The way mining works today as in that miners join up to create mining pools, within these pools people work together to find so called Bitocoin blocks, which are today 25 Bitcoin each plus transaction fee's that users have paid.
So how do I mine ?
Before you start getting excited, I would like to say that the difficulty of Bitcoin mining increases everyday and unless you have special mining hardware, like Asic or FPGA based mining hardware, you will have a hard time getting a return on your investment.
That being said the way to mine with your computer is to GPU mine. This is using your graphics card in your computer to make calculations for the Bitcoin network. Mining works best on ATi Radeon HD cards in the 5,6 and 7000 series. Check your computer device manager so see what graphics card you have.
Setting your pc up:
You will need to download and install the latetst drivers for your graphics card.
ATI Cards here
Nvidia Cards here
You will need to download and install a program called GUIminer. (In later articles I will be discussing different mining software and setting up Asic hardware.)
Download here
You will have to register an account at a mining pool.
For example Triplemining
After you register an account navigate to the workers page and setup a worker username and password.
Now you will run the GUIminer software by clicking its Icon in your startmenu.
The options:
- Server: Select your Pool in this list, in my example select Triplemining
- Username: Here you will put in your worker name, not your pool username
- Password: Here you will put in your worker password, not your pool password
- Device: Here you will select your GPU, running ATi it will have a name of an island like Cayman
- Extra Flags: "-v -f0" is good for any graphics card.
Now you are good to go, click start mining and see the magic happen.
Did you find this information usefull ? Please throw some Bitcoin my way: 13dprUXbVknKenXFN2qwZaajS8sum8PNMW
