To demystify Bitcoin Mining, below are lists of answers, guides and resources you will get on some of the interesting topics of Bitcoin Mining:

• What is a Bitcoin?
• Bitcoin Mining Definition
• Breaking Down Bitcoin Mining
• What is a Bitcoin Miner?
• Bitcoin Mining Sites
• Bitcoin Mining Software
• Bitcoin Wallets
• Bitcoin Mining Investment
• Bitcoin Mining Pool
• Bitcoin Mining Pool Comparison
• Bitcoin Mining Rig
• Bitcoin Mining Hardware
• How Does Bitcoin Mining Work?
• How to Start Bitcoin Mining
• Bitcoin Mining at Home
• Is Bitcoin Mining Profitable?
• Bitcoin Mining App
• Free Bitcoin Mining Sites
• How Long Does it Take to Mine 1 Bitcoin?
• Can You Make Money Mining Bitcoin?
• How do You Successfully Mine Bitcoins?
• Can I Mine Bitcoin on my PC?
• How Much do Bitcoin Miners Make a Day?
• How Much Does it Cost to Mine 1 Bitcoin?
• Can I Mine Bitcoin on my Phone?
• How Long Does it Take to Mine a Bitcoin With GTX 1080?

What is a Bitcoin?

According to CNNMoney, Bitcoin is a new currency that was created in 2009 by an unknown person using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. Transactions are made with no middle men – meaning, no banks! There are no transaction fees and no need to give your real name. More merchants are beginning to accept them: You can buy webhosting services, pizza or even manicures.

Bitcoins can be used to buy merchandise anonymously. In addition, international payments are easy and cheap because bitcoins are not tied to any country or subject to regulation. Small businesses may like them because there are no credit card fees. Some people just buy bitcoins as an investment, hoping that they’ll go up in value.

Bitcoin Mining Definition

Bitcoin mining is the process by which transactions are verified and added to the public ledger, known as the block chain, and also the means through which new bitcoin are released. Anyone with access to the internet and suitable hardware can participate in mining. The mining process involves compiling recent transactions into blocks and trying to solve a computationally difficult puzzle.

Read Also: Top 10 Best Cryptocurrency to Invest in 2022

The participant who first solves the puzzle gets to place the next block on the block chain and claim the rewards. The rewards, which incentivize mining, are both the transaction fees associated with the transactions compiled in the block as well as newly released bitcoin.

BREAKING DOWN ‘Bitcoin Mining’

The amount of new bitcoin released with each mined block is called the block reward. The block reward is halved every 210,000 blocks, or roughly every 4 years. The block reward started at 50 in 2009, is now 25 in 2014, and will continue to decrease. This diminishing block reward will result in a total release of bitcoin that approaches 21 million.

How hard are the puzzles involved in mining? Well, that depends on how much effort is being put into mining across the network. The difficulty of the mining can be adjusted, and is adjusted by the protocol every 2016 blocks, or roughly every 2 weeks. The difficulty adjusts itself with the aim of keeping the rate of block discovery constant.

Thus if more computational power is employed in mining, then the difficulty will adjust upwards to make mining harder. And if computational power is taken off of the network, the opposite happens. The difficulty adjusts downward to make mining easier.

In the earliest days of Bitcoin, mining was done with CPUs from normal desktop computers. Graphics cards, or graphics processing units (GPUs), are more effective at mining than CPUs and as Bitcoin gained popularity, GPUs became dominant. Eventually, hardware known as an ASIC, which stands for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, was designed specifically for mining bitcoin.

The first ones were released in 2013 and have been improved upon since, with more efficient designs coming to market. Mining is competitive and today can only be done profitably with the latest ASICs. When using CPUs, GPUs, or even the older ASICs, the cost of energy consumption is greater than the revenue generated.

Also, Bitcoin Mining is a peer-to-peer computer process used to secure and verify bitcoin transactions—payments from one user to another on a decentralized network. Mining involves adding bitcoin transaction data to Bitcoin’s global public ledger of past transactions. Each group of transactions is called a block. Blocks are secured by Bitcoin miners and build on top of each other forming a chain.

This ledger of past transactions is called the blockchain. The blockchain serves to confirm transactions to the rest of the network as having taken place. Bitcoin nodes use the blockchain to distinguish legitimate Bitcoin transactions from attempts to re-spend coins that have already been spent elsewhere.

Bitcoin mining is the process by which the transaction information distributed within the Bitcoin network is validated and stored on the blockchain. Bitcoin miners receive fees attached to all of the transactions that they successfully validate and include in a block. It is a term used to describe the processing and confirmation of payments on the Bitcoin network.

What makes the validation process for Bitcoin different from traditional electronic payment networks is that there is no need for an issuing bank, an acquiring bank, merchant accounts or mandatory centralized clearing houses, such as Visa and MasterCard, holding onto funds until they process transactions at the end of each day.

Bitcoin mining is a process that anyone can participate in by running a computer program. In addition to running on traditional computers, some companies have designed specialized Bitcoin mining hardware that can process transactions and build blocks much more quickly and efficiently than regular computers. The process of validating transactions and committing them to the blockchain involves solving a series of specialized math problems.

Each Bitcoin miner is competing with all the other miners on the network to be the first one to correctly assemble the outstanding transactions into a block by solving those specialized math problems.

In exchange for validating the transactions and solving these problems, Bitcoin miners are rewarded for all of the transactions they process. They receive fees attached to all of the transactions that they successfully validate and include in a block. In addition to transaction fees, miners also receive an additional award for each block they mine.

This block reward is also the process by which new bitcoins are created, as specified by the Bitcoin protocol. Currently, that reward is 12.5 new bitcoins (worth over $7,000 at time of publication) for each block mined. That reward decreased from 25 bitcoins on June 9, 2016.

Because the reward for mining blocks is so high, the competition to win that reward is also high. At any moment, hundreds of thousands of supercomputers all around the world are competing to mine the next block and win that reward. In fact, the total power of all the computers mining Bitcoin is over 1000 times more powerful than the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined.

And the competition doesn’t stop—the Bitcoin network has gotten stronger and stronger over the past several years, growing by as much as 10 percent per month. The strength of the Bitcoin network is very important for security because in order to attack the network, an attacker would need to have over half of the total computational power of the network. The more miners that are mining Bitcoin, the more difficult and expensive it becomes to perform this attack.

In order to have an edge in this global competition, the hardware used for Bitcoin mining has undergone various iterations, starting with using the humble brain of your computer, the CPU. The CPU can perform many different types of calculations including Bitcoin mining, but is designed to be general purpose.

Early miners soon discovered that the calculations could be run faster and more efficiently using a graphics card (GPU), which is the computer chip that handles complex 3D imaging algorithms. Aside from being able to process Bitcoin’s transactions faster and more efficiently, the graphics card setup in many desktop PCs meant more than one graphics card could be used per computer.

This was already a feature of high-end gaming and 3D design computers. As such, Bitcoin’s popularity grew among those associated within such fraternities, as they could dedicate their machines to mine bitcoins, and thus cover the cost of their hardware.

But this still wasn’t the most power-efficient option, as both CPUs and GPUs were very efficient at completing many tasks simultaneously, and consumed significant power to do so, whereas Bitcoin in essence just needed a processor that performed its cryptographic hash function ultra-efficiently.
Enter the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which was capable of doing just that with vastly less demand for power.

There was one issue: due to the reprogrammable nature of the chip, it had a significantly high cost for a chip that solved blocks at the same rate as a GPU. Its real virtue was the fact that the reduced power consumption meant many more of the chips, once turned into mining devices, could be used alongside each other on a standard household power circuit.

As Bitcoin’s adoption and value grew, the justification to produce more powerful, power-efficient and economical per-chip devices warranted the significant engineering investments in order to develop the final and current iteration of Bitcoin mining semiconductors: the Application Specific Integrated Circuit, or ASIC.

ASICs are super-efficient chips whose hashing power is multiple orders of magnitude greater than the GPUs and FPGAs that came before them. Succinctly, it’s a custom Bitcoin engine capable of securing the network far more effectively than before.

The year 2013 was very much a land grab for Bitcoin ASIC technology as the first ASICs became available and many different companies raced to create the most power chips using cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing processes. In the years since, several Bitcoin mining chip manufacturers have focused on optimizing for efficiency, rather than total power, since mining is a very energy-intensive process.

Because of the high energy costs for running a powerful Bitcoin miner, many operators have elected to build data centers known as mining farms in locations with cheap electricity, such as near a hydroelectric dam in Washington State or even in foreign countries like Iceland and Venezuela.

Another advancement in mining technology was the creation of the mining pool, which is a way for individual miners to work together to solve blocks even faster. As a result of mining in a pool with others, the group solves many more blocks than each miner would on his own.

However, the miners must split the rewards with the entire group. Today, the majority of mining on the Bitcoin network is done by large pools, several of which are based in China.

So far, Bitcoin mining has continued to grow stronger and more secure, even as the mining reward decreased at the 2016 halving.

What is a Bitcoin Miner?

Bitcoin Miners use special software to solve math problems and are issued a certain number of bitcoins in exchange. This provides a smart way to issue the currency and also creates an incentive for more people to mine.

Bitcoin miners help keep the Bitcoin network secure by approving transactions. Mining is an important and integral part of Bitcoin that ensures fairness while keeping the Bitcoin network stable, safe and secure.

Bitcoin miners are crucial to Bitcoin and its security. Without miners, Bitcoin would be vulnerable and easy to attack. Get this, most Bitcoin users don’t mine. However, miners are responsible for the creation of all new bitcoins and a fascinating part of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Mining, once done on the average home computer, is now mostly done in large, specialized warehouses with massive amounts of mining hardware.
These warehouses usually direct their hashing power towards mining pools.

Bitcoin Mining Websites

There are many bitcoin investment websites that offer cloud mining online, like BitcoDaily, without any downloads or installations. You can simply make a free account online and start earning bitcoins. However, these sites usually require users to deposit an initial deposit to start earning.

You will find below 22 cloud mining websites that do not need an initial investment or any work. You don’t need to login daily or solve any Captchas. Just make an account and wait! Currently all of these sites are earning a total of $37.93 a month!

• NAME — Earnings (BTC/day)
• http://fstmine.com/ — 0.000344350
• https://xmine.org/registration/–0.000008208
• https://hash-line.com/–0.0000045000
• https://biteminer.com/–0.000029400
• https://www.HashCoin.io/–0.000006892
• https://aromine.io/–0.000004900
• https://upmcoins.com/–0.000186890
• https://twentybitcoin.com/— 0.000014026
• https://profit-coin.com/–0.000003310
• https://www.cryptomining.farm/–0.000020500
• https://minerport.com–0.000014160
• https://joltcorp.io/–0.000043200
• http://mixmine.org/ — 0.000009340
• http://bitmine.cloud/ — 0.000072000
• http://hashchain.net/–0.000170000
• https://www.flyingbtc.com/–0.000988875
• https://bits2u.com/–0.000034900
• http://Space-Mining.net/ — 0.000100000
• http://golden-tea.com/–0.000165000
• http://www.bitzfree.com/ — 0.000010400
• http://fastmine.co/–0.000003170
• https://www.eobot.com/ — 0.000007590
• TOTALS: — 0.002241611 BTC ($1.34 per day, $37.93 per month)

Bitcoin Mining Software

• If you are a solo miner: the mining software connects your Bitcoin miner to the blockchain.
• If you mine with a pool: the software will connect you to your mining pool.
• If you are cloud mining: you do not need mining software.

The main job of the software is to deliver the mining hardware’s work to the rest of the Bitcoin network and to receive the completed work from other miners on the network.
Bitcoin mining software monitors this input and output of your miner while also displaying statistics such as the speed of your miner, hashrate, fan speed and the temperature.

Bitcoin Mining Software for Windows

Bitcoin Miner

You can use Bitcoin Miner on Windows 10 and Windows 8.1.
It has an easy to use interface, power saving mode, mining pool support and fast share submission.
One useful feature is the profit reports feature because this feature will help you know if your mining is profitable or not. The latest version of this software is Bitcoin Miner 1.27.0.

BTCMiner

BTCMiner is an Open Source Bitcoin Miner for ZTEX USB-FPGA modules 1.5.
BTCMiner comes with the following features:
• Dynamic frequency scaling in that BTCMiner automatically chooses the frequency with the highest rate of valid hashes
• Ready-to-use Bitstream i.e. no Xilinx software or license required.
It also comes with supported FPGA boards which contain a USB interface used for communication and programming.

CGMiner

CGMiner is arguably the most famous and commonly used among Bitcoin miners at the moment.
CGMiner is based on the original code of CPU Miner.
This software has many features but the main ones include:
• fan speed control
• remote interface capabilities
• self-detection of new blocks with a mini database
• multi GPU support
• CPU mining support

BFGMiner

BFGMiner is more or less the same as CGMiner.
The only major difference is that it doesn’t focus on GPUs like CGMiner but instead it is designed specifically for ASICs.
Some unique features of BFGMiner include: mining with free mesa/LLVM OpenCL, ADL device reordering by PCI bus ID, integrated overclocking and fan control.

EasyMiner

EasyMiner is GUI based and it acts as a convenient wrapper for CGMiner and BFGMiner software.
This software supports the getwork mining protocol as well as stratum mining protocol. It can also be used for both solo and pooled mining.
Among its main features is that it configures your miner and provides performance graphs for easy visualization of your mining activity.

RPC Miner

RPC Miner can be used on Mac OS 10.6 or higher and features integration with Mac OS APIs and systems.
More
All of the mining software above listed for Linux and Windows also works for Mac OS X.
Cash Out your Coins
Once you have this setup and are mining, you may need to cash out some of your coins in order to pay off your expenses such as electricity.
For this you can use Buy Bitcoin Worldwide to find a Bitcoin exchange in your country.
Bitcoin Wallets
One of the most important things you will need before using any kind of Bitcoin mining software is a wallet.
Why?
This is because all Bitcoin mining software will ask you for a Bitcoin address that will be used to send your mining rewards and payouts. Once you create or download a wallet you will be able to get a Bitcoin address from your wallet.

There are many Bitcoin wallets, but these are the ones we recommend if you are just starting out:
• Ledger Nano S – Secure Bitcoin hardware wallet for all platforms.
• Electrum – Simple Bitcoin wallet that works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
• Mycelium – The most popular Bitcoin wallet on Android.
• breadwallet – The most popular Bitcoin wallet for iOS.

If you expect to earn a lot of money through mining then it would be smart to purchase a more secure wallet: a hardware wallet. Now that you understand mining software and how it helps in the mining process, and you got your Bitcoin wallet and address, then you are good to go in bitcoin mining.

Bitcoin Mining Investment

China’s largest private conglomerate, Fosun, also one of the country’s most prolific investors, has bought a stake in a local blockchain startup.

According to Reuters, the Fosun Group is directly investing in Shanghai Distributed Technologies Co Ltd, the umbrella startup behind Onchain. Fosun was the sole investor in the Shanghai startup’s first round of fundraising. While declining to release the exact figures of its investment into the blockchain startup, the conglomerate confirmed the amount was “in the tens of millions of yuan.”

The Fosun group has operations and investments in a number of industries including steel, mining, real estate and more. It’s varied investment portfolio also sees the Fosun group own Wolverhampton Wanderers, a football club based in England.

According to Shanghai Distributed Technologies Chief executive Da Hongfei, Fosun’s investment in his company will see the conglomerate look to apply blockchain technology across its businesses including financial services and pharmaceuticals.

Da, also Onchain’s CEO, is also the founder of the open-source public blockchain network NEO, formerly known as Antshares. Onchain currently uses the distributed network architecture (DNA) originally developed by NEO.

As obtained through Reuters, the blockchain executive opined that the money going in to invest in blockchain startups is, despite fears of an industry bubble, “worth it.”

Bitcoin Mining Pool

Mining pools are groups of cooperating miners who agree to share block rewards in proportion to their contributed mining hash power.

While mining pools are desirable to the average miner as they smooth out rewards and make them more predictable, they unfortunately concentrate power to the mining pool’s owner.

Miners can, however, choose to redirect their hashing power to a different mining pool at anytime.
It is important to note that most mining pools are in China. Many only have Chinese websites and supports. Mining centralization in China is one of Bitcoin’s biggest issues at the moment.

There are about 20 major mining pools. Broken down by the percent of hash power controlled by a pool, and the location of that pool’s company, it is estimated that Chinese pools control ~81% of the network hash rate:

Iceland – 5%, Japan – 3%, Czech Republic – 3%, Georgia – 2%, India – 2%
1.Antpool
Antpool is a mining pool based in China and owned by BitMain. Antpool mines about 25% of all blocks.
2. BTC.top
BTC.top is a private pool and cannot be joined.
3. BTC.com
BTC.com is a public mining pool that can be joined. However, we strongly recommend joining Slush Pool instead.
4. Bixin
Bixin is another mining pool that is based in China. It is a public pool, but unless you speak Chinese we do not recommend joining this pool.
5. BTCC
BTCC is a pool and also China’s third largest Bitcoin exchange. Its mining pool currently mines about 7% of all blocks.
6. F2pool
DiscusFish, also known as F2Pool, is based in China. F2Pool has mined about 5-6% of all blocks over the past six months.
7. ViaBTC
ViaBTC is a somewhat new mining pool that has been around for about one year. It’s targeted towards Chinese miners.
8. BW Pool
BW, established in 2014, is another mining company based in China. It currently mines about 5% of all blocks.
9. Bitclub.Network
Bitclub Network is a large mining pool but appears to be somewhat shady. We recommend staying away from this pool.
10. Slush
Slush was the first mining pool and currently mines about 3% of all blocks.
Slush is probably one of the best and most popular mining pools despite not being one of the largest.
Bitcoin Mining Pool Comparison
Pool Location Fees Private Pool
BitFury Georgia 0% Yes
BTCC China 2-3% No
Slush Poo Czech Republic2% No
Antpool China 1% No
BW China 1% No
The location of a pool does not matter all that much. Most of the pools have servers in every country so even if the mining pool is based in China, you could connect to a server in the US, for example.

Bitcoin Mining Rig

If you dream of striking gold with bitcoin, then you should throw away that high-end PC you love so much, even if it runs on superfast graphics cards. To become the Warren Buffett of crypto currencies, you need to invest in a dedicated bitcoin mining rig. The best versions are ASIC, or Application Specific Integrated Circuit, bitcoin miners.

These use chips specifically designed to crack the mathematical problems that yield bitcoins. They do this at mind-boggling speeds and use less power than alternative mining rigs. ASIC miners are capable of hash rates, or computing speeds, as high as a few terahashes per second.

Hash rates are a measure of the number of bitcoin calculations that a chip completes in one second. Since an ASIC chip is specially fabricated for bitcoin mining, it cannot be used to mine other crypto currencies. Therefore, if you prefer mining litecoins then you need a litecoin mining rig. You can find a bitcoin mining rig easily in the vast inventory on eBay.

Bitcoin Mining Hardware

At first, miners used their central processing unit (CPU) to mine, but soon this wasn’t fast enough and it bogged down the system resources of the host computer. Miners quickly moved on to using the graphical processing unit (GPU) in computer graphics cards because they were able to hash data 50 to 100 times faster and consumed much less power per unit of work.

During the winter of 2011, a new industry sprang up with custom equipment that pushed the performance standards even higher. The first wave of these specialty bitcoin mining devices were easy to use Bitcoin miners were based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) processors and attached to computers using a convenient USB connection.

FPGA miners used much less power than CPU’s or GPU’s and made concentrated mining farms possible for the first time.
Today’s modern and best bitcoin mining hardware

Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners have taken over completely. These ASIC machines mine at unprecedented speeds while consuming much less power than FPGA or GPU mining rigs. Several reputable companies have established themselves with excellent products.

How Does Bitcoin Mining Works?

For every ten minutes or so mining, computers collect a few hundred pending bitcoin transactions (a “block”) and turn them into a mathematical puzzle. The first miner to find the solution announces it to others on the network. The other miners then check whether the sender of the funds has the right to spend the money, and whether the solution to the puzzle is correct.

If enough of them grant their approval, the block is cryptographically added to the ledger and the miners move on to the next set of transactions (hence the term “blockchain”). The miner who found the solution gets 25 bitcoins as a reward, but only after another 99 blocks have been added to the ledger. All this gives miners an incentive to participate in the system and validate transactions.

Forcing miners to solve puzzles in order to add to the ledger provides protection: to double-spend a bitcoin, digital bank-robbers would need to rewrite the blockchain, and to do that they would have to control more than half of the network’s puzzle-solving capacity. Such a “51% attack” would be prohibitively expensive: bitcoin miners now have 13,000 times more combined number-crunching power than the world’s 500 biggest supercomputers.

Clever though it is, the system has weaknesses. One is rapid consolidation. Most mining power today is provided by “pools”, big groups of miners who combine their computing power to increase the chance of winning a reward. As mining pools have got bigger, it no longer seems inconceivable that one of them might amass enough capacity to mount a 51% attack.

Indeed, in June 2014 one pool, GHash.IO, had the bitcoin community running scared by briefly touching that level before some users voluntarily switched to other pools.

How to Start Bitcoin Mining

To begin mining bitcoins, you’ll need to acquire bitcoin mining hardware. In the early days of bitcoin, it was possible to mine with your computer CPU or high speed video processor card. Today that’s no longer possible. Custom Bitcoin ASIC chips offer performance up to 100x the capability of older systems have come to dominate the Bitcoin mining industry.

Bitcoin mining with anything less will consume more in electricity than you are likely to earn. It’s essential to mine bitcoins with the best bitcoin mining hardware built specifically for that purpose. Several companies such as Avalon offer excellent systems built specifically for bitcoin mining.

Step 2 – Download Free Bitcoin Mining Software

Once you’ve received your bitcoin mining hardware, you’ll need to download a special program used for Bitcoin mining. There are many programs out there that can be used for Bitcoin mining, but the two most popular are CGminer and BFGminer which are command line programs.

If you prefer the ease of use that comes with a GUI, you might want to try EasyMiner which is a click and go windows/Linux/Android program.

Step 3 – Join a Bitcoin Mining Pool

Once you’re ready to mine bitcoins then we recommend joining a Bitcoin mining pool. Bitcoin mining pools are groups of Bitcoin miners working together to solve a block and share in its rewards. Without a Bitcoin mining pool, you might mine bitcoins for over a year and never earn any bitcoins. It’s far more convenient to share the work and split the reward with a much larger group of Bitcoin miners. Here are some options:

For a fully decentralized pool, we highly recommend p2pool.

The following pools are believed to be currently fully validating blocks with Bitcoin Core 0.9.5 or later (0.10.2 or later recommended due to DoS vulnerabilities):

• BitMinter
• CK Pool
• Eligius
• Slush Pool

Step 4 – Set Up A Bitcoin Wallet

The next step to mining bitcoins is to set up a Bitcoin wallet or use your existing Bitcoin wallet to receive the Bitcoins you mine. Copay is a great Bitcoin wallet and functions on many different operating systems. Bitcoin hardware wallets are also available.

Bitcoins are sent to your Bitcoin wallet by using a unique address that only belongs to you. The most important step in setting up your Bitcoin wallet is securing it from potential threats by enabling two-factor authentication or keeping it on an offline computer that doesn’t have access to the Internet. Wallets can be obtained by downloading a software client to your computer.

You will also need to be able to buy and sell your Bitcoins. For this we recommend:

• SpectroCoin – European exchange with same-day SEPA and can buy with credit cards
• Kraken – The largest European exchange with same-day SEPA
• Buying Bitcoin Guide – Get help finding a Bitcoin exchange in your country.
• Local Bitcoins – This fantastic service allows you to search for people in your community willing to sell bitcoins to you directly. But be careful!
• Coinbase is a good place to start when buying bitcoins. We strongly recommend you do not keep any bitcoins in their service.

Step 5 – Stay Up To Date With Bitcoin News

Staying up to date with Bitcoin news is important for your bitcoin mining profits. If you want general Bitcoin news then we recommend the WeUseCoins news section.

Bitcoin Mining at Home

Compass Mining, which sells bitcoin mining equipment and services, announced that it’s launching a direct-to-consumer mining service, allowing miners to set up shop in their own homes.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts used to be able to mine bitcoin on their own laptops from their houses and apartments. But around 2012, mining machines burst onto the scene and the industry boomed. Large firms were able to mine with thousands of machines, leaving individual miners with high hardware costs and less of an opportunity to actually mine any bitcoin.

Now, Compass Mining says it’s “bringing bitcoin mining back to its roots” by allowing miners to buy a single application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), which is the equipment used to mine bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, instead of having to buy in bulk. Prices for individual machines start at $8,100.

Sure, being able to create money at home might seem magical — Bitcoin is worth over $40,000 per coin right now, even after a recent decline. But mining for bitcoin doesn’t equate to snapping your fingers and getting bitcoin, and it certainly has risks.

Is Bitcoin Mining Profitable?

To answer the question of whether Bitcoin mining is still profitable, use a web-based profitability calculator to run a cost-benefit analysis. You can plug in different numbers and find your breakeven point (the point after which mining is profitable).

Determine if you are willing to lay out the necessary initial capital for the hardware and estimate the future value of bitcoins as well as the level of difficulty. When both Bitcoin prices and mining difficulty decline, it usually indicates fewer miners and more ease of receiving bitcoins. When Bitcoin prices and mining difficulty rise, expect the opposite—more miners competing for fewer bitcoins.

Bitcoin Mining App

Here are some of the best bitcoin mining software for beginners.

1. SHAMINING

In 2018 a squad of passionate cryptocurrency believers and IT experts decided to launch a new cloud mining platform that got success in a very short time. SHAMINING is a London-based company offering the global cryptocurrency community high-quality and reasonably-priced mining services in the most effective manner.

The key idea here is an efficient appliance of shared hash power capacities. By now, the provider has involved 17000+ crypto investors from different countries, and the cloud mining platform increases day by day. A lot of users have already marked SHAMINING as the best and trusted cloud mining website with steady returns and a customer-friendly policy.

2. ECOS 

ECOS was established in 2017 and remains one of the best cloud mining providers today. Launched in the Free Economic Zone, it is the first cloud mining provider to operate with legal status. It has more than 100 000 users from all over the world.

Features:

• Daily payments.
• The very low minimum withdrawal from 0.001 BTC.
• The minimum price for a mining contract is $49
• Convenient calculator on the website for choosing a mining contract (has standard and pro versions)
• ECOS is a full-fledged investment platform. It includes not only cloud mining but also a wallet, exchange, investment portfolios, savings.
• ECOS has a convenient mobile app. It is available in App Store and Google Play

3. CGMiner

Widely considered to be the best bitcoin mining software available on the market, CGMiner has been a key player due to its great versatility. It is open-source and written in C, runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and is compatible with three types of mining hardware: GPU, FPGA, and ASIC. Aside from that, CGMiner also offers other benefits like advanced detection of new blocks, remote interface capabilities, and the ability to scale to a hash rate of any size with zero delays.

4. ECOS

ECOS was established in 2017 and remains one of the best cloud mining providers today. Launched in the Free Economic Zone, it is the first cloud mining provider to operate within legal status. It has more than 90 000 users from all over the world availing its services.

Moreover, ECOS is also a full-fledged investment platform, meaning it offers more than just mining services. You’ll also find wallet, exchange, investing portfolios and savings in its platform available for download on App Store or Google Play.

5. BFGMiner

Launched in 2012 by developed Luke Dashjr, BFGMiner allows users to monitor hardware temperature, detect and start idle threads, and manage rigs remotely. Because of this, it has managed to put itself in the upper echelon of mining software when it comes to customisation.

While BFGMiner was originally created to add FPGA support to a popular GPU miner at the time it was developed, the software is only compatible with FPGA and ASIC. However, the software is written in C and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows machines and even offers an option to install on Raspberry Pi.   

6. BeMine

BeMine has been providing its services in Russia and CIS countries since early 2018, the year of its foundation. BeMine were one of the earliest pioneers of cloud sharing of ASIC-miners, operating on more than ~70,000Th/s placed in Irkutsk, Moscow, Chelyabinsk region, Siberia, Almaty, and Kazakhstan. They are continuously expanding. BeMine unites Russian data centres, as well as miners and individuals who want to participate in cryptocurrency around the world.

7. EasyMiner

EasyMiner is a GUI-based, open-source frontend software upgrade for mining software like CGMiner and BFGMiner. The upgrade gives you a clean user interface and can integrate with your cryptocurrency wallet. It also allows you to mine various cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and others, but only with the Windows operating system and ASIC mining hardware.

Free Bitcoin Mining Sites

There are several different types of free Bitcoin mining sites and software out there having advantages and disadvantages each. So, you need to ensure that you have done enough research on various mining software regarding the safety of your mining device.

Following are some of the best free Bitcoin mining software:

• EasyMiner: It is a GUI based free Bitcoin miner for Windows, Linux, and Android. EasyMiner auto configures your Bitcoin miners and is very transparent in terms of usage. With a user-friendly dashboard, the software provides performance graphs for easy visualization of your Bitcoin mining process.
• BTCMiner: BTCMiner is an open-sourced Bitcoin miner containing a USB interface for communicating. This interface reduces additional hardware requirements such as the JTAG programmer. The process of BTCMiner is fully automated in its system. The software scales dynamic frequency based on error measurement.
• MinePeon: It is also an open-sourced Bitcoin miner with prominent stability and performance. Once it is installed on the mining device, the user needs to configure it and then leave it to do the mining works automatically forever without any human interactions.
• BFGMiner: It is a modular ASIC miner that features dynamic clocking and monitoring along with remote interface capabilities. Written in C, the software is in-built with multi-threaded multi-pool GPU. The software also includes support for OpenWrt-capable routers.
• CGMiner: This is a multi-threaded GPU and ASIC miner and it is available for several platforms such as Windows, Linux, and OS. It is a very simple and lightweight miner in the crypto mining world. The software provides stable performance with decent hash rates.
• 50Miner: This is a GUI frontend miner for Windows. To start mining with this software, a miner only needs a username and password. It starts the mining process automatically with the optimal hardware settings. This software can work in advanced mode.

How Long Does it Take to Mine 1 Bitcoin?

There is currently no way to mine just one bitcoin. Instead, crypto miners will mine one block, with the reward currently being set at 6.25 BTC per block.

Each block takes 10 minutes to mine. This means that in theory, it will take just 10 minutes to mine 1 BTC (as part of the 6.25 BTC reward).

However, before you go choosing your Lamborghini, it’s important to know that for every block, there are thousands of bitcoin miners each competing for the reward.

When there are more miners in the network, the difficulty of mining increases. As a result, each block requires more computational power to solve.

Due to the unlikelihood of mining a single block on one rig, many bitcoin miners join a mining pool. Mining pools combine the collective computing power of their members and split the profits based on the proportion of power each miner brings.

Can You Make Money Mining Bitcoin?

When the first block of Bitcoin was mined, it was possible to mine using a standard computer. You could use your home computer and make some money on the side. As time went by, people started making their own hardware devices designed explicitly for hashing called ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). These specialized machines made mining more complex and expensive.

As more people invested in ASICs, the average Joe was left out in the cold. Mining became so competitive that you had to spend money on equipment to gain some extra hashes. You also had to justify the cost of that equipment by making more than it cost over time, which is very difficult with fluctuating crypto markets.

To make matters worse, people began using pools to band together and solve hashes faster. The more people you have in a pool solving those problems, the less time it takes to find a solution, which means you receive your payout from the pool sooner.

In essence, mining became too complex for an average household computer. In addition, the cost of ASICs, mining pools, and fluctuating crypto prices make it too expensive for the average household to run. As a result, mining has become a business venture designed for those who have money to burn on equipment and time to dedicate to updates and maintenance.

How do You Successfully Mine Bitcoins?

With Bitcoin, miners attempt to find Bitcoin through solving complex mathematical problems. Blockchain is the technology that cryptocurrency is built on. It is a ledger that is publicly distributed and records every Bitcoin transaction.

It is literally a digital chain of blocks. Each block contains a group of Bitcoin transaction information. Miners add to the blockchain by using computer processing power to solve complex mathematical problems. Solving the problems will result in the block being successfully added to the chain. The miner who correctly solves the problem is awarded Bitcoin.

The above forms the basis of the complex process of Bitcoin mining. It helps keep the payment network secure and trustworthy. The network is built on a peer-to-peer network, meaning that every single miner across the globe is contributing their computing power to maintain the network, confirm its transactions, and keep them secure.

To start mining bitcoin, the following are required:

1. Competitive mining computers (rigs)
2. Low-cost power supply
3. Mining software
4. Mining pool membership

Can I Mine Bitcoin on my PC?

While mining bitcoin on an individual computer is no longer viable, there are other cryptocurrencies that you can still mine at home if you’re prepared to put in the effort.

If the volatility of investing in cryptocurrencies is too much for you but you still want to benefit from the new economy, setting up a small cryptocurrency mining operation at home may be the right choice for you.

The easiest cryptocurrency to mine is one that doesn’t require you to build a massive mining rig. Although it was initially possible to mine Bitcoin using laptops and desktops, the growing mining difficulty as well as the advent of Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASICs) hardware created specifically for bitcoin mining has made it all but impossible to profitably mine Bitcoin at home using the processing power of a PC or laptop computer.

How Much do Bitcoin Miners Make a Day?

The rewards for Bitcoin mining are reduced by half roughly every four years. When bitcoin was first mined in 2009, mining one block would earn you 50 BTC. In 2012, this was halved to 25 BTC. By 2016, this was halved again to 12.5 BTC. On May 11, 2020, the reward halved again to 6.25 BTC.

In September of 2021, the price of Bitcoin was about $45,000 per bitcoin, which means you’d have earned $281,250 (6.25 x 45,000) for completing a block. Not a bad incentive to solve that complex hash problem detailed above, it might seem.

How Much Does it Cost to Mine 1 Bitcoin?

It currently costs between $7,000-$11,000 USD to mine a bitcoin. The lifetime cost of an ASIC miner to mine one bitcoin is on average $15,000-$19,000 USD. As the price of BTC is $56,000, it remains very profitable to mine bitcoin. Although, the entry price for miners has risen considerably the past few months because hardware prices have doubled.

ASIC Model	Est. Unit Buy Price	Lifetime Cost to Mine 1 BTC @ 5.5¢/kWh	Lifetime Cost to Mine 1 BTC @ 3.5¢/kWh
Antminer S19j Pro, 100T	$14,000	$19,965	$17,796
Antminer S19j, 90T	$11,000	$17,736	$15,286
Antminer S19 Pro, 110T	$16,000	$21,778	$19,677
Antminer S19, 95T	$12,000	$18,690	$16,257
Antminer T19, 84T	$11,000	$18,333	$15,667
Antminer S17+, 73T	$10,000	$17,822	$14,978
Antminer S17 Pro, 53T	$7,000	$14,726	$11,917
Antminer T17, 40T	$3,000	$13,756	$9,845
Antminer S15, 28T	$2,000	$13,147	$9,093
Antminer S9, 13.5T	$700	$19,865	$12,896
Antminer S7, 4.7T	$400	$54,199	$34,636
Whatsminer M30S++, 112T	$17,000	$23,062	$20,858
Whatsminer M30S+, 100T	$14,000	$20,649	$18,231
M30S, 88T	$11,000	$18,431	$15,729
Whatsminer M31S+, 80T	$9,000	$17,155	$14,189
M31S, 74T	$8,000	$16,753	$13,570
Whatsminer M20S, 68T	$6,000	$15,525	$12,061
Avalon 1246, 90T	$10,000	$17,431	$14,729
Avalon 1166 Pro, 81T	$9,000	$17,209	$14,224
Avalon 1066 Pro, 55T	$7,000	$18,556	$14,354
Innosilicon T3+, 57T	$7,000	$18,322	$14,205
Innosilicon T2T, 30T	$3,000	$17,341	$12,126
Ebit 10.6, 16T	$600	$22,111	$14,289
Ebit 12, 44T	$2,000	$13,147	$9,093
	$7,946	$19,404	$15,238

Can I Mine Bitcoin on my Phone?

It is possible to mine bitcoin with an android device even if you might have numerous reasons to stay away from it. Also, using a mobile phone to mine crypto coins isn’t close to the way the traditional mining software or hardware works. As well as applying mobile time clock app is opposite to the ordinary clock. Mining crypto with a smartphone will likely not give you a good enough profit to be worth the effort and time you put in it, given its current state.

Read Also: Investing in Cryptocurrency: Is it Worth the Risk?

This is not because these smartphones aren’t powerful or strong enough for you to use them to mine crypto. The reason is that other miners use way more powerful tools that it almost makes the use of smartphones useless. People using more powerful PCs are likely to get the incentives from mining.

If you have decided that you want to join the party and start mobile crypto mining, you have to get a mining app and make sure that your phone has a constant light source. Some of the most popular apps as listed on some thesis writing services in USA for mining crypto on a smartphone are:

• MinerGate Mobile Miner: with this mobile app, you will be able to mine multiple altcoins apart from Bitcoin. Some of the altcoins you will be mining are Dash, Monero, QuazarCoin, MonetaVerde, and DigitalNote. There’s also an in-built wallet in the app for users to store the coins that they have earned.
• Bitcoin Miner: this is probably the most popular android app for mining cryptocurrencies currently and is available for most devices. The interface is very user-friendly, and it has wonderful performance, as the numerous positive reviews confirm. Although the name explicitly mentions bitcoin, you can use this app to mine multiple coins.

How Long Does it Take to Mine a Bitcoin With GTX 1080?

Assuming a 600 MH/s hashrate for an NVIDIA GTX 1080, this calculator says for 95% likelihood* of finding a block you’ll need 871 450 680 days, or roughly 2.4 million years. For 50% likelihood, it’s around 550 thousand years. Mining on a pool, you’d need 63.7 thousand years to reach 1 BTC.

You have better options, though – for example you could mine RavenCoin or Monero or maybe even Ether, coins that are still GPU-mineable, and then exchange to Bitcoin. But, again, don’t expect this to take less than 10 years (normally the ROI is around 1 year – so if that 1080 was $700, it should take around 10 years to make $7000).

It is our believe that these guides have provided exhaustive insights into the viral issues of bitcoin mining.