On May 10, the cost of Ethereum, the main competitor to Bitcoin, exceeded $ 4,000 and broke a new record.  Since the beginning of the year, the cryptocurrency has grown by over 400%.  Ethereum can now be easily purchased through an app like Coinbase, but that's not the only way.  Cryptocurrency can also be obtained (mined) on your own.  Here's what it takes.

 How mining works

 This process has two purposes: to create new coins and to keep a log of all transactions of existing digital tokens.  As with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, miners around the world provide their computing power to validate and add ether exchanges to a public ledger known as blockchain.

 The Ethereum blockchain is called Ethereum.  Once a transaction is added to it, it cannot be changed or deleted.  You can watch or check it at any time.

 To register the exchange of ether, miners run a program that calculates millions of mathematical equations.  This is not happening in isolation: they compete with other miners around the world to be the first to validate a block of transactions.

 About once every 13 seconds, someone wins this race.  He is rewarded with two new Ethers and also receives a transaction fee.

 Setting up a mining farm

 To get Ether, you need to build a Mining Rig.  Its main components include the power supply, motherboard, operating system, computer memory, and graphics card.

 A mining farm is like a regular computer assembled by yourself.  Its only difference is the absence of a case in which all the components would be located.  He needs good air circulation, as video cards get very hot during operation.

 The installation with one video card is capable of calculating approximately 27 million mathematical equations per second.  It seems that this is a huge number, but in fact, right now, 600 trillion operations per second are performed on the Ethereum blockchain.

 For this reason, people join what are called mining pools.  They allow you to combine hashing power with other miners around the world.

 All that remains is to create a wallet.  This is a kind of digital address for a cryptocurrency.  They can range from physical hardware to web wallets.  As soon as you connect the mining farm to the power source and the network, within a few minutes the wallet will begin to fill with ether.

 Payback of mining

 A mining farm with one video card will cost about $ 1400.  If you add five more, then its cost rises to $ 4,400.

 If the equipment runs at full capacity with all six graphics cards, it will generate around 0.348 ETH per month, or $ 1425 at current prices.

 Mining farms consume quite a lot of electricity, so its cost is also an important factor in calculating ROI.  According to a 2018 study by Elite Fixtures, mining is the cheapest in countries such as Egypt and Kuwait.

Sincerely, Lyubov Sultanova.