As some of my LinkedIn connections will know, I was involved in the Bitcoin mining and company Schilthorn Capital. Schilthorn Capital mined, traded and held Bitcoin and it wasn't until the recent GAWmining lawsuit, I realised how well Schilthorn had protected me.

I then met an old client who had recently moved into Ether trading and that made me investigate alt coins once again. Personally, I believe the Ether ASIC miner is almost upon us and that will damage Ethereum. The cornerstone of this crypto-currency/contract was that it was ASIC resistant. I think if you take away the cornerstone of a product. You struggle to keep the community loyal but as with most things Crypto, only time will tell. Monero is currently ASIC resistant and seen a huge price spike over the last week. (74%) I believe this is due to the planned hard fork (v5).

I wouldn't mine this to hold long term but to trade and enjoy whilst the going is good. The best part of this currency is the algorithm used to solve the blocks is still do-able on modest equipment.

So if you fancy a cheeky dabble in crypto but do not want to buy new equipment or a cloud mining contract. Then why not try Monero and learn before you spend.

Starting right at the beginning you'll need a Monero wallet. This isn't a physical wallet but a string of letter and numbers that you must keep safe. I use https://mymonero.com/#/ there are others but considering I trade almost as quickly as I earn, I did very little research.

Once you have your wallet ID you'll need to setup the mining software. This is straight forward, I have attached the tricky part the xmr.conf file (https://pastebin.com/mkzqgdPg). You will need to delete the downloaded file, edit the wallet address and save it in the same folder as xmr.conf

So let's get started

Firstly we need to download the mining software. I used Wolf AMD miner. (https://github.com/OhGodAPet/wolf-xmr-miner)

Click the clone or download button and select "download zip"

Now you'll need to extract the zip file, to do this simply right click on the file and select "extract here" Once the files are extracted. Open the folder and you'll see a file called xmr.conf - delete it.

Now create a new file called xmr.conf and paste in this code https://pastebin.com/mkzqgdPg, changing the wallet ID to your own.

Now return to the main folder and you'll see a file to install, that's the C++ library for Windows and we are done.

You can now mine!

To begin mining, go back into the folder containing the xmr.conf and miner application files. Hold down SHIFT and right-click inside the folder not on any files , just inside the folder and select "open terminal here" You'll now have a small black screen to type in.

Type miner xmr.conf

Press the enter key and you are mining.















