So I've gone and done it now.... I opened up the can of worms that is Crypto Mining.
No. I don't have a mining rig. In fact, all I have is my laptop. But it is a gaming laptop, so I figured what the heck. I can download something and give it a try. No, not for Bitcoin, but for an alt coin that shows some promise.
I've been reading about Smart Cash for a couple of weeks now, I bought a little over 1000 coins to sock away and collect their monthly rewards, so I figured I would settle in for the ride. But the coin has out performed anything I own to date. So when it came to picking a coin to mine, it was a no-brainer.
I looked at a couple of blogs about how to get started, and ultimately just confused myself to no end. In fact, I think one of the mining programs I downloaded started mining coin for someone else!
So I went straight to the source. Smart Cash Pool has links for two mining programs: SGMiner, and CCMiner. From what I could figure, CCMiner was what I needed for my Graphics Card. My Laptop has a NVidia GTX960M Graphics card, so I downloaded this.
Next I had to create a run.bat file with what I wanted to mine, along with my pool username, miner name and password. I set all that up on the main site. To create the run.bat file, I just had to create a text file in the ccminer folder, open it and copy in the text from the Smart Cash Pool site, insert my credentials, and Blammo, I was mining!
My performance is pretty crap. My best Hashrate was 0.14 GH/s which entitles me to the grand total of 5 Smart Coins a day. If I was able to maintain my laptop's uptime. But it goes to sleep after awhile, and it gets really hot, making it uncomfortable to use my laptop, you know on my lap.
So in a day of use I've managed 1 whole Smart Coin. But hey! It's a start!
I had an old (circa 2009) computer sitting in a closet. I pulled that out and booted it up. Found some old pictures saved on the hard drive that I had been missing, and started it updating to Windows 10. We'll see what it can do with the onboard graphics. I'm guessing even less than the laptop, but it is a test case. If I can get up and running as is, then I may be in a position to invest in a decent GPU and throw a little mining rig together. Maybe...
So there's my day. Very exciting stuff all in all!
What do you think? Is my old computer up to the task? Or am I wasting my time? Let me know your comments and suggestions! This seems like it could be a "fun" and potentially profitable little hobby.