A few weeks ago, I decided to learn about mining cryptocurrency. I figured it was complicated, time consuming and complete inaccessible to someone with really limited technical understanding. Turns out I was completely wrong and I decided to write this article so other people who don't know where to start can try it themselves.

A few notes before we dive into how this works:

Unless you have a free GPU farm in China, mining is unlikely to make you rich. If you dedicate a decent computer, you may make a few dollars a day, but realistically breaking even with your power bill is probably the outcome. Any earnings are likely to come from mining a cheap coin that goes up in value over time. Still, this isn't a guide intended to create a new generation of millionaires.
Be careful what you download. There's a bunch of really great miners out there but as a rule, read reviews, figure out what people are saying before you download.

Anyway, let's get down to business! A lot of mining software requires setup. Even if the set-up is only a few steps, the reality is that configuring BAT files, figuring out where to connect etc makes it seem a lot harder than it needs to be. Luckily, a few currencies provide what are effectively 1-click miners. They work pretty much like the description says, so let's dive into a few of the ones I've used so far:

Nicehash - www.nicehash.com

Nicehash is among the most simple miners you'll find. The only real setup you need to do is choose what region of the world you're in, enter a receiving address for your bitcoin and then set a name for your "worker". Once that's set up, you click start and off you go! Nicehash has a good client for both Nvidia and AMD users, so everyone gets to participate. There's an important downside, which is that Nicehash will take some of your mining hash rate in addition to the regular fees on your earnings. Basically, the simplicity here comes at the cost of mining efficiency. If you're looking for simple though, this one is great.

Vertcoin One Click Miner - https://vertcoin.org + https://github.com/vertcoin/One-Click-Miner/releases

Vertcoin OCM is by far my favorite out of the box miner. Not only does it work well with their native wallet, they have a great team and a coin that looks to have a bunch of long term potential. To set it up, you select what type of graphics card you have, find a "node" to pick from (you can see their latency and how long they've been up) and add your wallet address. From then on, you click start and there you go. In terms of downsides, it's not AMD optimized and unlike Nicehash/MinerGate, you have to manually pick your node and in the case it goes down, you're losing mining time. Overall though, I love this miner.

MinerGate - www.minergate.com

Minergate was one of the first tools I used. It works a lot like Nicehash, but with a few additional features: Instead of mining a single currency, it can automatically select one has the highest yield right now, or you can select yourself. Additionally, it has a great website dashboard, so if you're at work, just log in and see how the mining is going. If you feel overwhelmed by getting any of this to work, they have a built in chat that's super responsive to dumb questions. In terms of downsides, I feel like Minergate has an even higher hash rate tax than Nicehash, so this is possibly the most flexible, but least efficient one-click miner. But again, if you're not too worried about that, Minergate is good.

What if you don't have a great GPU? What alternatives are there for old computers? Well, luckily mining is just one of many ways you can contribute to the crypto community. There are other currencies that reward you for participating in the ecosystem outside of traditional mining. Let's look at two of them:

Sia - www.sia.tech

Sia is an online storage solution where people store their files on computers in the Sia ecosystem. Basically, instead of mining currency, you sign up a portion of your hard drive for "rental" in exchange for SiaCoin. This is a great alternative if you have an old box with storage space, but no fancy GPU. To make things even simpler. Hosting is done through the Sia wallet, so once you've downloaded their wallet, you just have a click a few boxes and you're signed up to host! There are two things I struggled with while playing around with Sia; to keep the quality high, they ask you to commit at least 12 weeks of your uptime for rental, that means if you shut your computer off, the system penalizes your host ranking. While you build your ranking you're also unlikely to see any business and waiting for a week until anyone started hosting felt a bit bad. Additionally you have to have SiaCoin in your wallet to start hosting (so you have to go an exchange and buy some).

Burstcoin - www.burst-coin.org + www.burstnation.com

Burstcoin is "mined" in a similar fashion as Sia, basically set you aside a portion of your HD for reading through what's called a "plot". That means that unlike Sia, you should start seeing progress right away, in a fashion that's more like a traditional miner. This is the current miner I'm playing around with, so I haven't fully developed a view on what all the pros and cons are. The coin itself has been around for a long time, with a new group of developers picking moving the coin forward to exciting things.

Anyway, that's my quick guide to getting into cryptocurrency mining! I'm still fairly new, I'm still learning but I'm having a lot of fun and so can you. If anyone out there has experience with other great solutions to simple mining, feel free to throw a comment in below. As a final note, all the images used in this post were pulled off Google and not my personal accounts.

Thanks! Hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it!