How do mining: A short story by moondog. Edited and additional clarification from aetaric.

FAKE INTERNET MONEY

Today were gonna quickly go over how to set up claymores dual ethereum miner for
Ethereum and Siacoin mining on NVIDIA GPUs. The process is very similar for AMD cards, and
if you have an RX series card, we might all hate you a little.

Quick Note: Nvidia 900 series cards give terrible performance under windows, There are
guides for getting started mining under linux if you really wanna. 10xx series cards work fine. To
mine in windows with a 900 series card, you need nvidia driver 325 (suuuper old)

Requirements: A Video card with more than 2 gigabytes of video ram, cards with less
than 2gb of vRam WILL NOT WORK. This is a hard requirement for ethereum. CPU and ram
largely do not matter.
Tools you will need
You will need a wallet to store your freshly minted fake internet money! There are a few options
here, as well as many more virtual wallets stored in the cloud that won't even require you to
download any of these tools, but those should be used at your own risk as you arguably do not
have as much control over your funds.

I) The quick n easy way

https://jaxx.io/ - Download the jaxx multi wallet, this will get you a wallet for bitcoin,
ethereum, Zcash, doge, and many other currencies. Not sia though, for a sia wallet you
will need to download the Sia-UI client for your platform from h ttp://sia.tech/apps/ and
allow it to synchronize the blockchain. Be sure you save your seed and password when
you set up your wallet! (You need the password to unlock the wallet later!) This is pretty
easy and should be quick to set up the wallet just by clicking on wallet icon on the left
hand side of the Sia-UI client.

II) I like blockchains! Gimme one for ethereum too!

Fine fine, download this https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases
The original also works but mist feels more stable right now, i had a lot of issues with the
regular fork synchronizing the blockchain. This one has a nice wizard so just follow it.

Now you can store money!

So what now?
MINE!
We like to use a tool called claymores dual miner as it allows for mining ethereum as well as
Decred/Siacoin/Lbry/Pascal at the same time, increasing the amount of currency you can
generate! You can download it from here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1433925.0 Use
the mega link and download whatever the highest version for your platform is. The forum post
also has a lot of nice documentation on the settings for the miner. For mining, we like the mining
pools Etherminer (https://ethermine.org/) and Siamining (https://siamining.com/)! Neither of
these pools require you to really do anything to start mining on them, you just set your wallet
address for each as your username in the configuration of claymores miner and then use the
addresses in your configuration on each website to check your progress. Here's a sample
configuration for mining ethereum and siacoin with these two pools :

Windows:
EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool us1.ethermine.org:4444 -ewal <Your eth wallet address>.<Whatever
you want here for a worker name> -epsw x -dpool stratum+tcp://us-west.siamining.com:7777
-dwal <Your siacoin wallet address here>.<Whatever you want for a worker name> -dcoin sia

Linux:
./EthDcrMiner64 -epool us1.ethermine.org:4444 -ewal <Your eth wallet address>.<Whatever
you want here for a worker name> -epsw x -dpool stratum+tcp://us-west.siamining.com:7777
-dwal <Your siacoin wallet address here>.<Whatever you want for a worker name> -dcoin sia

So once youve set you your wallets, have addresses, and have your miner configuration written
(You can edit the start.bat file included with it for your configuration file) Simply run the start.bat
file or whatever you chose to name your config for claymores miner and off you go! Free fake
internet money!

Cavets
1. Something you should know about is that the sia coin wallet changes your address every
single time you click receive sia so you will need to use the address in your
configuration file in order to check your progress, if you copy the address out of your
wallet later on you won't be able to see anything because it has changed! This won't
impact your payouts in any way.
2. If you only have one GPU (No onboard or no secondary card, dont expect to use the
machine for anything. You might very well have a bad time or crash your graphics driver.
3. Overclocking your rig? Keep an eye on temps! As the temp goes up you will reach
thermal throttling and the card will under perform. Use something like MSI Afterburner to
crank the fans to max before you start to keep everything stable. Also keep in mind that
core clock doesnt help mining, you need a memory OC to make that happen

Expected Results
Heres a few of the cards we have used and expected results from them:
AMD Rx 480/580 : ~29 MH/s
GTX 980 Ti : ~18-20 MH/s
GTX 1080 Ti: ~34-38 MH/s
Wanna estimate your earnings?
https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/eth
https://etherscan.io/ether-mining-calculator
 http://calc.wolfchange.com/mining_calculator_siacoin

Learn me about the blockchain

WTF is a blockchain!? BLOCKS!? CHAINS!? Is this BDSM Minecraft!?!?

CryptoCurrencies like BitCoin, DogeCoin, SiaCoin, and Ethereum all use a core component
called a blockchain to store transactions. Think of the blockchain like a bank and the blocks that
comprise it as one of the banks ledgers. The blocks record everyones transactions and the
blocks make up the whole chain. The process of mining creates these blocks by means of
solving a complex mathematical equation while also recording the current transactions in the
current block and validating the transactions of the previous block. This gives the currency
validity. Currency is created by the next block and credited to the wallet address that finds and
signs the solution to the block in question. This introduces finite amounts of currency as a
reward for validating and recording transactions.

Whats this about a reward!?

If you are solo-mining (please dont unless you have a setup in the range of GIGAHASHES per
second), you stand to gain approximately 5 ETH for every block found. At the time of writing
thats a little over $1000USD. Since this requires HIGHLY complex maths and a lot of luck, you
probably wouldnt find this without a ton of power. This is why we join pools where a single
wallet has tons of clients mining and pays each of them a portion or the rewards based on the
work(hashrate) that is performed.