by this will

increase and you will find it more difficult to mine. That means that the returns reduce significantly. There are plenty of tools available online to help you get estimates on your hardware. Check out http://www.bitcoinx.com/ for a well thought out calculator.

Mining Bitcoin ASIC {Post-21}

Application-Specific Integrated Circuit” are basically designed from the ground up
to do just one particular task. They are absolutely useless for any other function. These are the fastest sort of mining hardware at the moment. There are some manufacturers like Avalon, ASIC Miner, Butterfly Labs etc, who have released hardware based on ASIC chips which are

highly evolved for bitcoin mining. For a little comparison on which hardware is better

you can check the following link https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Mining Bitcoin-GPU {Post-19}

The Graphics Processing Unit is the processor that sits in the heart of your graphics card or more recently on your main CPU itself in the form on on-chip GPU. GPUs are more focused towards mining since they have a reduced instruction set compared to CPUs. CPUs are designed to calculate a wide variety of instructions hence the focus is more on compatibility and less on volume. GPUs on the other hand have a much reduced instruction set in comparison and can crunch out a lot of numbers in a short amount of time.

Needless to say, AMD cards are way better than NVIDIA’s offerings and this is because of the architecture they have. AMD’s GPUs have many simple shaders that run at low clock frequency while the NVIDIA design has a lot lesser CUDA cores which run at a relatively higher frequency.So AMD gets

the upper hand by having way more parallel processing throughput, when we compare the AMD 6990 to the NVIDIA 590 we can see that   --> AMD Radeon HD 6990: 3072 ALUs x 830 MHz =2550 billion 32-bit instruction per second
-->  Nvidia GTX 590: 1024 ALUs x 1214 MHz = 1243 billion 32-bit instruction per second 

Right off these numbers we can see that AMD is ahead by twice the margin. Another factor is how the instruction sets are implemented in the two competing devices. AMDs instruction set is capable doing what NVIDIA’s instruction set does in number of steps. This significant advantage in terms of time combined with the sheer raw output puts AMD ahead of NVIDIA.

Mining Bitcoin- CPU {Post-18}

The CPU is simply the Central Processing Unit or your computer’s processor. This is
the easiest and the most commonly obtainable hardware. Also it would be prudent to
mention that you don’t need to go and get a separate processor at this moment. The problem with using your CPU is that it isn’t designed for the volume of calculations involved. You will be able to mine coins in the long run but the costs associated with
it will be astronomical and in no way will you be able to break even. The only place where CPU based mining becomes feasible
is for criminals who have botnet that mine Bitcoins on all infected computers.

Few models of CPU's are mentioned bellow 

remember "Mhash/s higher is better"

Mining Bitcoin {Post-17}

Anybody can mine bitcoins, there is a lot of material available online which
can guide you through your choice of hardware and software. We’ve gone through some of them to curate all the methods and the time taken to generate bitcoins with each of them. First, we will look at the different hardware
that is available in the market for mining bitcoins. There are different types of hardware available in the market. You can
use your ordinary computer [or your super-awesome-rig, whatever you call it] to mine or you can purchase specialized hardware made for mining and nothing else. The hash calculation process is very simple but the sheer volume of calculations is quite taxing on the system. We have four popular options on a broad scale. Along with each hardware type will be a chart detailing different models of each hardware available in the market and the hash rate it offers in MHash/second(higher is better).