Welcome to Lesson 3 of Cryptocurrency Mining for Dummies. If you missed either of the first two lessons you can find them here:
In this lesson you will learn how to mine a specific coin that you can hold or trade later for potentially greater profit. We will cover the three things you need to mine any coin:
- mining pool account
- mining software
- payment address (either personal wallet or exchange wallet address).
To help decide which coin to mine, you can use Whattomine.com to show you the profitability of mining different coins based on your hardware. In this lesson we will be using an Nvidia 1050 Ti GPU that has already been installed and working in a Windows 10 computer. Since Zcash is currently one of the most profitable coins to mine with this hardware, we will use this as our example.
Setting Up a Mining Pool Account
Once you have decided on a coin to mine you need to find a mining pool and create an account. Suprnova.cc and Give-me-coins.com are two sites that offer pools for a variety coins. Since we need a Zcash pool, we will use Suprnova. We start by going to the supernova.cc site and finding the Zcash pool.
Click the Start Mining button to enter the pool. We need to create an account, so move your mouse pointer over Guest
and click on Sign Up.
You will be taken to the Register New Account screen. Fill in all the required information and click register.
Next you need to create a worker for your account. Click on My Account then My Workers.
You will be prompted to create a new worker. Enter a worker name and password and click Add New Worker to save.
Setting Up Mining Software
Now that you have a mining pool account with a worker, you need to set up the mining software. Most pools will have a Getting Started section under Help that will assist you with this.
In the Getting Started section there is a list of several versions of mining software along with how to configure each. We will be using EWBF's CUDA Zcash miner since it's gives the best performance with our Nvidia GPU. Click the Download here link to be taken to the BitcoinTalk forum page for the software.
Find the link under Windows x64 for the software and click to download the ZIP file. Extract the ZIP file to your hard drive, then navigate to the extracted directory.
Create a Batch file that will be used to start the miner. Open the batch the file for editing and copy and paste the EWBF configuration line from the Getting Started page.
Then replace the configuration with your specific worker name and password. Also, since there is only one GPU, you can delete everything after the port number (please note, there is a typo in the port number of Suprnova's page. The post should be 2142). Save and close the batch file, then execute it. If all goes well you will see the following screen as your GPU begins to mine Zcash.
Setting Up a Payment Address
Now you need to set up a way to get paid the coins you have mined. First you will need a valid wallet address for (in this case) Zcash. If you will be holding the coins long term you may want to use a private wallet address. If you are going to be trading the coins fairly quickly, you may just want to use an exchange wallet address as a payment address.
Once you have your address, go back to the Suprnova pool site and click My Account, then Edit Account. To get paid, you need to enter two pieces of information, your Payment Address and if you wish an Automatic Payout Threshold. Then click Update Account.
If you don't want automatic payouts, you can always use the Cash Out feature to manually request a payment.
Congratulations you have successfully completed Lesson 3 of Cryptocurrency Mining for Dummies!
Until next time...
