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Crypto Currency Mining Information and Links
If you are absolutely, completely, utterly out of the loop on crypto currency in general, your first stop should be to watch this video about Bitcoin: What Is BitCoin?
Mine-Litecoin has a nice little video section of getting started with a few different things.
Now easy cowboy. The first thing you need to do is create a wallet. This is where you can keep all your coins that you mine. You can download a wallet to your computer, Bitcoin or Litecoin OR you can create a wallet online at many different sites. HOWEVER is it much safer to keep your coins locally on your computer or a paper wallet so you have physical access to your coins. When you create a wallet, it will automatically create a payment address for you which you can use to receive coins from other users paying with the same coin. You must have a wallet for each coin you want to send or receive. In other words, you can not send a litecoin to someones bitcoin address and vice versa.
Ok, take a deep breath and prepare for a LOT of reading and most likely some frustration. But take it from me, its frustrating at first, then interesting, then awesome, then flat out addicting.
Now that you're pumped, go signup for a mining pool. These are pools of users, just like you and me who basically combine their hashing power to find blocks for a certain coin. There are multicoin pools too, but for the sake of this post, we'll try and keep it simple and stick with Litecoin. Some of the more popular Litecoin mining pools can be found here. Don't forget to create a "worker" for your mining pool.
Most of you want to use your ultra mega 3d thunderzord gamer xtreme super pc to mine with, which is fine, but depending on what OS and video card you have, you'll have several differnt options.
WINDOWS 7/8 (and Vista I guess if you're a glutton for punishment):
1. I have an nVidia graphics card - I fully admit to not being very familiar mining with nVidia cards, but I understand that theres an application called CudaMiner which makes nVidia GPU's much more useful for mining that with cgminer. Here's a guide I found from a quick google search.
2. I have an ATI graphics card -
- Go download an application called CGMiner
- Find the settings for your card (these most likely won't be the settings you use, but they are a good starting point). This will take some trail and error and require some patience on your part. Some people try the first setting and boom, they are off to the races. Some people spend weeks trying to get mining and still have problems.
- Create a batch file with your miner settings. This example shows for coinat.com but you can just replace the url info with whatever pool you signed up with and go from there.
BAMT/SMOS: I dont think nVidia cards can be utilized under these two (someone correct me if I'm wrong) so you'll want to again find the settings for your card (see link above) and setup your configuration file. This is the guide I used for BAMT and while I have yet to set it up myself, here's a "guide" for SMOS.
This is nowhere near complete, but I'll continue to add on to this for as long as I can so feel free to post recommendations for me to add or corrections on any of the above information. Hopefully it'll get some people started in the right direction.
