Bitcoin mining software controls your mining hardware.
It also helps you point your hardware at mining pools.
Software can also used to manage and monitor your miners and optimize their performance.
Once you have selected a firmware option that meets your needs, stock or 3rd party, it is time to consider monitoring and management tools.
While this type of software mostly benefits larger mining operations, known as farms, they can also benefit people running a single miner.
Monitoring and management tools are used to provide an overview of your mining operation.
Using these tools allow you to quickly check the health of your operation, to ensure that all miners are running optimally and to root cause issues if they are not.
At a glance you can check if any miners are offline, running too hot or not hashing efficiently. You can imagine how this becomes more useful with an increased number of miners.
Awesome Miner is a complete solution to manage and monitor mining operations.
This tool is powerful for large scale mining and can be used to optimize Antminer firmware, maximize profits and minimize downtime.
Pros of Awesome Miner:
Foreman Mining is a new mining software company, but is now the choice among large miners. The company offers custom setups for operations with over 1,000 ASICs.
Pros of Foreman Mining:
Cons of Foreman Mining:
Hive OS is the ultimate mining platform which allows users to setup, mine and control processes more effectively and hassle-free across thousands of rigs all from a single place.
Everything you and your team need to keep your farm at peak efficiency. Monitor your rigs from a single dashboard.
Keep track of hashrate, online statuses, GPU errors, team activity, pool configurations, power consumption.
Remote access from anywhere across the globe. Troubleshoot and reboot GPUs remotely or perform bulk updates across your entire farm.
Minerstat offers a complete stack of solutions for crypto mining professionals.
Monitor and manage all your mining machines from a single powerful dashboard. Optimize your efficiency, automate your mining and drastically shorten time spent on debugging and error handling.
Access all important historical and live mining data from the dashboard. Whether you’re running ASIC machines or GPU rigs, Minerstat has the software for you.
Mining software is confusing, so we’ve answered some of the most common questions below.
You can.
But you will lose lots of money doing this.
Cost of Mining with a Computer:
Computer vs. ASIC Machine:
Evolution of Mining Hardware:
Current State:
Mining with non-ASIC machines is very unprofitable. It’s more cost-effective to buy Bitcoin directly.
Unless you can find free electricity through your government or housing contract you cannot mine Bitcoin for free.
Even if you can secure free electricity you will still need to buy some kind of mining hardware in order to mine Bitcoin.
In most cases you probably should not mine bitcoin.
Unless:
Bitcoin mining is a very competitive global industry and not for amateurs.
If you don’t believe us, just use our Bitcoin mining profitability calculator to see for yourself.
The process of mining evolved.
Beginning: Miners used available tools and created various software for mining control.
Issues:
Innovative Solutions:
These solutions streamlined the mining process.
CGMiner is an open source ASIC/FPGA mining software written in C designed for several platforms - Windows, OS X and Linux. CGMiner is one of the oldest bitcoin mining software and it has the ability to run on any computer and is compatible with multiple mining hardware.
BFGMiner is designed for FPGA and ASIC mining.
BFGMiner offers advanced users the opportunity to mine multiple cryptocurrencies by simultaneously hashing on mining algorithms like Scrypt and SHA256d. BFGMiner has remote interface capabilities.
Awesome miner is a total software suite to manage your mining operation.
But many users of the existing systems still experience issues with:
FPGA stands for ‘Field Programmable Gate Array’.
According to BH Miner:
FPGA chips supposedly deliver higher hash power at lower rates of energy consumption compared to ASICs.
However:
Given than these are multi-algorithm mining hardware, you should be very skeptical that these claims actually bear out.
GPU involves using a Graphics Processing Unit (normally used to play video games on PC) to mine cryptocurrencies. GPU mining was very popular in Bitcoin mining a few years ago, but that is no longer profitable due to highly advanced ASIC miners. Now, GPU mining is mainly done on Ethereum and Monero.
GPU involves using a Central Processing Unit (normally used to run desktop PCs) to mine cryptocurrencies. Almost no one uses their CPU to mine any coins today, but it can be a god way to learn how mining works without spending much money.
EasyMiner is another free open-source mining software available to anyone who wants to use it and mine using their GPU or CPU.
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