How to Mine Cryptos Like BTC, ETH, LTC, DOGE, and BCH

How to Mine Cryptocurrency

Many people interested in cryptocurrency are also interested in crypto mining, particularly for popular coins like bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), and doge (DOGE). In general, mining crypto can be as complicated as you want it to be.

For starters, there is a huge assortment of crypto mining rigs from which you can choose. Central processing units (CPUs), general processing units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are all different types of computer hardware that can be used to mine crypto — and you can learn about them all on our deep dive on the subject. These mining rigs vary in hash rate and energy efficiency, which are two of the key factors in determining mining profitability. In addition, the mining algorithms and overall mining process for various cryptocurrencies tend to vary. For example, you wouldn’t mine zcash (ZEC) with the same equipment — or in the same way — that you’d mine bitcoin cash (BCH).

Below we’ll break down the similarities — and differences — in how you mine some of the most popular coins in terms of both market cap and mining interest.

How To Mine Bitcoin

While mining bitcoin was once a feasible endeavor for home mining with accessible hardware, mining BTC is now largely dominated by large crypto mining companies. Sometimes called crypto mining farms, these operations may use hundreds — or thousands — of ASIC miners optimized to mine BTC, which uses the SHA-256 algorithm. These ASIC bitcoin miners are hot, noisy, and expensive — with prices varying from $2,000 – $15,000 USD each. For these reasons and more, mining BTC from home is more of a throwback to the early days of Bitcoin circa 2010, when the competition was lower and mining with home hardware was more feasible.

Nowadays, while there’s nothing stopping you from trying to mine BTC solo using a CPU, your chances of winning a block reward are statistically lower than winning the lottery. Even if you join a mining pool, the payout you’d receive from mining bitcoin with CPUs and GPUs would be miniscule, and would almost certainly be revenue negative as any crypto payouts you’d receive in BTC would be overshadowed by the electricity costs your CPU or GPU miners would accumulate. While BTC has become a highly competitive mining field, there are many more cryptocurrencies with which you can engage.

How To Mine Ether

Ether (ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, and has become one of the most popular coins for those crypto-mining at home. Some passionate ETH miners even have GPU mining rigs that have numerous cards in each unit. As Ethereum uses the ethash algorithm — one that prioritizes small-scale miners with GPU hardware — it doesn’t require a large-scale mining farm to be competitive. That being said, GPUs can’t mine as efficiently as FPGA miners, and many GPU miners have transitioned to mining smaller cap altcoins.

In addition, some of the biggest crypto mining rig manufacturers are working on ASIC ether miners that could make both GPU and FPGA mining of ETH largely obsolete. In fact, there is already an ETH ASIC miner on the market with an impressive hash rate of 720 megahashes per second (mh/s), although some question whether its high price is worth the increased hash rate and energy efficiency.

Looking ahead, Ethereum is migrating from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), a consensus mechanism that does not require hardware mining. This will make ETH no longer mineable after phase 2 of Ethereum 2.0 is implemented. On PoS blockchains, you are rewarded for staking your coins to support the network in lieu of the crypto mining rewards on PoW blockchains.

How To Mine Litecoin

Mining litecoin (LTC), dubbed by its creator as “the silver to bitcoin’s gold,” is fairly similar to mining BTC. Litecoin has a block reward that finalizes four times as fast as Bitcoin’s, with new blocks being processed approximately once every 2.5 minutes. It also has a max supply of 84 million LTC, which is approximately four times as large as BTC’s. However, a key difference when it comes to mining LTC is the mining algorithm Litecoin uses.

In place of SHA-256, Litecoin uses the Scrypt algorithm. The primary technical difference between the two is that Scrypt is a memory-intensive mining algorithm that requires possible solutions to be stored in a unit’s random access memory (RAM). This was chosen to allow it to be CPU-mineable, as mining bitcoin at home became increasingly unfeasible. However, as was the case with BTC, mining LTC soon became only profitable (for most) when using more advanced and costly GPU mining rig setups. Although Scrypt was designed to be ASIC-resistant, ASIC Scrypt miners were subsequently developed and have since placed CPU rigs at a competitive disadvantage.

How To Mine Dogecoin

Originally intended as a meme project to help grow public interest in crypto, Dogecoin has taken on a life of its own and is now a large multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency. Dogecoin has a block time of approximately one minute, ten times faster than Bitcoin’s, with each block reward equal to 10,000 DOGE. Unlike most PoW chains, the block reward for DOGE never diminishes; this means that DOGE doesn’t have a hard cap.

Dogecoin uses the same Scrypt algorithm that Litecoin uses, and could originally be mined with CPU and GPU miners. With the advent of Scrypt-optimized ASIC miners, those not utilizing them are now at a competitive disadvantage. In fact, some institutional and industrial-scale mining operations have plans in the works — or have already begun — to diversify their mining operations to include both DOGE and LTC mining at a significant scale.

How To Mine Monero

Similar to mining ZEC, mining Monero’s cryptocurrency XMR was also optimized in an effort to allow retail miners to fairly compete for mining rewards with large crypto mining farms. While there may be some large-scale mining of XMR, there is far more retail crypto mining of XMR than some of the other blockchains that are dominated by huge industrial-scale mining operations. This is because Monero’s mining algorithm RandomX is designed to be — and has remained —  largely ASIC-resistant. The RandomX algorithm changes periodically, and as the algo changes, any ASIC optimized for the previous algorithm simply won’t be profitable. For this reason, most large crypto mining farms focus on mining BTC and other large cap projects where scale, specialization, and ASICs give them a competitive advantage.

Because of these dynamics, Monero’s XMR is one of the last large-cap coins that can be mined at home with a reasonable chance of being competitive and profitable. This is because XMR is still CPU-mineable; in fact, it’s optimized for CPU mining. A far cheaper option than ASICs, many of the best CPU miners of XMR cost between $50 and $200. Monero has a block time of two minutes, and its block reward will gradually decrease until May 2022, when the supply reaches 18.132 million XMR. After that, it will have a static 0.6 XMR block reward to incentivize miners to continue to secure the network.

How To Mine Bitcoin Cash

Mining BCH is a nearly identical process to mining BTC. As Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin, the design parameters of the two cryptocurrencies widely overlap — including using the same SHA-256 algorithm. In fact, ASIC miners have been known to switch between mining the two coins. Using crypto mining profitability tools, they typically mine whichever coin gives them the highest return on investment (ROI) at any given point. Using a combination of the current market price and the mining difficulty of these two coins, they are able to calculate which coin to mine to maximize returns.

For a simple example, if BTC is $50,000 per coin and BCH is $5,000 per coin, a BCH mining difficulty that’s 1/10 of BTC’s would result in identical returns (over the long-term), since a miner is 10 times more likely to win the BCH block reward. A BCH mining difficulty that’s 1/20 of BTC’s would result in BCH being twice as profitable to mine. If BCH’s mining difficulty is 1/5 of BTC’s, BCH would be half as profitable to mine (all assuming the example prices above are static).

For this reason, ASIC miners optimized for BTC are usually pointed at whatever SHA-256 coin is the most profitable to mine at the moment. Beyond this, the other Bitcoin fork, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV), also uses SHA-256, so these miners may switch between all three of these coins (BTC, BCH, and BSV) depending on the mining difficulty and current market price.