The managing director of the Montana-based power block currency thinks that the decreasing prices of cryptocurrencies are an advantage for miners

Mining is now a popular and very expensive business. It arrived with the ASIC miners in 2012-2013, because there was a big competition to get Bitcoin. This was a reason why the difficulty of the network started to rise very quickly. In the following two years, Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies became impossible to extract using a normal PC.

The first ASICs were relatively weak. In fact, the most powerful could originally only give a little more hashrate than a normal computer with GPU / CPU. Today it seems ridiculous, but the first Bitcoin Core users used to accumulate hundreds and thousands of digital coins without special hardware.

Today we have real factories for mining. They are mostly distributed in Asian countries such as China, Japan and South Korea. This activity is usually focused on Bitcoin, which, by the way, should have been independent and decentralized.

Businesses must be legal. This means that you have to pay taxes and salaries for your employees with regular money. There are some countries where Bitcoin is legal, but it is not yet possible to use it for legal affairs there. This is the reason why such managers have to exchange coins earned with a normal currency.

The question is why we need to extract cryptocurrency with ASICs, spending a great deal of energy when we do not use it for business. This activity is meaningless. Many developers and crypto-enthusiasts worry about this. They think we have to decentralize cryptocurrencies to give everyone the same opportunities to use it. While Bitcoin is controlled by data mining pools, it does not offer any advantage to regular users.

Therefore, much of the crypto community does not appreciate the ASIC miners. This part includes many gifted developers who manage their cryptocurrencies, based on the principles of decentralization. This means that you can get these coins with the power of your computer, using CPU or single graphics card (GPU).

In this article, we will examine five of the most famous and valuable cryptocurrencies that can still be used with CPU / GPU. Some of these belong to the CryptoNote family, but we should also pay attention to new projects, created in the last two years with advanced hashing protocols.

CPU extraction

CPU stands for central processing unit. It's actually a bit like a brain that implements all the calculations in any computer. The more powerful your CPU is, the faster your machine will be.

The CPU is usually used for regular programs because it is not relatively powerful. If you want to play games on your computer or make some difficult calculations for the mineral cryptocurrency, you will also need a GPU.

Mining GPU

GPU is a graphic processing unit. It was originally made for games and complicated 3D modeling, but it is also excellent for extracting altcoins because a GPU is able to provide a good hashrate.

Hashrate is a measure of power in the mining industry. To understand what exactly matters, you should know the basic principles of Bitcoin architecture. To avoid boring technical explanations, we accept that with more hashrates you will get more revenue.

Important note

As I said before, mining is a business a day today. This is the reason why many people consider it a source of income. In fact, to get regular income, you will have to invest a lot of money and time. Requires hardware, plant, electricity and so on. In this article we will talk about the mining industry for personal purposes and the knowledge of the crypto industry. When you try to get big revenue with your CPU / GPU, you're probably going to break your computer, and it does not depend on which cryptocurrency you shoot yourself. Do not expect much, this is more than testing.

The best cryptocurrency for mine with CPU

It is important to note that a GPU is always more powerful than a CPU. However, there are some coins that are still workable, even if you do not have a powerful graphics card.

Monero

Monero is a relatively old project that has demonstrated its safety and anonymity many times. No one can trace the sender and recipient of any transaction in the Monero network. This allows users to be sure of the security of their personal data.

In reality, most cryptocurrencies originally had to be anonymous. Unfortunately, today most of them do not provide this functionality. This does not mean that the developers are wrong. To put it simply, Internet tracking technologies are becoming increasingly powerful. That's why, for example, Bitcoin is not anonymous at all now.

In 2018, Monero still uses impregnable encryption methods. This is an open-source project, but above all – Monero is truly decentralized. This means that the cryptocurrency is totally independent of certain developers and, of course, data mining pools.

Monero uses the CryptoNote protocol and is still one of the best coins to extract with the CPU. To start mining, you only need to install software. The official Monero website recommends MoneroSpelunker.

Bytecoin

Another CryptoNote coin, less popular, but also quite promising. In 2017, when all cryptocurrencies increased, the Bytecoin route increased 56-fold. It has been an incredible growth and the project has had a large community of followers.

Like Monero, Bytecoin provides anonymous peer-to-peer transactions. Cryptocurrency can not be minimized with ASICs, so the only way to get Bytecoins is CPU encryption.

The Bytecoin team has a blog, where they publish some news and recommendations on their project. In this blog, they recommended Xmrig as the best software for mining. It is available for free download on GitHub in three versions:

• For mining using the central processing unit (CPU)

• For extraction using AMD graphics cards (GPU)

• For mining using Nvidia graphics cards

In 2018, Bytecoin went down with the total market recession, but still has a relatively good course and more than $ 300 million in capitalisations, while many crypto-projects have provoked a scam. That's why I think the project deserves our attention.

Electroneum

Electroneum is the new project in this list. It was launched in the fall of 2017 and now has a capitalization of $ 43 million. This is not really a good result, because in December 2017 the capitalization was almost 10 times more. However, we should remember that the market was totally reduced in 2018, so it is more important to pay attention to an existing technology and not to the price chart.

Electroneum is also a currency based on CryptoNote, but uses the modified and improved version of the algorithm. It makes transactions safer and faster, without losing anonymity and decentralization. Furthermore, the most notable thing about the algorithm is that you can also extract coins with your smartphone. This makes Electroneum one of the easiest cryptocurrencies to mine.

To extract Electroneum with CPU / GPU you will need the miner XMR-STAK 2.2. It is software that can be used with any central processing unit and with both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. A & # 39; mining mobile app is also available on the Google Play Store.

The best cryptocurrency to extract with GPU

horizen

Originally, Horizen was called Zencash. The cryptocurrency has recently been rebranded, probably to become more different from its reference – Zcash.

Zcash is one of the most popular and successful altcoin. It was created by a group of crypto-scientists with some special methods of cryptography and hashing. Zencash was based on the same technologies, but the developers included some new features in the project.

Horizen offers anonymous and secure transactions, but it is also much more decentralized and independent of Zcash. Moreover, it is one of the best cryptocurrencies to extract with GPU. There are many programs that can be used to extract Horizen. Some of these are available for all platforms and some require special conditions. The most relevant programs of the programs are listed in the following table:

These are not strict rules, only recommendations. In fact, you can use any software that is able to perform Zcash mining.

Ethereum

You're probably wondering why Ethereum is on this list. It is a popular platform with great network difficulty and is totally unable to extract PCs. Well, it's true. Trying to extract Ethereum with a normal PC is meaningless, but in this article we are talking about minimal CPU / GPU cryptocurrencies and Ethereum certainly belongs to this. Ethereum aims to be a decentralized smart-contract platform. The developer team does not like ASICs, because it usually promotes centralization.

In 2018, there are some ASICs for the Ethereum algorithm, but they are not as profitable as the Bitcoin SHA-256 ASICs. So, Ethereum is still a GPU coinage. It is important to note that if you want to get revenue, you need to buy several graphics cards and make them work together. CPU mining is useless here because it does not have enough power.

There are too many different Ethereum extraction programs, I think listing them here makes no sense. If you do not know what to start with, try Geth- it's a console wallet that connects your computer to the Ethereum network.