There are three main categories of bitcoin mining hardware, each more
expensive and more powerful than the last. This guide to setting up a
bitcoin miner explains each of them, and talks about how to make them
work.
By this stage, you will understand how bitcoin works,
and what mining means. But we need to get from theory to practice. How
can you set up a bitcoin mining hardware and start generating some
digital cash? The first thing you're going to need to do is decide on
your hardware, and there are two main things to think about when
choosing it:
Hash rate
This is the number of calculations that your hardware can perform
every second as it tries to crack the mathematical problem we described
in our mining section. Hash rates are measured in megahashes,
gigahashes, and terahashes per second (MH/sec, GH/sec, and TH/sec). The
higher your hash rate (compared to the current average hash rate), the
more likely you are to solve a transaction block. The bitcoin wiki’s mining hardware comparison page is a good place to go for rough information on hash rates for different hardware.
Energy consumption
All
this computing power chews up electricity, and that costs money. It's
worth looking at your hardware's energy consumption in watts, when
making your choice. You want to make sure that you don't end up spending
all of your money on electricity to mine coins that won't be worth what
you paid.
Use these two factors to work out how many hashes you’re getting for
every watt of electricity that you use. To do this, divide the hash
count by the number of watts.
For example, if you have a 500 GH/sec device, and it’s taking 400
watts of power, then you’re getting 1.25 GH/sec per watt. You can check
your power bill or use an electricity price calculator online to find
out how much that means in hard cash.
However, there’s a caveat here. In some cases, you’ll be using your
computer to run the mining hardware. Your computer has its own
electricity draw on top of the mining hardware, and you’ll need to
factor that into your calculation.
Bitcoin Mining Hardware
There are three main hardware categories for bitcoin miners: GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs. We'll explore them in depth below.
CPU/GPU Bitcoin Mining
The least powerful category of bitcoin mining hardware is your
computer itself. Theoretically, you could use your computer's CPU to
mine for bitcoins, but in practice, this is so slow by today's standards
that there isn't any point.
You can enhance your bitcoin hash rate by adding graphics hardware to
your desktop computer. Graphics cards feature graphical processing
units (GPUs). These are designed for heavy mathematical lifting so they
can calculate all the complex polygons needed in high-end video games.
This makes them particularly good at the SHA hashing mathematics
necessary to solve transaction blocks.
You can buy GPUs from two main vendors: ATI and Nvidia. High-end
cards can cost hundreds of dollars, but also give you a significant
advantage over CPU hashing. For example, an ATI 5970 graphics card can
give you over 800 MH/sec compared with a CPU, which will generally give
you less than 10 MH/sec.
One of the nice things about GPUs is that they also leave your
options open. Unlike other options discussed later, these units can be
used with cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin. Litecoin,
for example, uses a different proof of work algorithm to bitcoin,
called Scrypt. This has been optimized to be friendly to CPUs and GPUs,
making them a good option for GPU miners who want to switch between
different currencies.
GPU mining is largely dead these days. Bitcoin mining difficulty has
accelerated so much with the release of ASIC mining power that graphics
cards can't compete. If you do want to use them, you'd best equip
yourself with a motherboard that can take multiple boards, to save on
running separate PSUs for different boards.
FPGA Bitcoin Mining
A Field Programmable Gate Array is an integrated circuit designed to
be configured after being built. This enables a mining hardware
manufacturer to buy the chips in volume, and then customize them for
bitcoin mining before putting them into their own equipment. Because
they are customized for mining, they offer performance improvements over
CPUs and GPUs. Single-chip FPGAs have been seen operating at around 750
Megahashes/sec, although that’s at the high end. It is of course
possible to put more than one chip in a box.
ASIC Bitcoin Miners
This is where the action’s really at. Application Specific Integrated
Circuits (ASICs) are specifically designed to do just one thing: mine
bitcoins at mind-crushing speeds, with relatively low power consumption.
Because these chips have to be designed specifically for that task and
then fabricated, they are expensive and time-consuming to produce - but
the speeds are stunning. At the time of writing, units are selling with
speeds anywhere from 5-500 Gigahashes/sec (although actually getting
some of them to them to ship has been a problem). Vendors are already
promising ASIC devices with far more power, stretching up into the 2
Terahashes/sec range.
Calculate mining profitability
Before making your purchase, calculate the projected profitability of your miner, using the excellent mining profitability calculator from The Genesis Block or this one.
You can input parameters such as equipment cost, hash rate, power
consumption, and the current bitcoin price to see how long it will take
to pay back your investment.
One of the other key parameters here is network difficulty. This
metric determines how hard it is to solve transaction blocks, and it
varies according to the network hash rate. Difficulty is likely to
increase substantially as ASIC devices come on the market, so it might
be worth increasing this metric in the calculator to see what your
return on investment will be like as more people join the game.
Once you have chosen your hardware, you’ll need to do several other things:
Download the software
Depending on which equipment you choose, you will need to run
software to make use of it. Typically when using GPUs and FPGAs, you
will need a host computer running two things: the standard bitcoin
client, and the mining software.
Standard bitcoin client
This software connects
your computer to the network and enables it to interact with the
bitcoin clients, forwarding transactions and keeping track of the block
chain. It will take some time for it to download the entire bitcoin
block chain so that it can begin. The bitcoin client effectively relays
information between your miner and the bitcoin network.
Bitcoin mining software
The bitcoin mining software is what instructs the hardware to do the
hard work, passing through transaction blocks for it to solve. There are
a variety of these available, depending on your operating system. They
are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and others.
You may well need mining software for your ASIC miner, too, although
some newer models promise to ship with everything pre-configured,
including a bitcoin address, so that all you need to do is plug it in
the wall.
One smart developer even produced a mining operating system designed to run on the Raspberry Pi,
a low-cost credit card-sized Linux computer designed to consume very
small amounts of power. This could be used to power a USB-connected ASIC
miner.
Join a pool
Now, you're all set up. Good for you. I bet you thought you were
going to be mining more bitcoins than the Federal Reserve prints
dollars, didn't you? Sadly not. You will stand little chance of success
mining bitcoins unless you work with other people. You can find out more
about that in our upcoming guide on how to join a mining pool.
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