Ok, so Steem is up. Bitcoin is up. Mining is actually profitable even with expensive electricity. You've made up your mind. You're going to mine. Only 1 problem. You don't have a fucking clue how mining works.
OK, for the absolute newb I suggest getting an antminer ASIC mining rig to start. http://holybitcoin.com/ is a site out of NY that has some equipment for sale. Some of it is new and some is used. I'd talk with them. The bitmain antminer S9 is the king of the hill right now. You need power supply with it. You frankly need a circuit breaker for it. It's also loud, and it will generate heat. So, if you're planning on putting it in your office or something that's a bad plan. This is the kind of thing where you figure a way to wire internet down (hardwire!) to your basement and let this thing keep your basement warm.
When the big places start mining it looks like this:
If loud and hot is a little too much then the backup is a different antminer. The R4 has a different fan system. It's still roughly as efficient as the other miner, but it has fewer chips mining and it doesn't make as much noise or heat. It's for home use. It's still a space heater though. So, cut down your heating bills in the winter and sweat your balls off in the summer if you plan to have it near people.
Ok, why am I suggesting starting there? Because they are easy as shit to setup. Having never programmed a thing in my life I bought a used antminer s7 and started mining within a day. You need a bitcoin wallet and a server to mine off of and possibly a pool to use..
So, a wallet is just like a real life wallet exect that's it's completely digital and it stores digital tokens. It's a long string of numbers and letters and when you log into websites that host wallets you'll see how many tokens you have in there. Some of the wallets are single coin only. Others allow you to store more than one type of coin. When you mine and get paid you'll use your wallet address to collect your bitcoin.
A server is the place where you do the mining. You point your mining rig at a certain server and it's going to give you shares to solve. How quickly you can solve things will be based on your hashing rate. Your hashing rate usually depends on how much money you spent on the rig.
Mining pools and selling hashrate. Ok, when you mine you don't make money. It's only when you solve the block and release the coin that you get paid. When you mine by yourself in your basement with your one rig the likely hood of you solving shit is generally way low. For things like bitcoin it's nearly mathematically impossible taht your lone rig will solve a block. On new coins like dopecoin it's possible that your staking/mining at home has enough power to find something. So, because people don't want to spend an eternity not making money they have come up with two solutions. 1. Join a pool. 2. Sell your hashrate.
So, antminer and others have mining pools. You sign up. You start contributing your hash rate. And when a block is found everyone is paid based on how much hash rate they were putting in. You contributed 0.000001% of the hashrate so you'll get that much of the bitcoin that was mined when a block is found.
The other way to go is use nicehash. There you sell your hashing power. Someone else buys it. They pay you in bitcoin. So, as long as your mining you're getting an hourly wage and nicehash pays out weekly.
I'm not that interested in bitcoin though. I like steemit (despite the ridiculous wealth distribution on here), so I used a bitcoin address powered by blocktrades to convert the bitcoin that I mine into steem. So, this week I'm going to mine $80 USD worth of bitcoin that I will get paid in bitcoin and send to a blocktrades wallet that automatically converts that bitcoin into Steem for me.
Yes, each one of those steps takes a small amount of my mining awards out, but the convenience is worth it to me and the fact that I cashed some out when the price just spiked allowed me to buy services for literally a quarter of I actually invested. So far so good.
Ok, so you've set up your antminer. It's running. You'll login to it just like the instructions say and you'll put it the server address. You'll put in your wallet. Done. You are now mining.
But ASIC mining might not be the thing you want to do. Another route is GPU mining. That's the main rig I have.
ok, I'm lying. Mine is taking up an entire table and isn't nearly as neat as that, but it's the same idea.
If you're not a DIY kinda person you may just want to hop on ebay and buy a mining rig and then just tell it where to mine. If you want to build something I'll put together a parts list below.
You need:
A CPU
windows
external cd rom
A Motherboard
A motherboard fan
A power supply
some PCI-E risers
Ram
a harddrive
A mouse
a monitor
thermal paste
an extension cord
A power button
and 3-6 GPUs depending on the motherboard you buy.
A frame if you're feeling splurgy.
You can use whatever CPU you want basically because GPU mining isn't super intense on the processor. Many people just get a shitty celeron for $40. If you're only using this thing for mining then that's probably fine. I would suggest something a little higher priced but not because you need it but only for convenience. It's nice when loading takes fewer seconds to start up and load.
Get a OEM disk for windows 10. Should be $70-100 bucks. Some of the computer stores that are small shops can get it for a lot less and install it for you. maybe call around. They are also the guys that may have cheap monitors.
You need an external cd rom. Anything with a usb connection should be fine. If you pay more than $20 you're doing it wrong.
You need a motherboard that can host multiple gpus. I use a BTC Pro from asrock.
The main thing here is you're looking for the number of PCI and PCI-E slots the thing has. If you're gaming on this or using it for work or something you may want more than that, but if it's just a mining rig all you care about is does is have at least 5 total PCI and PCI-E slots for you to use? Ideally it has 6.
Fans are cheap. Get one that sits on your processor. This is where the thermal paste comes in too. Here's a mini tutorial on how that's done. http://www.wikihow.com/Apply-Thermal-Paste basically you put a pea sized blob in the middle and squish the fan down on top of it.
Ok, you're going to need a power supply. This will cost some money and it ranges in price depending on how efficient you want it and how big it needs to be. This will depend on which cards you choose to use. Each card will require a different number of watts. I like mining with Claymore Miners and those only work with Radeon GPUS and the radeon GPUS people are buying these days don't require a shit ton of watts. The 470 and 480 GPUs run about 150 watts each. So, 6 x150 is 900. Plus another 100-200 for the rest of the machine and You're rocking just over 1200 watts. So, if you plan to do that that's how much power you'll need. I ended up finding an open box Evga platinum power supply that was 1600 or so. That's been working great for me.
You need some PCI-E risers. The ones you want are powered, so a USB cable is included that draws power and brings it to the GPU so it's not all going through the motherboard. Here's an example of that
http://holybitcoin.com/product/pci-e-1x-16x-usb-riser-card/
Just make sure you don't jam them in backwards.
You need ram. I suggest 2 8gig ram chips. More if you are going to use this comp for anything. Don't go with less.
You need a hard drive. I like SSDs but windows often has problems with them. So, it's slower on start up but the older style hard drives seem to work more reliably. It's not a constant issue. It's just right at start up it might go slow as fuck because there's some feedback loop that makes your hard drive shoot to 100% and still not give windows what it wants.
You'll want to get a power button. Otherwise you'll have to start it with a key or a screw driver. It'll feel cool if you do that, like you just hot wired your mining rig, but it makes me nervous I'm going to short stuff out everytime I do it.
Last piece hardware piece is the GPU. I'd suggest going on newegg and buying inexpensive Radeon 470, 480, 570, and 580. I see about a 25% difference between my 470s and 480s. They consume roughly the same amount of electricity though. So, if you have the cash to spend get the 480s/580s. If your budget is a little tighter get the 470s/570s. You can also get nvidia gpus and they will work well for other programs to mine with, but I'm about to suggest a miner that only works with radeons so that's why I'd go with them.
Here's teh miner I use.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1670733.0
Down load that. Install it. Go into the config file and open that. Put in a server from nicehash so you can sell your shit. Put in your wallet address.
My config file looks like this:
-zpool stratum+tcp://equihash.usa.nicehash.com:3357
-zwal XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (redacted)
-zpsw password
hashtag-tt 75
-i 6
hashtag-powlim 50
hashtag-a 2
hashtag-asm 0
-allpools 1
anything with a # is code the program isn't reading so techincally I could remove it but I'm lazy and I don't. The pool is the server I pulled that was on the list for nicehash.com that was closest ot me. My wallet is the blocktrades thing that pumps money into steemit. Password is literally password because i don't need it for nicehash. i is intensity. I don't know how to increase some of the virtual settings to maximize what my cards can do. So, I can't run higher than a 6 anyway. So, I don't change that. Allpools 1 let's it mine from multiple pools and I think gives claymore his dev fee too.
That's a pretty good start. Should be mining in a week or two. Best of luck!