Best mining software

While the value of cryto currencies such as Bitcoin may have fallen over the past year, the underlying distributed ledger technology (DLT) still has a good long-term outlook.

Though at present crypto currencies are not regulated, the overwhelming success of Bitcoin (BTC), along with Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), and Litecoin (LTC), means that governments and banks are already considering how to bring them into mainstream use.

Bitcoin (BTC) mining hardware or mining rig, your next step is to connect to a mining ‘pool’. This allows you to share your machine’s resources over the internet and receive a portion of the mining profits in return.

There are a number of programs available to help manage your crypto-mining. In this guide, we’ve explored five of the most popular. If you’re an experienced computer user, you may prefer to install the free operating system Linux and make use of one of the text-only programs such as CGminer.

If you prefer to keep things simple and are sticking with Windows 10, mining clients with a GUI such as MultiMiner may suit you better.

Before getting started, if you want to be sure a mining program will work with your particular device or operating system, the Bitcoin Wiki has a very helpful list.

• We also show you how to mine Bitcoins

1. CGMiner

CGMiner has been around for over six years and is coded in C, meaning it’s compatible with almost all operating systems. It works via a simple command line interface and supports multiple mining pools and devices. It’s primarily designed to be used with hardware mining devices but can make use of any GPUs connected to your machine as well.

On first run, CGMiner will ask you to enter the URL, username and password (if necessary) for your mining pool, and it will automatically detect any hardware you have connected such as an ASIC device. 

Although you have to work with CGMiner via the command line, the layout is very easy on the eye: mining devices are listed at the top and you can use simple keyboard commands to change your settings (e.g. to enable verbose mode or detect new hardware).

During our tests using CGMiner 4.9.2 on Windows 10, we found that Windows Defender and our antivirus software tried to block the download. This may be because hackers using their own versions of this program could secretly install CGMiner on someone else’s machine to mine for their own benefit. You can configure your system to make an exception for CGMiner if you wish, or use the Linux version.

• Download CGMiner here

2. Bitminter