Bitcoin Mining Hardware Setups

Bitcoin mining is a profitable hobby, and if you decide to invest heavily into it, can quickly turn into an incredibly profitable business. However, it's not something that everyone can easily do — especially not without the right equipment.

Though there used to be a time when Bitcoin mining could be done by a good computer, those days are long gone. If you want to mine cryptocurrency online, you will need specialized Bitcoin mining hardware setups to do so.

Moreover, if you're new to mining, most setups might be confusing to understand. Here's what you need to know about Bitcoin mining hardware setups, and what you should expect from them.

First, to understand Bitcoin mining hardware setups, you need to understand what Bitcoin mining really is.

Bitcoin mining is the act of authenticating transactions, having your computer do calculations, and transferring those encrypted calculations into another portion of the Bitcoin's blockchain. In other words, it's letting your computer do a lot of calculating as part of a Bitcoin transaction.

The way that Bitcoin was designed makes each Bitcoin mining transaction a little bit harder than before. So, while a regular computer CPU used to be good enough to mine Bitcoins, it's no longer the case anymore.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin miners did notice something about mining that helped create a wave of specially designed Bitcoin mining hardware setup: GPUs worked wonderfully for mining. GPUs are Graphics Processing Units, and they actually do the calculations required to build block chains fairly rapidly.

This knowledge helped make mining doable, but eventually, GPUs weren't considered to be good enough either. Eventually, Bitcoin mining hardware setups had to be specifically designed for this task, and also had to come with specialized software for that purpose.

Generally, if you want to actually mine Bitcoins with ease, you're going to need an ASIC setup.

ASIC stands for Application Specialized Integrated Chips, and it literally means that this device has been designed and prepped solely for the purpose of Bitcoin mining.

Here's what you need to understand about ASIC Bitcoin mining rigs:

• They use a lot of electricity. Electricity is a major requirement of Bitcoin mining. In the past, mining rigs were prone to overheating because of the sheer amount of electrical current they use. Most ASIC rigs today come with high-quality cooling systems, but still, will need to be kept in cold areas.
• You want to get a high Th/s rating. This stands for terahashes per second, and since Bitcoin mining is all about hashing out blockchains, the higher the Th/s, the better off you'll be. Most top-of-the-line Bitcoin mining setups will do 8 to 15 terahashes per second. However, more casual users can get a right that operates at 1 terahash per second and still get a return on investment in a couple of months.
• Your ideal Bitcoin mining hardware setups are efficient at converting electricity into Bitcoins. It won't do much good to get a Bitcoin rig that can make one coin per month if it's eating up all the electricity in your office.
• If you're new, you might want to look into Bitcoin mining setups that come with free guides. This will help you navigate the Bitcoin mining world.

That being said, most Bitcoin mining should be done as a hobby.

The cryptocurrency economy isn't what it used to be, at least when it comes to mining profitability. It's one of the lead reasons why many are saying that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are flawed. (Actually, it's already been established that Bitcoin has flaws — how fatal they are remains to be seen.)

That being said, you still can make money doing this. So, if you want to grab some Bitcoin mining hardware setups and do it for a profit, you can. However, you shouldn't quit your day job just yet.