Moreover, to increase efficiency, some miners not only adopted high-tech mining gear, but also pooled their resources, and located them where electricity is cheaper.
At the moment, solo mining without an ASIC miner is virtually impossible. The hash rates of GPUs and ASIC miners are extremely higher than old-timer CPUs. Because ASICs caused massive leaps in mining difficulty, mining on general-purpose computers became unprofitable. Its processing power was 200 times greater than the GPU models at the time. Later, in 2012, the first ASIC miner, designed solely for mining cryptocurrency, was introduced. GPUs are graphics cards designed to render high-resolution video graphics, which were utilized for mining thanks to their parallel processing capacity. However, as mining became more and more profitable, more miners entered the market, and the mining equipment advanced significantly over time. When Bitcoin was first invented in 2009, everyone with a regular computer, generally a CPU-based one, could easily mine new coins. When mining Bitcoin, miners actually verify the incoming transactions on the blockchain, thus keeping the cryptocurrency network functional. Mining is also an essential part of keeping the blockchain network alive and secure. Mining cryptocurrencies is a way to obtain digital currency without paying for them directly on an exchange.
What Mining Software Do You Need to Mine Cryptocurrency?
However, while solo mining is still possible and you can mine Litecoin on your Mac, if you are looking to make a sustainable business model out of mining, you will need stronger mining hardware.īefore we get into the details of how to mine Litecoin on your Mac, it is a good idea to explain how cryptocurrency mining works using the world’s first cryptocurrency as an example. This is one of the main reasons behind the emergence of Litecoin (LTC), an altcoin whose hashing algorithm, at least in the beginning, consumed less power and electricity and could be done on a regular laptop. Unfortunately, in the last couple of years, Bitcoin mining became more and more centralized and rather monopolized. The procedure of mining cryptocurrencies is similar across different coins except that it differs in terms of the employed hashing algorithms and consensus mechanisms. Apart from buying them on crypto exchanges, you can get some crypto coins if you mine them yourself. The volatile nature of Bitcoin and crypto assets, in general, makes digital currencies an exciting investment opportunity.