For most headline crypto currencies it doesn’t make sense to mine them on a home PC. This is because you require specialist hardware (called ASIC) and even with this hardware, the cost of electricity in the US and European countries generally means that it is an unprofitable activity.
There are two reasons why I mine Digital Note:
- The underlying algorithm that it uses is resistant to ASICs and so it is very suitable to mine on a home PC, even if you don’t have a dedicated GPU.
- The price of XDN is currently rather low. Therefore, even though I incur a cost of electricity, I expect the XDN that I mine to increase in value over time. In fact, over the past few weeks the XDN that I’ve mined have tripled in value ($0.02 to roughly $0.06)
How do I actually mine it?
1. Wallet. My first port of call was to download the standard wallet for Windows from the Digital Note team. This gives me the address that I need to collect the XDN that I’ve mined. Interestingly the XDN wallet application also has a tab for mining, however I couldn’t get any of the standard pools to work or find any others online.
2. Mining software. For this I use Minergate. This is a simple to use tool that has a graphical interface and will let you mine Digital Note on both your CPU and GPU (and on your phone too.. but don’t expect great performance). I have also successfully transferred the XDN that I’ve mined from Minergate to my XDN wallet which happens super fast (minutes). When you use Minergate don’t use the default mode which sees the application selecting which currency to mine. You need to go to the next tab along and start XDN mining on your CPU & GPU (if you have one).
I would really like to find a good, reliable mining pool for XDN so that I can use some other mining software that may give a better hashrate. For now I’m on Minergate, but if I can find a good pool (or if you know of one, please comment on this post) I’ll write a new post and link to it here.