I've been searching for the best way to mine crypto for the past few weeks. I've read scores of sites and installed and uninstalled various mining software.
At this point, I'm not going to go out and spend $$$ to create a mining rig so I need something that can run on my current hardware, a 3-year old Mac PowerBook.
Finally, I found the easiest and most profitable approach: minergate
Minergate can mine 15 different types of cryptocurrency, including:
- Zcash
- Ethereum
- Ethereum classic
- Litecoin
- Dashcoin
- Monero
- Dogecoin
You can select a currency to mine OR you can enable Smart Mining which automatically mines the most profitable currency over the past hour.
The other thing I liked about minergate was the fact that it starts mining immediately. No hours and days of waiting for a blockchain to download.
To find out how much $$$ your system could earn per year, run the benchmarking tool.
Here are some screenshots:
^^^ You can set the number of CPU cores to use. (The default is 2 cores. I bumped mine up to 4 cores at first and didn't see any lag in my other apps. However, my system warmed up and started blowing its fan, so I bumped it down to 3 and later to 2 cores.)
The dashboard shows which currency the smart-miner is working on. You can also manually enable mining on any other currency you like, but doing so takes away computing power from mining the most profitable coin at the moment. It integrates pool mining, so you can get small consistent payouts instead of waiting to hit it big by solving a whole block.
^^^ You can use the benchmarking tool to see how much $$$ your system can earn in a year. With CPU mining alone, it looks like a modest $25/year. However, if you've got any kind of GPU video card, this amount could be significantly higher.
^^^ Minergate has gamified their software so you're encouraged to learn and do more with their tools.
Finally, clicking the Support tab in the app opens this support form online.
Overall, this software is very easy and fast to get up and running.
Please go ahead and try it out. Let us know which settings you chose, which hardware you're using, and what the benchmark annual payout looks like!
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I welcome your thoughtful comments and questions!
interesting
Thanks for taking the time to write this. Interested in mining but always thought that it would be impossible with my mac and might even damage it. This might be worth looking further at
As I mentioned, I bumped the number of cores down to 2. With that, my Mac is still hashing over 40 H/s, which is 80% of the hashing I got with 4 cores. My machine is running quietly now, only slightly warmer than usual. I think I'll keep this setting.
If you decide to try it, please post your results here.
Coins mentioned in post: