Guide: basic tools for cryptocurrency mining

If what you are looking for is to get the most out of cryptocurrency mining, what you should know is that it demands more than pressing the power button on a computer, market research is also extremely relevant.

Since one has already decided to enter the world of cryptocurrency mining, the definitive question arises: AMD or Nvidia? And the answer is always the same, another question What are you going to mine? And depending on what cryptocurrency (or algorithm) you want to mine are the video cards that one must acquire.

What video card to use?

AMD cards are said to be the best at mining the Ethash algorithm (although now as we have been taught in the video of the HardwarEsfera channel Nvidia are also gaining this ground) of which its most representative currency is Ethereum (ETH).

On the other hand, we have Nvidia that are better at mining the Equihash algorithm from which we can find currencies such as Zcash (ZEC), Bitcoin private (BTCP) or Bitcoin Gold (BTG) among others.

Having assembled the rig and put it into operation over the months, you come to notice that the cryptocurrency you chose stagnates or loses value compared to other cryptocurrencies and you think it would be a good idea to change cryptocurrency, but is this beneficial for us? This is where one should put market research into practice.

Tools

There are two websites that are basic tools for a person who is dedicated to mining cryptocurrencies, these sites are totally free and extremely important when deciding between mining one cryptocurrency or another, we are talking about whattomine y Coinmarketcap.

what to mine

In the description that they themselves offer, it says:

Using WhatToMine you can see how profitable it is to mine a certain type of Altcoin compared to Ethereum or Bitcoin.

This website has several useful functions but its main objective (and which we will use more) is to estimate the profits generated from mining according to what type of video cards we are using.

When entering the web we can see a series of gray buttons that make references to different video cards from which we can choose both Nvidia and AMD, of which we can see for example the GTX 1060, 1070, 1080, and the RX 480, 580, vega56 and vega64.

To make use of this function, you do not have to do anything other than select the type of card used, write the number of similar cards to be used in the box and press the button "calculate".

Once you click on "calculate" the web will return an estimate of gross income and net profit. In the example, the web returns that today it says that it is more profitable (Net income) to mine Zencash under the Equihash algorithm.

Here we have to emphasize that the results are estimated so if we want to have a more exact result we can press on the preferred currency and enter the values ​​manually for both mining power and electricity cost and give "calculate" again, which will return a table of income values generated both by hour, day, week, month and even year.

Coin Market Cap

This website focuses on creating a ranking or classification of cryptocurrencies based on their market capitalization. In total, the website has a total of 852 Altcoins listed, although of its total only 699 have a registered capitalization.

The use that we will give to this website is various, we will use Bitcoin as an example.

Among the options that we will see are:

• Currency
• Market capitalization
• Price
• Volume (movements in dollars generated in 24 hrs.)
• Quantity in circulation
• Value changes (percentage of the last 24 hrs.)
• Graphic

Capitalization

This value consists of knowing how much fiat money has been injected by investors (call it companies or individuals) and the higher the capitalization the value of the currency rises.

Price

The value of said cryptocurrency at the present time.

Volume

This tells us the amount of (in this case) Bitcoins that were transacted in the last 24 hours. The amount is always provided in the value of the fiat currency of your choice.

Quantity in circulation

This is the total number of bitcoins that are currently in circulation, regardless of the volume in circulation.

Value changes

This value tells us if the currency in question has risen or fallen in value with respect to the last 24 hours.

Graphic

This graph shows us the evolution of the cryptocurrency according to the time value that we determine.

Now, if we press on the cryptocurrency, it will send us to a section of the web where all this same information that I have mentioned comes, but with more details, easier to understand, but above all and the most important part or that will serve us in this case is the tab "markets".

In the Markets or markets tab we will see that exchages accept said cryptocurrency, with which other cryptocurrencies you can buy / sell said cryptocurrency, the price of that cryptocurrency within the Exchange and the volume in movement within it.

Knowing the value and volume within an Exchange is very important to know how long it will take to make a purchase / sale and if the value that is handled in it is fair or if it is a better option to look at other exchanges.

It should be mentioned that, if it is difficult for you to understand English at the top of the search engine you can change the language to Spanish and the currency from Dollars to Euros, also as I said, the web has a cryptocurrency search engine, something basic for this type of webs but which is very useful when locating a specific altcoin.

How would the two sites be used together?

Let's go back to What to mine and its analysis tells us that at this time it is better to mine Zencash (ZEN), we loyal to the web mine this altcoin, but we are interested in having either Bitcoins or Ethereum, then we are going to coin market cap and in In its search engine we put Zencash and if we go to the markets tab, we will see that of the eight exchanges that accept Zencash, only two (Binance and COSS) accept exchanges between Zencash and Bitcoin or Zencash and Ethereum, the value between both exchanges is only of two cents (ZEN-ETH) but instead Binance has a high volume of transactions so your purchase / sale will be much faster and easier to carry out.

It is true that whattomine tells us exchanges that accept said cryptocurrency (ZEN), but coinmarketcap is more complete in this regard.

Using these two tools together is great when mining certain cryptocurrencies not as popular as Zcash (ZEC), DASH, among others, for which we highly recommend that you tinker a bit on these two websites to familiarize yourself with what it has or see the other functions that we have not touched here since there are many.