A beginner's guide to mining feathercoin

Having spent a long time pouring over forums and searching through blog posts I finally managed to turn my PC I into an entry level mining rig.
But Before I get started guiding you towards the goal of mining cryptocurrencies on your home PC, I would like to make it clear that thanks to the cost of electricity the chances of turning a profit are very slim. But that doesn't mean it's not worth doing, there is a lot that can be learned from setting up a "small" miner just not necessarily much to be earned from doing so.

So to keep things simple I shall only refer to feathercoin throughout this guide, but the steps should be the same for almost any other cryptocurrencies if preferred.

First things first you will need to download and install the Feathercoin Core Wallet and leave it to fully sync with the network. This could take a few hours upto a day or two depending on your internet connection and harddrive read/write speed.

You can download the official Wallet from here:

feather coin

At this point you will need to download a mining application. There are a few different miners to choose from and many different versions of them out there, all optimized for different hardware. Personally I use nsgminer as i feel it is fairly user friendly for a command line interface and can mine many different types of cryptocurrencies if that is desired.

Download the latest version from here:

nsgminer

Well now you have your wallet and your mining application, which means you are going to want to join a mining pool. This is because mining is a chance based and competitive process, Meaning that The chances of successfully mining a block by yourself are slim to none. Whereas mining pools allow you to earn shares of the block reward for the block currently being mined by pooling your hashing power with that of other miners in the pool.

The Blocks Factory is the pool I use for FTC, i find it to have an easy to navigate interface as well as clear statistics on your mining efforts. But again there are many different pools to choose from depending on preference and the coin/s you wish to mine.

Here's the link to get you started:

the blocks factory

Once you have signed you should click the getting started button on the top navigation bar. Here you will be presented with a list of command line configurations for different mining software. Copy the line for nsgminer, then open notepad and paste it there. Save this in the same folder as nsgminer and call it "startup.bat" making sure to change the "save as type" property to all files.

Finally double click your newly created batch file and hey presto you are now mining feathercoin... Or whatever cryptocurrencies you choose to go for.

Happy mining!