Cryptocurrency has been a really hot topic in the news for the past few months. Bitcoin and Litecoin are two of the main currencies currently in use. What's special about cryptocurrencies is that they're completely decentralized. There isn't a single entity or company in control like traditional fiat currencies of the world. Everyone has a copy of every transaction that has ever been sent, referred to as the blockchain. Instead of relying on a central server to store these records and carry out the transactions, cryptocurrencies rely on people to lend their computing power to the network. In return, the cryptocurrency network rewards contributors with a certain amount of coins.

Since these cyrptocurrency networks are so large, a single user will rarely receive the award from mining. Most users join a mining pool that splits the rewards. Pools consist of a bunch of users mining as a group. When a reward is generated, the pool will split it among its users. Two popular types of pool mining are pay per share (PPS) and proportional payout. PPS usually comes with a high fee because of the uncertainty associated with mining. Although high in fees, these types of pools are a more stable source of income. Proportional pools pay users based off the percent of their hashing power represented when finding a reward. Since this type of pool relies on finding a reward before paying users, it's not as consistent as PPS pools.

I've been mining Litecoins with two 7850 GPUs in my PC for about 6 months. I decided to mine Litecoins because specialized hardware called ASICs has been developed specifically for Bitcoin's SHA256 algorithm. ASICs are a lot more powerful than GPUs and they quickly made mining with GPUs unprofitable. Litecoin, however, uses a different algorithm called Scrypt. Currently there are no ASICs available to mine Scrypt. With the sharp increase in price at the end of last year, the mining difficulty also rose. The higher the difficulty, the smaller the reward from a pool. To stay relevant, I decided to expand my mining/hashing power and build a dedicated mining rig with some of the Litecoins I previously mined. The large rush to build mining rigs caused a GPU shortage but I was able to grab four R9 270x GPUs for my rig. I was interested in these specific cards because of their lower cost, low power consumption (about 150 Watts each), low fan noise, and the ability to hash at around 450khash/s each. Below is the bill of material. Miscellaneous items needed include a HDMI cable, an ethernet cable, keyboard/mouse, and a monitor to use for initial setup. If using Windows as an operating system, substitute a small hard drive for the 16GB flash drive.