We have seen a noticeable increase in interest in mining crypto in 2021 since early 2018 and especially mining Bitcoin and Ethereum.
This interest in mining is the result of the massive increase in cryptocurrency values,faster adoption of cryptocurrencies worldwide and the release of the new VGA cards that have a really strong mining power.


Google chart Bitcoin is mined using ASIC miners that use the SHA-256 algorithm, and it is not that profitable nowadays because ASIC miners have seen a big power increase for a really long time and the new generation of ASIC miners are slightly better than the older generation.

Google chart Ethereum on the contrary we have seen a really big increase in interest of mining it since this cryptocurrency requires VGA cards.
Ethereum uses Ethash which is a proof-of-work mining algorithm implemented by the Ethereum network and Ethereum-based cryptocurrencies.
Ethash is a successor of the previous Ethereum algorithm called Dagger-Hashimoto and is, in fact, an upgrade of it.
The new series of VGA cards offer much better performance and much more energy efficiency than the older series.
To be able to mine Ethereum now, you need a graphic card with at least 6Gb of VRAM, before you required much less VRAM but this is due to the size of the DAG file that is constantly increasing, it grows by 8MB every 30 thousand blocks. Any VGA card that has 6+ GB VRAM can mine ETH from GTX 1060 6GB to RTX 3090.
These cards are available everywhere and easier to get hands on, so if you have a VGA card right now, well... good news you can mine!
Google chart
Firo or XZC (formerly Zcoin) is also one profitable cryptocurrency to mine, it requires also 6GB of VRAM like ETH but this coin uses a different algorithm than Ethash.
Firo uses MTP (Merkle Tree Proof) which is also a PoW mining algorithm and is protected against ASICs and potential centralization. Moreover, it is incompatible with cloud mining services. You can mine Zcoin (XZC) only on physical GPUs or CPUs.

Nvidia Amd

For older VGA cards or the ones that hass less than 6GB VRAM you can still mine other cryptocurrencies for the moment like ETC, BEAM, RVN, and many more...
They are not as profitable as ETH but put that old card hiding in your attic to work!

Google chart UPDATE: There were recently a new release of LOLMiner an AMD GPU focused mining software — that offers a special mining mode called zombie mode for continue mining on 4G GPUs even when they run out of memory to hold the DAG file. Read more about it on LOLMiner Latest Release

There are a lot of mining software, the best ones are:


Apart from the mining Hardware and software you are going to need to chose between solo mining or pool mining.
In solo mining, you’d be mining for the block rewards alone. But for low hashrates and cheap rigs the chance of you mining solo and getting anything is not even worth running the numbers, let's just say you have better luck winning the lottery.
In pool mining, you’d be mining for the block rewards together with other people. So join other miners in the pool and split the rewards based on your mining power in the pool.


Binance

Pools take fees that range from 1% up to 4%. Binance will charge a 0.5% pool fee for ETH mining, half of what its competitors are charging, so in my opinion it is the best option out there for pool mining, it does not have a minimum payment threshold for ETH mining, and the daily mining revenue is directly paid out to users’ pool wallets.


To start mining on Binance if you don't already have an account please click this link with my referral to create a new account:



OR



And then go to Binance ETH mining pool and follow the instructions:

Binance ETH Mining Pool

The setup is really easy and takes minutes.


To calculate the revenue on mining use a mining profitability calculator:

calc
Calculator profit-mine.com

OR

calc
Calculator whattomine.com

Here is a list of VGA cards with their average mining power for different algorithms (Updated February 2021):


Name Ethash Etchash MTP ProgPow BeamHash3 Zhash