Ether blew the minds of crypto haters, blowing past the $4,300 mark this May. Even the most stubborn passer-by began to wonder how to make Ethereum after noticing its growth in 2021.
If the price itself does not impress you, here is another metric of Ether’s value: its price increased 500% in relation to USD in less than a year. Saving in dollars does not seem a good idea anymore, does it?
You can strategically invest in Ethereum or you can gather some intelligence on how to mine Ethereum. Mining is done with the help of a gaming video card, so your investment is not going anywhere even if Ethereum goes bust – and it hardly ever will, considering the scale of the technology so far.
Ethereum how to mine
We went through the general breakdown of mining, and reviewed the most profitable coins in an earlier article. Ether is going to remain the top 1 crypto in terms of mining profitability until the 2.0 upgrade goes online. Who knows, maybe the upgrade is going to impact the prices in such a way that miners will have nothing to complain about!
Anyways, mining—be it PoW or PoS—will never die out. There will always be a demand for processing transactions, store blockchain instances and expand it with newly generated data. The more miners leave the field, the more transactions will be left to process to the ones who stay. The mining profits of the latter will rise respectively.
Now back to the topic: you type, ‘how mine ethereum’ into the search bar, looking for a quick how-to guide, so here it is.
A single mid-tier GPU you use in daily life should be enough to consistently mine small quantities of Ether. A more serious approach is to design a dedicated mining rig. Your rig would be, in fact, an almost fully functional computer specialized on mining. What do I need to mine Ethereum?
- A basic low-tier CPU to run the operating system. Intel Celeron, i3, or their AMD equivalents will do. In other words, you need the cheapest processor on the market to mine Ether.
- A mining GPU. We will go through the options later in this article.
- 4 GB RAM. As you know, there are different RAM standards. The faster ones are welcome. Think ahead and consider re-using your RAM later.
- A hard drive. SSDs are faster and lighter; they consume less energy and heat up less. You could experiment around and go for a MicroSD card though.
- Power supply.
- A motherboard with appropriate slots to keep the whole thing together.
- Last but not least, the casing. You can’t put the hardware innards into a box as if it were a regular PC; what you need is a barebone frame.
Unless, by some inexplicable circumstances, your hard drive came with an OS pre-installed, you’d need to install it manually. We are not talking about Windows 11, of course; look for ethOS, Arch Linux, or another lightweight distro. To install an OS, you’ll either need to plug in a monitor temporarily or to connect the drive to a working PC.
When the rig is assembled and set up, how do I mine Ethereum with it?
Join a mining pool. Optionally, you can test the performance of your rig inside a private test network. Combining your has power with other participants increases a chance to verify a block and share a reward.
Ethminer software is required to serve as an intermediary between your rig (or a PC) and a pool.
How hard is it to mine Ethereum? As you can see, the preparation process might scare off anyone who’s not into IT or cryptocurrencies. However, when everything is up and running, you will have a relatively stable source of passive income. Remember we talked about price fluctuations? That factor plays against stability. The long-term price trend will compensate for that.
If you don’t plan to construct a mining rig any time soon, then consider how to mine Ethereum with GPU of your PC or laptop. Predictably, it will be less productive or convenient; besides you risk frying up the GPU. That would be unfortunate.
How to mine Ethereum with GPU
Now that you know how to mine Ethereum with GPU in general, the question is, which graphics card to choose.
A mainstream miner’s GPU is nVidia GeForce RTX 3080 while a 3090 model is considered an overkill.
Another formidable card often labeled ‘the best’ is GeForce RTX 3060 Ti.
Be wary that nVidia announced that the mining capacity of all the new models from 3060 Ti to 3080 will be cut down.
Looking for a less expensive alternative? Check out AMD Radeon RX series.
What do I need to mine Ethereum
When it comes to estimating how much you can earn and when the price of the mining rig will return, it is best to use online calculators of particular mining pool websites. It’s recommended to write down all the expenses on the mining rig and, judging on the earnings in the first week/month, estimate when you actually will start to gain profits.
Any other kind of approximation, for example, the one proposed in this article, is going to be wildly inaccurate because of the ETH price fluctuations. Also consider the dramatic change in price that will probably take place after the 2.0 upgrade.
It seems we almost forgot to include the crucial step in the whole mining venture. How can I mine Ethereum if I have no wallet address? Where would the reward go? There are quite enough options to choose from: online wallets, hardware ones, and, of course, a handy mobile Trustee wallet that allows you to easily turn the reward into cash.
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