Mining altcoins on a laptop

Mining bitcoin wasn't on my list of things to do but somehow the recent hype about its price got me thinking if I can mine it too and I decided to give a try with what I had, an average HP laptop. 

I got myself into research and as expected found mining bitcoin with a laptop is a completely stupid idea.

The reasons:

• Laptops are underpowered and bitcoin mining is highly competitive.
• Due to current difficulty in mining in bitcoin, the only profitable way of mining is by use of special microchips called ASICs(Application-Specific-Integrated Circuits) that are designed to mine bitcoin and nothing else. They are at least 100x better at mining bitcoin than even the best GPUs.

My HP laptop didn't stand a chance and even if I became stupid enough to ignore these facts and get into mining it was only going to mess up my laptop. I wasn't ready to burn my only laptop, just how am I supposed to do my assignments then? There were many cases where people have destroyed their laptop cooling fan, hard drives, laptop screens and even monitors.

I started my research again and it came to my knowledge that bitcoin was just one of many cryptocurrencies. I had no idea about it before.

There are so many other altcoins or alternative cryptocurrencies that launched after the success of bitcoin and some of them could be easily mined on my average laptop and surprisingly altcoins like Monero, Zcash, Dashcoin fetch a good price too.

Getting started with MineGate!

There are many mining pools out there at the moment but I decided to get started with MinerGate as it was one of the oldest mining pool and also after going through the user reviews it seemed trustable enough.

It was founded on 24th of March, 2014. It was the first mining pool for CryptoNote based currencies.

Minergate has a very clean aesthetic design and easy to set up which proved to be very helpful for someone like me who had no prior knowledge of mining pools. Minergate also payout in the actual crypto that you are mining. You can mine many different cryptocurrencies in it. Minergate also offers their own exchange changelly which make thing much easier for the user to exchange their cryptocurrencies. The fees for MinerGate also are fairly low. MinerGate also provides the opportunity to purchase cloud mining contracts for Bitcoin and some other coins.

Here is something you can learn from experience with MinerGate. 

pros

1. Clean interface.

2. Mine in different currencies and diversify your assets in different wallets.

3. Customized mining options.

4. Low withdrawal fees.

5. Has the smart miner that can switch back and forth to the most profitable currency.

Cons

1. Terrible hashing rate giving rise to many speculations

2. Takes a long time for your earning to be confirmed. It has been one week already and my earnings are not confirmed yet. However there is no reported case of MinerGate leaving its user unpaid, they just take some time.

The earning you see above are the result of mining for about 4 hours. Honestly, it would take a long time for a laptop to actually make something. However, it was never in my mind to become rich mining through my laptop I wanted to try it and as I found out it works. 

Again here is something you can learn from my experience about mining altcoins with a laptop.

Pros

1. You can save money because buying a mining rig would be very costly

2. Mining with a laptop doesn't consume too much electricity.

3. You don't require any external cooling equipment, Mining rigs are reported to emit a lot of heat.

Cons

1. Earning is very low so don't get your hopes high.

2. High possibility of damaging your laptop.

This post is for informative purpose only and I don't endorse MinerGate or any other company. While some are subjective facts that I have collected through research, some are just my opinion and I do not intend to tell you what to do. I have tried my best share my own experience that would hopefully help you decide what to do if you also have an urge for mining bitcoin or altcoin on your laptop.
Read more
 Nicehash alternatives for mining bitcoin 
5 best altcoins to mine in 2018

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