Peter Kent - Cryptocurrency Mining for Dummies

Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952296

ISBN: 978-1-119-57929-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-57947-2 (epdf); ISBN 978-1-119-57942-7 (epub).

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 5
5. Chapter 6
6. Chapter 7
7. Chapter 8
8. Chapter 9
9. Chapter 10
10. Chapter 11
11. Chapter 12
12. Chapter 13
13. Chapter 14
14. Chapter 15
15. Chapter 17

Welcome to Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies. Were here to help you enter the wonderful world of cryptocurrency mining. Of course, you dont need our help. You can just go to Google or some other major search engine, search, and jump right in. Youll find plenty of information to help you!

Hah! Try it and see. Itll be like drinking from the proverbial firehose youll drown in a flood of confusing blog posts, conflicting news articles, unintelligible wiki articles, misleading YouTube videos .

So thats where we come in. Our job is to break it all down into intelligible, easy-to-digest, bite-sized pieces that ordinary folk like yourself can read and understand.

This book explains, simplifies, and demystifies the world of cryptocurrency mining. You find out what you need to know and do in order to decide if and how youre going to begin cryptocurrency mining.

In this book, we explain

• How cryptocurrency mining works, and what its for (it cant just be a way for you to make money, right?)
• The different algorithms and how they function Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, Delegated Proof of Stake, and more and what hashing is all about
• The different types of mines: pool mining, solo mining, cloud mining
• The different types of hardware: CPU mining, GPU mining, FGPA mining, and ASIC mining
• How to pick the right cryptocurrency to mine
• How to find and work with a pool mining service
• How to set up your mining hardware and software
• How to calculate your potential earnings (or losses!), taking into account network hash rate, your mining rigs hash rate, currency exchange rate, the price of electricity, and so on
• Where to find a plethora of helpful resources to guide you on your cryptocurrency mining journey
• And plenty more!

We dont want to assume anything, but we have to believe that if youre reading this book, you already know a few things about the Internet and cryptocurrency. We assume that you understand how to work online and work with personal computing equipment. We also assume that you know how to buy and sell cryptocurrency, how to work with exchanges and wallets, and how to keep it safe.

This alone is a complicated subject, which would take an entire book to explain. It is essential that you understand these basics; this book focuses on a more advanced subject, cryptocurrency mining, and we just dont have room to cover these basics. We recommend you check out Peters 8-hour online video course, which you can find at CryptoOfCourse.com ; but one way or another, its essential that you learn how to work with cryptocurrency safely, in a way that protects you from theft and loss.

This book, like all For Dummies books, uses icons to highlight certain paragraphs and to alert you to particularly useful information. Heres a rundown of what those icons mean:

A Tip icon means were giving you an extra snippet of information that may help you on your way or provide additional insight into the concepts being discussed.

The Remember icon points out information that is worth committing to memory.