Using my GTX 1060 graphics card it took me about three weeks to mine 0.051 Ethereum. 0.05 is the minimum payout on nanopool.org. I made around $2.50-$3.00 a day. For me, this is just free money because I don't pay for electricity and it's the middle of winter so energy lost from electrical resistance simply displaces heating costs.

The program I used to mine Ethereum is called Claymore. It's open source and only works with Nvidia driver graphics cards. The developer of Claymore takes a 1%-2% fee by using my computer to mine for his account 1%-2% of the time. Some people complain about this fee, and there are hacked versions of Claymore that circumvent it, but that's just greedy in my opinion. It's one of the best and most simple mining programs out there.

Nanopool

In order for Nanopool to give me a share of reward my GTX has to randomly generate a quality hash. Every share is worth about a penny last I checked. I was getting around 4-5 hashes every 10 minutes starting out, but the difficulty may have risen since then.

My 1060 GTX was getting about 20 Mega-Hashes (20,000,000) per second when I first downloaded Claymore. However, if I wanted to do anything on my computer my graphics would randomly lag. I fixed this by editing the start.bat file, adding the '-ethi 1' tag to the end of it. This lowered my Mh/s to 18-19, but now my computer never lags.

I really want to buy a mining rig with 6 graphics cards. I may go in on one with my roommate. They can pay for themselves in 2-4 months. This is a much more stable investment than buying directly into a cryptocurrency because the price fluctuations won't hit you as hard and at the end of the day you still have graphics cards and a rig that is worth quite a bit of resell value. I need to do more research but last I checked there were a few cards out there that could get 30 Mh/s for around $250. I'll definitely be buying an extra card for my current rig in the near future. Details to come.

If anyone wants to know more about setting up their computer to mine let me know. I may do a separate post on it.