As some of you know back in August AMD released a driver which is optimized for mining of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies, though they’ve been in the news several times, mostly Bitcoin, are still used only by a very small group of people. You can buy and sell cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Monero at a cryptocurrency exchange like kraken.com. But there is one fact which some of you might not know – you can also mine some cryptocurrencies. What does that mean?

Very short, you submit a part of your computing power, which is measured in hashes per second (H/s), to a mining pool and get paid in a cryptocurrency when the pool solved a very complex calculating task. Monero (currency code is XMR) is one of the very interesting cryptocurrencies for mining right now. If you use your AMD/Nvidia GPU or your CPU you can get easily 50 to 100 USD a month when running the mining software 24h. If you have several computers this adds up to more, always depending on the combined hashrate of your systems. As most of you should have a powerful system you could give it a try but keep in mind that you also need to pay for electricity which can lessen your profit.

To get started you can read the Howtos some mining pools offer, for example SECUmine.net. If you want to see a list of other Monero (XMR) mining pools you can look some up at moneropools.net. For profitability calculations you can use this calculator.

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