There has been a lot of drama around cryptocurrency lately. All crypto had been skyrocketing since early January to mid-April making a lot of folks unimaginably rich in the process. Bitcoin struck the marker of about $60,000 per BTC. Ethereum saw the price of more than $4,000 per ETH. And then it all lost about 50% of value in a couple of months.
Every crypto-geek had their opportunity to find the one and only favorite coin, the love of their life: Solana, Mina Protocol, Stellar Lumens, Doge, Cardano, Polkadot, or the good old Ether?
You can choose from hundreds of strong projects. But which cryptocurrency to mine with GPU?
Which cryptocurrency to mine with GPU
Assuming that you know little about mining at the moment, let us provide a brief introduction.
Miners are the backbone of every blockchain network. It doesn’t matter how you call them—validators, witnesses, or god-knows-what—the process is basically the same.
Blockchain users exchange information via the Internet. Every action they make is broadcasted to everyone else, but there must be a strict rule to determine who exactly will record their action into the blockchain. So, the blockchain network software itself selects one of the miners: the selection favors those who contributed the most computational power or coins to the network but remains random to a significant degree.
What every miner is after are the block rewards and extra transaction fees. Which coins are worth your while?
Most profitable cryptocurrency to mine with GPU
The earnings on crypto are crazily volatile when you mine. Not only due the nature of the market itself but to the internal upgrades or conflicts, the profit will jump up and down. The first few examples of this that come to mind are the Ethereum DAO hard fork (and the upcoming London hardfork) and the scandal around STEEM. Be prepared for this when looking for the best cryptocurrency to mine with GPU.
The claim that one can earn $30-$700 per month is barely informative. And don’t forget to consider the electricity expenditures.
So how much are you going to earn, exactly? It is possible to estimate, with acceptable precision, just browse through the available mining pool and find their profit calculators. We assume that pool mining is the safest, easiest, and most stable option. What are your other options when looking for the best cryptocurrency to mine with GPU 2021?
Solo Mining
It is a high-risk high-reward approach. Considering the number of competitors, your chance to verify a block and single-handedly collect a reward is ridiculously small unless you have a sizable mining farm at your disposal. A private power plant would come in handy in case with proof-of-work blockchains.
To make reliable profits from solo mining, one has first to invest thousands of dollars into equipment or at least to buy a high-end gaming GPU.
Cloud Mining
So you have a buck to spend and zero time or desire to invest into setting up a mining rig. You don’t even need a GPU or another chip, which is great.
The trick is that it is hard to find a credible and profitable cloud mining provider; even if you do, their hashrate may be sold out already. This is the situation with IQmining: only the low-return SHA-256 packages are available at the moment.
ECOS or Shamining offer the cheapest contracts for $200 and $250 respectively but hey, you could buy a fairly beefy discrete graphics card for that money. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 costs $300, for example. So yes, instead of considering a three-year miner rent contract we suggest looking for the best cryptocurrency to mine with nVidia GPU. It is not even close to the $680 AMD Radeon RX 580, which is considered the best budget mining GPU.
It also looks like buying bitcoin and holding it until the ROI exceeds the desired minimum is much less of a hassle.
Best cryptocurrency to mine with my GPU: top 7
Ethereum (ETH) remained the most profitable cryptocurrency to mine with GPU for quite some time but the London hard fork may change it in an instant. Let’s not make any premature assumptions before we see how it goes; as far as we know, seasoned miners intend to keep supporting the Ethereum ecosystem hoping that it will pay off, if not out of loyalty.
Ethereum Classic (ETC) stemmed off ETH back in the days of the DAO fundraising campaign. Vitalik Buterin took the side of ETH while what we now know as Ethereum Classic was supported by a relatively smaller group of developers and followers. Despite the seeming lack of recognition, miners hold ETC in high esteem for revenues.
Zcach (ZEC) features all the traits one would expect from a GPU-mineable cryptocurrency:
- ASIC resistance;
- Low block time (75 sec);
- Wide variety of pools to mine from (ZEC, Flypool, Nanopool, etc);
- The option to mine with CPU as an entry point.
By the way, quite a bunch of unpopular altcoins can be easily mined on an average laptop (even a smartphone!). Who knows how high they will fly one day?
KawPow ASIC-resistant algorithm attracts decentralization advocates and low-budget miners. This is why RavenCoin (RVN) may be a perfect pick for you. As a last resort, one can try mining on a smartphone via MinerGate. 1 minute block time implies a fair chance to bite off the reward of 5,000 RVN.
We bet you never saw VertCoin (VTC) in flashy headlines, and who would guess that it has been out since January 2014. It specifically opposes Litecoin for giving in to ASIC mining with a custom GPU-focused VertHash hashing function. In many other regards, it is identical to Litecoin.
Monero (XMR) is a privacy-focused blockchain that heavily encrypts transaction details and user identity data. It has been praised and cursed for its anonymity protection. 24 second block generation time, low-power CPU/GPU mining, inexpensive solo mining plus a wide variety of pools to choose from – all of it makes Monero attractive both to privacy ideologues and profit seekers.
Grin is another privacy-focused cryptocurrency to mine with GPU. The great proportion of price, mining complexity, and adoption make it an overall profitable coin.
How to mine cryptocurrency with GPU
Long story short, choose a pool, install the required software, set it up according to the guidelines, and watch the coins slowly accumulate in your wallet.
You’ve probably noticed that Bitcoin is not on the list of the best cryptocurrencies to mine with GPU all things considered. Unimaginable mining difficulty that resulted from ASIC mining makes Bitcoin a bad choice for a newcomer.
How is GPU mining different from CPU mining?
GPU chips process mathematical operations better while CPUs are the general purpose ones. If coin creators want to make their mining algorithm ASIC-resistant (and therefore more accessible to average users), they will likely target versatile CPUs. One day we may come up with an article about the best cryptocurrency to mine with CPU; it is not very popular at the moment.
One day CPU mining may become mainstream though, judging from the Solana validator node requirements.
How is ASIC mining different from GPU mining?
The most notable difference is that ASICs are not good for anything other than calculating Gigahashes. No wonder! They are the Application-Specific Integrated Circuits. You won’t be able to plug it in your gaming rig, say, after the government bans mining, like it happened in China.
Leave a Reply