Mining Ethereum for beginners

Christiaan
Aug 27, 2017 · 2 min read

Hello, in this short guide I will give you an introduction to mining cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. Mining cryptocurrencies is essential for them to exist, as the mining task is verifying transactions and putting them in the blockchain. In exchange, you get a transaction fee.

Step one: Sign up for a pool

For most cryptocurrencies, you have to work together with other members in a pool to mine the so called blocks faster, this will grand you a payout much faster but often in exchange for a small fee and it will allow you to run multiple machines at once, working on the same block. I can recommend MinerGate as they support a lot of different currencies, you can signup here:

Step two: Download a miner program

MinerGate has it’s own gui program but ethminer (A command line version) is also supported. Find it on the download page and download the one for your mining machine. GPU mining is often faster than CPU mining, but Ethereum still handles CPU mining quite well.

Step 3: Start mining!

MinerGate GUI client in action

From the MinerGate GUI client, you can mine multiple currencies, I prefer Ethereum myself. From the second tab, manual mining, you can start ETH, before the mining starts, it will first prepare DAG, this can take a while. After that it starts to mine automatically for you. It takes a while until the block is confirmed by the network, then you will be compensated for the work you did.

After you are done mining, visit the dashboard on the MinerGate website, once you have more than 0.001 ETH, you can withdraw it to your wallet. This can take a while though. I’ve hope this has encouraged you to start mining and trading Ethereum, feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

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 by the author.

Christiaan

Written by

INTP — Software engineer — Interested in cryptocurrencies, using hardware in ways it is not originally intended and mobile apps

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