How to make bitcoins using your Windows PC
You have probably read about bitcoins in the past months and it is likely that not everything that you read about was praising the digital currency. What you probably read in the past days was that bitcoin dropped from an all time high of about $266 Dollars - that is per bitcoin - to $97 as of today. That's still a lot considering that the value of a single bitcoin was just $13 on January 1, 2013.
The currency is interesting for a number of reasons and while it would take too long to go over all of those, I'd like to mention a few. First, it is a virtual currency that is not managed by a central authority but by an Internet-based network. Currency can be traded just like any other currency, you can exchange Dollar, Euro or any other currency in to bitcoin and vice versa. Bitcoins are created through a process that is called mining. To put it very simple: a mining program runs on your computer that will use your computer's processing power to create new bitcoin.
Single users need to be really lucky to stand a chance in the race to create new bitcoins, which is why many join so called pools that divide chunks of works among their members to stand a chance against server farms, super computers and larger networks. Pooled mining will reward you with smaller but more frequent returns.
I'd like to thank Ghacks reader Alex as he helped me tremendously in this matter.
Setting up your bitcoin mining PC
You need two tools to get started:
- A secure wallet that stores all the bitcoin that you own.
- A mining program that lets you use your computer's resources to mine.
There are several wallets out that that you can pick one from. Electrum is a cross-platform wallet for Windows, Linux, OS X and Android that is available as binaries and as source files. Windows users can download a portable version of the application or use the installer to install it on their system. Setup should not pose any troubles to you, just make sure you store the secure phrase in a safe location so that you can recover your wallet at any time should you forget the authentication password.
Guiminer or Gui Mining is a free portable program for the Windows operating system that you can use to mine for bitcoin on your PC. The core benefit of the program is that it ships with everything that you need to get started. It supports joining a mining pool but also solo mining if you prefer to go that way.
Running Guiminer
Now that you have the tools to start mining bitcoin, you should consider joining one of the mining pools. There is Slush's Pool which I have joined for now for instance. You do need to sign up at the pool's website to receive one or multiple worker logins that you need to enter into your program - in our case Guiminer - to start mining and get credited for your efforts.
You can naturally join any of the other pools linked directly from the application, or use the other option to enter a custom host name and port instead if the pool that you have joined is not listed in the program.
Note that the mining will tax your computer a lot so that it is best done if it is idle and not while you are working on it. While you can continue writing blog posts and doing other light activities, you will notice that more taxing activities will be slower than usual.
The program displays a couple of information about the speed of your system and so on and so forth, but if you are interested to find out how much your mining has earned you, you need to visit the mining pool's website as this is where that is listed.
Here you see estimated, unconfirmed and confirmed rewards displayed to you. Don't expect to gain several bitcoins a day using a single personal computer, but if you are persistent, you will earn money this way. You may also want to enter your Bitcoin address (shown in your wallet) on the mining pool website to receive mined bitcoins there.
You are probably wondering how fast a single personal computer can go. Not that fast actually. My Intel Core i7 860 cpu, 8 Gigabytes of RAM and a Nvidia Geforce GTX 470 graphics adapter has a speed of about 102 Mhash/s. The hall of fame on Slush's pool website shows that some users managed to generated more than 149000 Mhash/s.
Advertisement
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.