Mining Bitcoin

There are various hardware choices and methods to use to mine bitcoin. Whatever hardware and method you choose, you'll either use your CPU or GPU, an FPGA, or the new ASICs. With the current difficulty over 2 billion, using a CPU is just a waste of time and money. A good ATI video card can still get a decent amount of Bitcoin, but at this point you really need to use an ASIC, or buy shares of GH at the online mining sites, shown below.

For example, a decent CPU today can get 300Khps (Kilohashes per second), while a good GPU can get 500Mhps.

An FPGA might get anywhere from 100-800Mhps and higher, and an ASIC can get 4.5Ghps up to 1.5Thps! See the Mining hardware comparison wiki page for details.

Check out my Bitcoin ASIC Miners page for more info on ASICs.

Check the Bitcoin mining profitability calculator to see if your hardware or the hardware you're looking at getting is worth purchasing, and if the energy use will still make it profitable or not.

Since bitcoins can only be harvested when solving a block, it can take an individual months, even a year, to solve a block on their own. Unless they are running a huge mining rig with hundreds or thousands of Ghps, it's not really worth it. That is what is great about mining pools.

The first commodity exchange to trade GHs (GigaHash per second) of their mining equipment. You earn Bitcoin based on how much GHs you have in your account. They also sell BitFury chips and futures contracts.

Bit-Mining is new and offers Bitcoin mining services. You can purchase GHs and begin mining right away!

Mining Litecoin

Check out my guide on How to Mine Litecoin.

Mining Pools

A mining pool is a group of miners all working together to solve blocks, and then sharing the rewards. The more work a user contributes, the bigger share of the bitcoins they get. This is great for most users.

I currently use CEX.io when I mine with my BFL ASIC since I can buy GH there instantly and add to my hashrate.

Multi-currency Mining Pools

Coinotron - supports BTC, LTC, PPC, TRC, and FRC
Ozcoin is another great Bitcoin mining pool. They also have a Litecoin pool.
Give Me Coins - supports BTC, NMC, LTC, and FTC

Bitcoin Mining Pools

BitMinter - Their Java client is very convenient.
Slush's Pool
BTC Guild
Deepbit
GHash.io

Litecoin Mining Pools

Pool-X.eu
WeMineLTC.com
LiteGuardian
litecoinpool.org
LTCRabbit
Hypernova
P2Pool
CoinHuntr

Dogecoin Mining Pools

Dogechain Pool
DogePorn Pool
doge.pool.pm
Doge Street
shitpost.asia
Doge PoolGen

Invest in Bitcoin and Mining

See the Invest in Bitcoin page.

Miners

Ok, now that you have a mining pool, it's time to install a miner. Here are some you can choose from. Some pools prefer a certain miner, so check the site to see which one you need.

CGMiner
BFGMiner
GUIMiner
GUIMiner - scrypt for LTC
ScryptMiner GUI - an easy to use LTC miner
poclbm
stratum proxy

The Litecoin client has a built-in miner, which is very convenient. I use this when I'm on Linux, and ScryptMiner when I'm on Windows.

Mining Through Your Browser

BitcoinPlus - Mine through your browser!

This page is currently running a miner from BitcoinPlus. What's this?
It supports this site and uses your idle CPU. If you do not wish to run the miner, click here.