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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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:
Calculator
profit-mine.com
OR
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 |
|---|