
You're looking at a $200-$20,000 investment for a mining rig. The pool then divvies up the BTC earned, usually by individual contribution. You may also opt to join a mining pool, a collection of miners who pool resources together to verify more transactions than individuals. Bitcoins earned will be held in a wallet.
HOW TO MINE BITCOIN ON MAC SOFTWARE
Run your software and let your computer do the work. Usually, you'll need to enter some preliminary information like your selected coin, mining pool (if applicable), and preferred settings.

HOW TO MINE BITCOIN ON MAC INSTALL
If you own an ASIC miner, mining is fairly easy from here:ĭownload and install Bitcoin mining software like Easyminer or MultiMiner. Your typical desktop computer comprised of AMD or Intel CPU/GPUs is capable of mining, but they simply don't have the computing power required to mine with any sort of efficiency. In this case, BTC mining is one such function. ASIC chips are energy-effective and built for one specific function only. Unless you have a spare mining rig built around an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) chip lying around, you'll need to purchase one. (covered in-depth later in this article.) If someone does so before you, you don't get any Bitcoin, regardless of the work you did.Ĭonsidering these points, it's unlikely that mining Bitcoin will be profitable for you. On top of it all, you'll still need to factor in overhead costs like expensive hardware, power usage, maintenance, labor hours, etc. To receive the block rewards, you must be the first miner to produce this proof of work. This process is known as a Proof of Work algorithm. Not to mention the amount of BTC miners receive per transaction is constantly shrinking, and the number of miners doing work is rising consistently. Each block is around 1MB in size, and 1MB of blockchain data can equate to thousands of transactions, with the average block containing over 2,500 transactions. For every successful block validated, the miner receives a portion of BTC for the work completed.

How do you validate these transactions, and why would you want to? Related: What Is a Blockchain and How Does it Work? Miners check transaction receipts to ensure that no user is attempting to use the same Bitcoin fraudulently, like to pay for multiple goods or services (double-spending). Bitcoin uses a public ledger, known as a blockchain, to track every Bitcoin transaction.īitcoin mining is the process of validating these transactions.
