If you want to make some money with cryptocurrency you have a few choices. Many of the choices come down to either putting up with a lot of risk or putting in a lot of time and effort. For instance, you can invest, but if it crashes then you can lose your money. Or, you can get paid in cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum but you have to work for that.
A good passive and low risk way to make money with crypto is to mine it. You have to have a bit of know how and the money to invest in the mining rig but once you are set up you don’t have to do much to keep making money.
In this article, I will go over the basics you need to get started mining so you can see if it is something that you could be interested in.
1. Pick your currency
The most obvious choice for making money in cryptocurrency is Bitcoin. But, the second most popular currency is Ethereum. With lots of people looking for an alternative to Bitcoin, they are starting to buy ETH. You may want to focus there for your mining operation since it is getting harder to make money mining Bitcoin.
You have to believe in the currency that you end up mining for in that you are confident that it will gain in value. Once you get your reward and start building up your wallet with coins, you want that to gain in value without the need to do anything.
This year Ethereum has gained quite a bit in value and it seems poised to grow. Of course, there is a risk with any currency that you decide to mine for that a crash happens and it becomes unprofitable to continue to mine. This happened in 2018 with the Bitcoin crash in which people sold off their rigs since the electricity needed to do the computations cost more than what was coming back in the form of Bitcoin.
2. Ready built rigs
You can buy a ready made mining rig if you want to just plug and play. They cost more than the individual parts would if you bought them separately. But, you can start making money right away if you buy the rigs ready to go.
For instance, one rig with at least 4GB of RAM and a very fast processor can cost you a few thousand dollars. Add in the cost of the electricity to run it and you are looking at close to $10,000 before you start making any real money.
The advantage is that you will be making money sooner when it is already set up for you. When the value of cryptocurrency is high and rising as it is now then time is of the essence to get in quickly.
3. Essentials for a DIY rig
When building your own there are the main components that you need. Namely a motherboard that can hold several graphics cards. It should have at least four ports and be able to power six CPUs.
Then you’ll need a mulitprocessor which is a processor that contains many different one. For storage a 50GB hard drive is usually enough for your needs starting out. The most expensive part of the rig are the video cards for Graphics Processing Units or GPUs.
*This article has been contributed on behalf of Paxful. However, the information provided herein is not and is not intended to be, investment, financial, or other advice.