What Is a Mining Rig and How to Start Crypto Mining?
If the idea of earning a passive income from home gives you a buzz, then you might be interested in cryptocurrency mining. Crypto mining is, simply put, the process of creating new tokens that provides a way to stack up some without investing any money in the tokens themselves. Yet, this all wouldn’t be possible without mining rigs. In today’s blog post, we are talking in-depth about what is a mining rig, how to mine cryptocurrency on a PC, different categories of rigs, and whether purchasing one would be profitable in the long run.
Knowing that tokens don’t just appear of thin air, you, as a miner, should posses technology that is able to solve complex mathematical problems before everyone else. To get started with crypto mining, you are, obviously, going to need powerful hardware – not just any but a purpose-built, mining PC, and high-quality graphics cards.
A mining rig is a system that solves the PoW (Proof-of-Work) puzzle and makes it possible for miners, that are competing against each other, to validate transactions. Keep in mind that the number of miners tells a lot about the network and makes it more or less robust and secure. The more miners, the better, while less miners can also mean potentially greater rewards.
The miner that cracks the code first receives the block reward – a fresh token, to their wallet. So, now that is clear that blockchain networks require intense computations, you get it that it is crucial to equip yourself with a good cryptocurrency mining rig. Yet, there’s not just one but several types of mining rigs.
Mining Rigs – Categories
Originally, miners used high-performance personal computers or laptops and built-in CPUs (central processing units) were able to handle block verification demands. However, as more people were drawn in the game, the demand became more complex. CPU mining partially fell into disuse from the moment when miners realized that they could use graphics cards to generate more mining power (GPU).
Nowadays, you can use a high-end graphics card to mine new tokens but, if you’re serious about this kind of business, you should better switch to ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits), specialized mining equipment, that provides better performance in terms of speed and uses less energy at the same time.
As an illustration, crypto mining machine equipped with ASIC chips are used for mining Bitcoin. Back in the days, miners used central processing units in their laptop or desktop devices. However, nowadays, when there are thousands of Bitcoin miners, CPU and GPU mining, that simply don’t feature immense computing power, go out of business.
On the other hand, some cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Safex Cash, Aeon, and Monero are resistant to ASIC mining, thus, you have to stick with the CPU/GPU mining. The good thing of all this is that not only large-scale institutional miners can benefit from mining but average ones as well. So, if you want to mine ETH in 2022, GPU mining is the way to go.
ASIC crypto mining machine have a couple of weak points as well. Before anything else, they are unduly expensive, and average miners get easily kicked out of the game, while the ones that are really making money are (guess who) – companies that are selling mining rigs. Also, ASIC miners are impossible to configure so they can mine all kinds of cryptocurrencies. Lastly, as you would expect, return on investment when it comes to older ASIC machines drops down bit by bit as new, advanced ones are launched.
In order to get the best of both worlds – diversity when it comes to mining a wider range of tokens ASIC mining can’t provide, and more efficiency than GPU mining provides, go for FPGA (field-programmable gate array) mining. And, if you don’t want to buy rigs, try a cloud mining service that makes it relatively easy to mine coins whilst saving you a decent amount of money you’d, otherwise, spend on hardware maintenance.
Is It Possible to Build a Mining Rig?
Yes, you can either upgrade your PC with a top-end GPU or build your own mining rig if buying a brand new, finished product is not an option. Keep in mind that you are going to need a high-quality gaming PC since an average mining PC won’t do much.
However, if you want to really unleash your mining and earning potential, build a mining rig from scratch. Buy a motherboard, CPU, several GPUs (maximum 19), and a PCIriser. A mining rig like this can run algorithms more expeditiously, 24/7, since multiple GPUs multiply the rig’s hashing power.
Is Mining Profitable?
Well, it depends. Factors such as the cost of the cryptocurrency mining rig, the cost of electricity where you live, mining difficulty (variable, since it is tied with the number of miners on the market), and the price of the token you want to mine.
For instance, if you want to mine Bitcoin, you’d better double check on all of the costs involved. Bitcoin mining is, most of the time, not profitable for individual users. Use a Bitcoin mining profitability calculator to see whether to go on this mission or to skip it. Alternatively, you can still buy a high-quality mining rig and join a mining pool (a group of miners) and split rewards.
Summary
Crypto mining is definitely on the top 10 list of passive income ideas, however, it still requires a significant initial investment. Now that you know what is a mining rig, you can start exploring your options and decide whether you want to buy one or to build one.
