A photo of my PC. Ignore the terrible picture.
So, a couple weeks ago, February 1st to be exact, I was sitting in my AP Physics class, doing nothing in particular. It was one of our remote days in the alternating schedule, so I wasn't sitting in class per se, just absentmindedly in my room. As Mr. Mangold (who is the greatest physics teacher in all existence, by the way) explained how you can integrate a charge distribution to get electric field, I started thinking about cryptocurrency.
How hard is it to actually mine cryptocurrency and get free cash?
For those uninitiated, cryptocurrency is an all-digital alternative to real cash that is not regulated by any central agency like physical currencies are. All transactions are managed and verified by a distributed net of computers.
Because there's no central agency to inject new cash flow like the Treasury does for the dollar, cryptocurrency is created by 'mining'. People use their computers to solve difficult math algorithms and get a little money for their effort. That 'distributed net of computers' I mentioned earlier? All miners, who earn the transaction fee when they verify the transaction.
Mining computers have to pretty good, specifically, their GPU, graphics card, needs to be pretty good. This is a part that's often not powerful in most consumer computers, it's really mainly used for gaming PCs that need that graphical power.
Miners are also picky about which GPUs they use. The only cost to mining for cryptocurrency is the power used by the computer, so the newest, most power efficient GPUs are often used.
My PC, which I just built to be able to run deep learning programs and also to run sick video games, happens to be one of those with a profitable GPU for mining.
I have a RTX 3080 GPU from Nvidia, a pretty powerful new card, if you can find it among this intense GPU shortage. I had to scour checker sites and even built an Amazon bot to get one. But that's a story for another day.
So, some web searches showed me the way.
Bitcoin, the most famous cryptocurrency, isn't profitable for normal gamers to mine with normal hardware. You need specialized components. But Ethereum, a less-popular-but-still-famous currency, is a pretty good one to mine for standard computers.
Another couple of searches led me to programs I could download to run the mining. I just used CUDO Miner, and it's worked pretty straightforward for me. I open the program, enable the workloads, and it mines away all day.
I also applied some overclocks to my card, which I found online, that decrease its power usage and increase its mining ability.
The whole thing took me up to the end of the period.
Several weeks later, it's been mostly painless, and I've made a pretty steady 9 to 10 bucks a day. That isn't a lot for, say, a person with an actual job, but for a high schooler, it's a decent sum of profit.
It's not without its downsides, mainly just the hassle of leaving your computer running all the time and managing the stability of your computer. I've had inexplicable issues with graphics occasionally, almost definitely caused by my overclocks on the GPU.
It's not for the faint of computer-heart, but it's a fun way to make a little buck with your gaming PC. Maybe I'll buy my friend a computer game with the 200-some bucks I've earned.
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