Can Cryptocurrency Still Be Mined at Home?
Mining Bitcoin was a huge thing, until suddenly it wasn’t. It is no longer viable to mine Bitcoin on an individual computer. However, there are a bunch of other Cryptocurrencies in which it is viable to mine from home.
Very briefly, mining is the process of solving complex, mathematical problems. Sounds abstract, and even more so when I tell you that miners are at the foundation of cryptocurrency networks. This is because they’re providing a proof of work for the network, which verifies transactions. Ethereum mining, for example, has the miners responsible for creating new Ether tokens, as they’re rewarded in Ether for successfully providing a proof of work task. So, new Ether is distributed to miners.
It may seem perverse, but as more miners join the process, the harder the mathematical problems are to solve. Or, in other words, the more computing power and time it takes, whilst the rewards become smaller. Bitcoin may have become unviable, but many other cryptocurrencies can be mined successfully.
Here are a few to consider, that are generally deemed to still be viable:
- Ethereum
- Monero
- Dogecoin
- Zcash
- Beam
- GRIN
- Bytecoin
Setting up a mining rig
You may have heard the annoyment from gamers that high-end GPUs are profoundly overpriced because of miners. That’s right, graphics cards are bought up by miners because they’re hugely important to the most popular farming method. Dedicated GPU mining rigs are built for the sole purpose of mining and nothing else, to keep costs as efficiently as possible.
As you can imagine, building a mining rig is expensive. It’s an investment, sure, but you’re likely not experienced in mining yet. It’s not that it’s really difficult, but you don’t want to dive in with thousands of dollars of equipment in something you know little about.
It is possible to rent a rig temporarily to see how you get on. This is how miningrigrentals.com operates, by leasing rigs, giving miners more hash power without having to pay the full price of the rig. This way, you get a free pool selection too. Pooling can be a way to leverage power by sharing resources and splitting costs.
Services like these allow new miners to begin learning about mining at a lower cost, and see if it’s for them. There’s a lot of mining tutorials online, as you would suspect. But, like all forms of monetisation, there’s always exploiting parties…
The dark side of mining
There’s been a cybersecurity risk outbreak recently in which malicious actors trick victims’ phones into mining XMR without knowing. ADB.Miner is a worm that exploits Android devices which expose debug capabilities to the internet. When ABD exposes its control port, the emulator has full access without further authentication. In short, the worm will mine XMR currency and send the tokens to the actor’s wallet address.
Said worm comes in a shell file “Invoke.sh”, which facilitates the worm propagation component “Droidbot” by mass replacing core programs on the device. The worm is spread over the ADB on port 5555.
