Mining Cryptos on Your Laptop: A Tutorial
A Great Idea or a Lousy Plan? I documented everything, so you’d have it easy to set up your environment.
Disclaimer: as with any nascent trend and technology, there are related risks. When it comes to cryptocurrencies, the field is still in its infancy. There is limited available resources to the general public. Instead, it’s still a niche & nerdy field. I wanted to share my experience, but remember that anything you would do is at your own (electricity) costs ��.
What to Expect?
In this article, after an introduction to the brief history of digital payments, I’ll discuss what matters when choosing which coin to mine. Then we’ll go through a step by step tutorial to create your own crypto-wallet and set up an environment to start mining cryptocurrency. Spoiler alert: there’s gonna be some command line! But fear not, you’ll be guided step by step down the mine. I will also explain why I chose Ethereum, and have a small digression on smart contracts. As a bonus, by the end of this article, I am providing some additional resources to go further.
Introduction
The concept of cryptocurrencies is in the mainstream for about a decade. As for every new concepts or technology, there are one or two flag-bearers that will remain in the public’s collective memory for the ages. For cryptos, it would be Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is by no means the first cryptocurrency to come into existence. Ever since the start of the digitalization of our daily lives, the focus was set on payments. In the late 1980s, or as some call it 20BBTC for 20 Before Bitcoin, there was an initiative to digitalize payments at gas stations to prevent night-robbery¹. Although this initiative was an early example of electronic cash, it paved the way for the advent of cryptocurrencies. A few years later, by the end of the millennium, DigiCash came and went, while PayPal stayed and revolutionized P2P payments online¹.
Bitcoin would be created a decade later in 2008 by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto². It is a decentralized digital currency, without any oversight such as a central bank, and it does not require intermediaries for P2P exchanges.