Ether (ETH), the digital currency on the Ethereum blockchain, has grown to become the second largest cryptocurrency, commanding an aggregate market value of just around $1 billion - behind Bitcoin with a market cap of around $10.5 billion.While people may buy ether in the open market (for around $11.50 per ETH currently), others may choose to "mine" for ether by using their computer's power to validate and confirm transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, in a process known as proof-of-work (PoW).These miners are rewarded with blocks of ether -- currently the reward is 5 ETH per block, and a block is expected to be found, on average, once every 12 seconds.Bitcoin miners can use specialized hardware known as ASIC chips to solve the mining algorithm, but Ethereum's mining algorithm is purposefully ASIC-resistant, requiring computer memory as well as processing power.Also, Ethereum is meant to transition ultimately away from PoW and to proof-of-stake (PoS), whereby mining is replaced by "stakers" who are rewarded for holding on to quantities of ETH.

(Related: Ethereum Community Agrees on Hard Forking, Fixing DAO Hack) The easiest way to mine for ether is to do so indirectly, via cloud mining services.bitcoin digging linuxHere, individuals can buy contracts to mine virtually, often employing the resources of a company such as Genesis Mining, the largest ether cloud mining service currently.bitcoin diff calcContracts are generally long-term - 1-year or longer - and come at a fixed cost to the buyer, right now at $37 per MH/s of computational, or "hashing" power.bitcoin feministLike Bitcoin mining, ether mining's profitability fluctuates based on its market price, as well as the mining difficulty, which is a function of how much aggregate mining power is on line.bitcoin apex

While home bitcoin mining has become quite user-friendly, ether mining using the CPU or GPU on your computer is a bit more hands on.bitcoin julian assangeHere is a basic overview of the steps required: 1.bitcoin uzman?Create an ether wallet.bitcoin value yearlyThis can be done for free by downloading wallet software, or by creating one via a web wallet service such as myetherwallet.poker bitcoin indonesiaThis wallet is your virtual ether account that holds your digital currency and where you can send and receive coins.ethereum forum redditAmy mining rewards you earn will go to this wallet.The next thing you will need to do is download a program called Geth, which is program that talks to the Ethereum Network and serves as the relay between your computer's hardware and the rest of the distributed network.

When a block is mined by another computer, your Geth program will receive that information and update your copy of the blockchain.Geth comes zipped and is a command-line program with no windows or graphical user interface.You will then have to download another piece of software to actually initiate and process the mining activity, known as Ethminer.This is also a command-line only program, and can only be started after you have downloaded and synchronized the entire Ethereum blockchain with Geth.For an in-depth, line by line tutorial on how to get about mining following these steps, please follow this link.Obtaining ether via mining can be done indirectly with cloud mining, or directly on your computer by harnessing the power of its CPU or GPU.Doing it yourself is a bit cumbersome still, and involves some familiarity with command line operations on your PC.Also, as solo mining gets more difficult, miners may find it optimal to join a pool, where they can aggregate their mining power with many others and receive a pro-rated share of discovered ether.

Even though I am a fond of huge in-house bitcoin mining rigs, I also love to experiment on PC altcoins’ mining, in an attempt to find the best altcoins one can mine using his/her PC.Accordingly, I decided to look through the altcoins one can mine with his PC and GPU.After researching through a considerable number of coins, which can be mined without ASICs, I found some interesting results.For this cryptocurrency mining experiment, I used my HP i5-5200U laptop which has an average CPU benchmark of 3543.Here are the detailed specifications of my machine: My Graphic card is a NVIDIA GEFORCE 820M with an average GPU benchmark of 577.Here are the detailed specifications of my graphic card: Bus Interface: PCIe 2.0 x16, with a maximum memory Size of 2048 MB, Graphics API Support: DirectX 11 OpenGL 4.5 Max My Operating system is Windows 10 64 bit How The Results Of My Experiment Can Benefit You: To estimate how much money you could make via using your PC or laptop to mine altcoins, you have to benchmark your CPU +/- your GPU.

I recommend using PassMark Software to benchmark your CPU and GPU; it is free to use and can give you a relatively accurate estimate of the power of your machines.So, if your CPU has a benchmark of around 7000, you can make the double amount I made with my laptop and so on.I mined the following altcoins using my CPU +/- my GPU using pool mining.I excluded the mining fees of the pools from the results below.The following represents the amount of each coin I mined in 24 hours and its worth in USD.Miner used: I used the open source Cryptonote AMD GPU miner for Windows.Please, note that the script is designed to utilize the AES-NI instruction sets.Important – you might have to manually enable the AES-NI in your BIOS , as some manufacturers disable it by default.Your mining rate will be directly proportional to your CPU’s AES encryption speed.Amount mined in 24 hours: 0.0128 Monero price on the 12th of December, 2016: 7.85 USD Total amount earned after mining for 24 hours: 0.097 USD Miner used: I used Minergate’s mining software, as it is free to use, enables you combine CPU and GPU mining and also has a “smart mining” feature that automatically picks the best altcoins to mine based on market price.

Amount mined in 24 hours: 2,522 BCN Bytecoin price on the 12th of December, 2016: 0.000046 USD Total amount earned after mining for 24 hours: 0.116 USD Miner used: The fantomcoin qt wallet.It is easy to use, allows you to use CPU and GPU mining and also enables you to also mine Bytecoin BCN, Quazarcoin QCN or Monero XMR while mining FCN using merged mining.Amount mined in 24 hours: 0.205 FCN Fantomcoin price on the 12th of December, 2016: 0.0341 USD Total amount earned after mining for 24 hours: 0.07 USD Miner used: Minergate’s mining software.The great thing about XDN is that supports merged mining with XMR and other Cryptonote-based coins.Amount mined in 24 hours: 666.1 XDN DigitalNote price on the 12th of December, 2016: 0.00015 USD Total amount earned after mining for 24 hours: 0.0999 USD I tried mining Ethereum, AEON, DASH and Quazarcoin, but none of those yielded more than 0.05 USD after mining for 24 hours.Using your PC and Graphic card to mine altcoins can help you make a few cents per day utilizing a PC that you have hanging around your place doing nothing.