Most discussion about mining is from the perspective of serious Bitcoin users who are trying to profit from it. I’m curious to try mining, only to experiment and become more familiar with cryptocurrencies. I’m not interested in being profitable over the long term, but I am interested in verifying success, namely in seeing my wallet balance nudge a tiny bit.
How can I best use my regular computer (~18Mhash/s GPU, via this) to mine Bitcoin or Litecoin? Specific questions:
- If joining a pool, a centrally coordinated one or a P2P pool?
- What mining pool payment system(s) would make the most sense?
- I’ve got
cgminer
operating. Any parameters / tweaks I should use?
From what I’ve read, with a slow hash rate, it’s easy to just waste all your compute time on dead pool shares and whatnot. How can I avoid that? Is there anything else I should watch out for?