1. You can mine Bitcoin
Everyone that starts mining would first like to start mining Bitcoin. Unless you have an ASIC miner (where one profitable machine can cost several thousands of dollars and is usually really hard to get), you won’t be able to mine Bitcoin.
However, there are services that auto-exchange your mining earnings to Bitcoin or services that pay you for mining in Bitcoin, but in reality, you don’t mine Bitcoin - you just earn it.
2. You can mine with any device
With mining earnings increasing, so does increase mining popularity. But you need to keep in mind that you cannot effectively mine with just any device. For mining, you need capable equipment. These days mining is done with ASICs (machines dedicated for mining), FPGAs, GPUs, and powerful CPUs. You can’t profitably mine with your phone, tablet, watch, Xbox, Playstation, Wii, Raspberry Pi, or other devices you have at home.
3. You can mine with any computer
Another big misconception is that you can mine with just any computer. Unfortunately, you can’t. Most of the mining clients support only high-end GPUs and CPUs for mining. There are some coins and mining clients that you can use on older devices, but usually, these coins are still being mined with stand-alone GPUs. This means that you can’t mine them with integrated or mobile GPUs.
4. Free electricity
There is no such thing as free electricity. If you are a tenant, live with your parents, or are in a student dorm, there is still someone that will have to pay for increased electricity. If your computer spends 200 W in total and you will have it running 24/7 and your electricity costs are 0.20 USD per kWh, this means an additional 22 USD on the monthly electricity bill. Keep in mind that mining might not be considered as regular use of electricity by your electricity provider.
5. You will get regular hourly payouts directly to your wallet
Few pools or services allow you to get regular and frequent payouts directly to your wallet. There are two ways the payouts are handled:
- You are waiting to reach the minimum payout threshold. Once you do, the pool or service sends you the money to the wallet you are mining.
- You are getting earnings to your username on the pool and you can withdraw them once you have enough to cover the fees.
The main reason for that is that the pool is still a service - you are connected to the network with all other miners and you are together finding blocks. Your part of the reward is saved in the pool’s database and once you reach a threshold on which pool doesn’t have to pay too high fees to send you the reward, you get the reward to your wallet.
6. Earnings will be steady
If crypto is anything it is not steady. The prices are still very volatile and while they are raising miners usually do not complain. However, as soon as the prices or estimated rewards started dropping, a lot of miners give up.
A single Nvidia GeForce 1080 GPU was making 0.30 USD per day in the bear market of 2019. Whilst today (August 2021), it is making 2 USD per day and this is considered low for some miners as the daily earnings were as high as 6 USD per day a few months ago.
Keep in mind: You are mining coins and not USD value. The number of coins that you earn depends on network hashrate, difficulty, block rewards, and transaction fees. The estimated rewards are changing all the time.
7. You can mine solo
With one or two GPUs you could mine solo only a coin that has really low network hashrate. If you try mining solo Ethereum, Ravencoin, or Ethereum Classic networks, you won’t come very far with one or two GPUs. You are competing against pools that have thousands (or millions) of MH/s of hashrate. So for home miners, it is still best to join a pool that works on a low difficulty.
8. Mining is hard
A few years ago mining was actually hard. There were no mining services, you had to set up bat files to run mining clients, there was a small number of wallet providers, a small number of pools, and almost no articles that would help someone to enter the mining space faster. Miners had to learn everything on their own - most of the time by experimenting.
Today, there are numerous different mining services available, tons of content, mining calculators, discussions, forums, and people that can help to start with mining.
9. Mining is easy
While mining is not hard anymore, it is not easy either. Sure, you can start mining in few minutes with different services (including our own), but to really understand mining and to optimize the machine to be as efficient as possible is an art itself. There is not only the question of overclocking but to also know how algorithms work, how pools work, what different coins stand for, how are rewards calculated, what temperatures are efficient, which pools are the best for certain setups, etc.
10. Mining is dead
The mining was dead as many times as Bitcoin. Every time there is a bear market, most of the miners sell their equipment and only a few are left searching for blocks - usually, those that are doing it as a business. With the upcoming migration of ETH from PoW to PoS when ETH won’t be available for mining anymore, a lot of miners believe that the mining will end. It is true that there is a lot of other coins to mine, but there is also a lot of hashrate that will get distributed over different blockchain networks, and no one really knows what will that large amount of hashrate do to the coins running on these networks.
In the beginning, Bitcoin was being mined with CPUs, then with GPUs, and then ASICs came. Everyone thought mining was over when new machines entered the market, but mining is still here. Just not in the same form as older miners were used to.
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