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Cryptocurrency Mining Software Buyer’s Guide

If you’re looking for the best cryptocurrency mining app, consider the following common and high-level features.

Common Features of Crypto Mining Software

Your typical Bitcoin or altcoin mining app will support a multitude of mining approaches. The most common, which is what an expensive mining rig focuses on, is GPU mining. With GPU mining, you take advantage of the massively parallel (but simple) instructions a graphics card can run, which produces faster results per unit of time.

They will be capable of background operation, so you can still use your machine while the operations are performed, though things like gaming and 4K video playback may be diminished by the mining platform’s use of the GPU. In that vein, most mining applications will allow you to throttle its usage of your GPU, allowing you to free up resources for multimedia, at the cost of some efficiency.

The software will provide a readout of the number of hashes resolved, and, if designed right, will also list the number of currency units earned from the current number of resolved hashes. Miners based around ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) technology will not have a lot of these adjustment features, as they use a hardwired device physically constructed to run the resolutions. These are far less common due to the niche industry around any ASIC technology, as well as the fact ASIC mining apps cannot be updated nor futureproofed.

Advanced Features

More advanced cryptocurrency mining applications will provide more sophisticated abilities such as sharing a mining pool across multiple devices that don’t have the GPU resources of a proper rig. They may accomplish this through merged mining, multipool setups, cloud mining, or other decentralized means of providing a cross-device mining capability.

Along with this, they will provide more advanced functionality for cryptocurrency wallets, which are the other key component to mining. A wallet is necessary to receive the units mined and it can, in some cases, be very difficult to link the Bitcoin miner or altcoin miner to a wallet if advanced linkage features aren’t present.

These crypto mining apps may provide a secure cloud layer to transfer the ID necessary to link wallets and miners together. Otherwise, it results in the user having to copy and paste or manually type ridiculously lengthy alphanumeric sequences.

The most advanced mining applications are capable of managing multiple individual mining contracts, which can further the serialization, especially if you’re doing this through distributed devices or even multiple rigs. The more parallel devices you can run and the more contracts you can run in parallel, the more profit you can expect to make for a unit of computing time.

Some of the most advanced miners will provide difficulty settings, because hashes can be simple or more difficult, the more difficult ones taking more time to resolve, but also being much more profitable. Depending on your distribution method, rig design, etc., you may want to solve a lot of simple ones quickly or tackle the most difficult ones in smaller series.

Some cryptocurrency mining programs are console applications, but most solid ones offer some form of basic GUI which allows you to control things visually. This is nice, because it can be hard to get real-time data out of console text and typing commands is very archaic in most circumstances as well. Mining tools that are wisely-designed prevent the UI from being too dependent on the GPU so it doesn’t hinder the miner, and the miner doesn’t hinder it.

Finally, the best of these will offer multiple approaches to GPU access. Not all GPUs support the same exact mathematical programming languages, such as CUDA. While most GPUs do support CUDA, or can reassemble it, this isn’t always the case. Intel GPUs, for example, cannot necessarily do this.

Mining applications themselves are actually pretty basic in features, it’s more about the control and flexibility they can offer during operation that counts. Aside from some UI niceties and platform support options (platform agnosticism is nice but rare in miners), they’re not all that vastly different under the hood when all is said and done. When this technology first came around, the ability to manage in-depth threading was an inconsistent feature, but pretty much any miner now has to support this by default.

What to Look For

First, know what unit of currency you actually want to mine. In addition to Bitcoin, you may have heard of Ethereum, Litecoin, Reddcoin, and Zcash—there are over a thousand different altcoins and new ones are continually being developed. Some of these are created on a whim and can actually wind up valuable despite being jokes. A prime example of this is Dogecoin, which started as a joke currency based on a meme. Dogecoin is actually worth quite a lot now.

All of these currencies require their own specific protocols and algorithms to be employed; none are remotely interchangeable beyond the very basic fundamentals of mathematics and abstract logic behind them. Do you want to mine Bitcoin? Do you want to mine Ethereum? This will shape which miner you choose, unless it’s a scriptable multi-mining application, although we should not that these are often not optimized and are therefore best avoided unless you really know what you’re doing.

While simplicity can be bliss, you’ll want to avoid miners with a decidedly simple and limited interface, as these provide very limited control over the mining operation. Look for ones with the control over hash difficulty, GPU usage, thread management, and so on. These will let you fine-tune and optimize your mining efforts.

Also, seek out mining tools that support multiple GPUs or multiple devices, as these can let you build servers or distribute your operations across devices to optimize that progress per unit of computing time. Limited distribution will severely hamper how much you get out of weaker hardware—not everyone can afford a high-end rig to perform this. If you have the right capabilities for distribution, you can actually get a lot of small, individually-weak devices to work together as something resembling a supercomputer.

If you can get cloud mining as an option, it’s ideal because it allows you to resume the process across platforms that don’t necessarily have a single platform-agnostic, unified solution to carry them through complete distribution.

Of course, you need to consider what your company’s ultimate goal is with this process. Are you trying to just get some more profit out of equipment that’s idle for lengths of time? Are you trying to supplement your revenue? Or, are you trying to capitalize on this concept on a more industrial level? This will shape what miner is best suited for you, just as much as any of the factors we’ve talked about thus far.

Cryptocurrency mining software is usually free to install, although some apps do shave off hash solutions to pay their developers. If a miner offers subscriptions or pricing plans, it’s up to something no good. Instead, you’re paying for your computing hardware and energy consumption. If you participate in cloud mining, you’re going to purchase mining capacity of hardware in data centers.

Since mining applications are free, you can easily test out multiple different miners, and see how well they work with your equipment and how well they match your needs and required rates of success. Never settle for the first solution you find, as there’s almost always going to be one that does some aspect of it better—it all comes down to which aspects you need it to excel at, as to making a choice after that point.

Finding the Best Crypto Mining System

This is a technology field that has no right or wrong answers at the end of the day. Depending on what cryptocurrency you want to mine and what kind of equipment you have available, the ideal solution can vary quite wildly. Take some time to explore our resources, compare different cryptocurrency mining software, and find the right app for you.