CryptoCurrency has been getting a lot of attention in mainstream media lately, leading to a large influx of people wanting to get in on the action. Einsteinium EMC2 Miner Pc. As a co-founder of a CryptoCurrency index fund, a blockchain developer and a Bitcoin miner, I have a little advice for those folks who are new to the scene and want to ride Bitcoin's coattails. I'm purposely targeting Bitcoin mining, ignoring other -- possibly more profitable or easy to mine -- currencies. However, most of the challenges and calculations I'm introducing in this article will apply to altcoins as well.

Challenges First off, mining Bitcoin is best done using an ASIC. ASIC stands for 'Application-Specific Integrated Circuit' which is not a term you need to understand. ASICs are essentially computers that only exist to perform a single task. Because they're specifically made for one task, they do that task a lot more efficiently than other hardware, like GPU miners.

However, ASICs are expensive so expect to spend at least $1500 on your hardware. Secondly, you need to think about power usage. Running an ASIC is like running a tanning bed 24 hours a day. This means your profitability entirely depends on how much you pay for electricity. If you live in a country where electricity is heavily taxed, you might want to look for a different hobby.

Bitcoin Difficulty hashrate chart and accurate estimated next difficulty.

However, if you live in a country like Iceland -- where electricity is nearly free -- you've got perfect conditions to make actual money from Bitcoin mining. Even if you pay only $0.10/kwh (which is low), expect to pay about a hundred dollars extra for electricity every month.

Your third challenge is location. ASICs are loud and need to be kept in a cool location. This was the biggest thing keeping me from setting up my own Bitcoin mine. If we take the one ASIC I would actually buy -- the Antminer S9 -- we would be living with a sound similar to a vacuum cleaner for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That's loud and annoying, meaning you probably don't want it in your own house.

If you have a location where you can put the mining rig(s) without them bothering you, that's worth considering. The sound has a purpose however, because most of it is coming from the fans which are keeping your investment cool. Lastly, you need to be warned. Bitcoin is volatile and while it's done very well in the last year, that is no promise for the future.

The Bitcoin price might drop, making your mining operation worthless. Technically you could still use your ASICs for other purposes but you're not going to be making real money from them anymore if they're not mining. Every Crypto investment is an investment in a small, volatile market with high risks. Fortunately, the crypto market can be a ridiculously lucrative one as well. Variables The amount of money you'll be making from your Bitcoin mining depends on a few variables (besides electricity usage and cost): Hash rate Your hash rate is how many calculations you can do every second. The more efficient your miner, the more calculations you can do. This is your horsepower.

This is the only variable you have impact on. Bitcoin price The Bitcoin price has a tendency to rise and fall but is in an upward trend overall. You're rewarded bitcoins from your mining. The higher the value, the higher the payout. You have no control over this and are just left to the open market's strange volatility.

Bitcoin mining difficulty Difficulty decides how hard it is to find a Bitcoin block. This is adjusted every two weeks but tends to rise with the price. At some point however, the difficulty will most likely be too high for the value of a Bitcoin. You have no control over this but it does have a lot of direct impact on your profitability. Pool cut Mining alone is almost never worth it so I suggest mining for a Bitcoin mining pool. I won't vouch for any but there are plenty large ones you can easily join. Normally, these pools take a small cut from your mined Bitcoins.

You have some control over this in the sense that you can choose a different pool but pools tend to have static fees. Making Money I've told you the challenges you'll face mining Bitcoin, I've told you which variables matter, now I'll give you a quick way to calculate if mining bitcoin is worth it for you. Normally, I prefer to create my own scripts to calculate the profitability of business plans or investments -- and I have a large excel sheet that does exactly this -- but for a simple Bitcoin mining operation, there are many sites you can use. One of the sites I really like using is, where you can simply input your variables and get an overview of the money you can be making. There are many sites like Coinwarz but it's the one I used to check my own math. When you do start making Bitcoins, you still might want to make actual dollars.

In my opinion, you should hold your Bitcoin as I believe the price will only rise but I understand if you just want to have money on your bank account. A good way to do that is by selling your Bitcoins on an exchange like. Coinbase is quite easy to use but it's worth reading up on how exchanges work before you get into mining.

If you have any more questions, leave me a comment and I'll try to help out!

Downwards if there is, roughly speaking, a 12 hour gap between blocks. SmartCash SMART Mining On Old Computer. At least that's my understanding.

Difficulty has dropped to about a quarter of what it was because if that and more blocks are coming in now. Does this not mean that the new difficulty rules will no longer be triggered now? It seems difficulty has adjusted enough to never again trigger the rules with high likelihood. That would mean that the next difficulty change happens through the regular mechanism.

This regularly happens every two weeks but because the hash rate is still so low it could be far longer than that. Normally, 21 hours would have produced 126 blocks on average. So it seems the speed we are seeing is roughly a quarter of the normal speed despite the lower difficulty. And that seems to imply that this difficulty period will take roughly 8 weeks to complete assuming that the hash rate on that chain stays the same. Is this assessment correct? The original bitcoin adjusted difficulty every 2016 blocks, which would nominally be 14 days @ 6 blocks per hour. The 238th such adjustment is due at block 479,808, and we are presently (early 4 Aug 2017) at 478,620 or 1188 blocks away on BCC.

I assume the original adjustment interval has not been changed. 35 blocks were generated in the last 24 hours, so at that rate it will take 34 days to adjust (~5 weeks). However, miners can jump in and out of BCC according to price/difficulty ratio relative to BTC, since they use the same mining hardware and just different software. So I expect the mining hash rate to be variable. Note that BCC allows for larger blocks, and several have been mined that are >1 MB. So even at 1/4 the block rate, theoretical capacity is twice that of BTC.

BCC transaction rate is running about 1/8 of BTC, so blocks are currently nowhere near full. Since many exchanges and wallets are not yet set up to handle the forked coin, volume is likely to grow over the next month or two. @Donn Lee - According to blocks have been recently (7 Aug) running at an average of 20 minutes or 72/day. Grey lines are a prediction for the future, white line items are history. There have been two difficulty adjustments since bitcoin cash started, and it is currently at 16.78% of the original level. Lower difficulty makes it more profitable for miners, so more have jumped in.

Some early adjustments were to be expected, and more are likely since many wallets and exchanges don't yet handle Bitcoin Cash. You shouldn't judge this coin based on the first week – Aug 7 '17 at 13:41 •.