Bitcoin Forum: Beginner's Guide

Hi everyone,

Starting this thread when I was trying to consolidate different rigs into my building thread and it quickly became more like a newbies guide and I thought why not. I realized as I kept including the different threads and sites I've been to thinking that it'd help people who would go to my thread it started turning into this.

I'm not an expert on Bitcoin or anything, in fact I consider myself a newbie at this point of time. However being a newbie myself, I found that information regarding this relatively new and very technical topic is scarce and difficult to find. After many days of searching the net and forums I found myself still within the vicinity of where I started albeit I'm getting the general idea of how things work, also I've found that over the few days I've been reading this forum that the same questions kept getting raised and people would have to keep answering the same questions from newcomers which might get a little frustrating sometimes.

However, with that said, I'd probably need the help of much more experienced members and players in Bitcoin to help with this guide so that it may in turn help the newcomers. In my own experienced, it is very difficult to come into the Bitcoin scene and I found that this guide has been long overdue, I believe as this guide becomes more comprehensive and complete it helps more people to get into Bitcoin and in turn help Bitcoin to grow toward it's vision.

This guide is by no means complete, suggestions and recommendations are welcome, I'm not as technically inclined as many that I've found so I'm asking for help to consolidate information that would help people get into Bitcoin easier and faster.

:Update: 26th May 2011, Thread has been made sticky. Thanks Mods and everyone who have contributed

:Notice: 28th May 2011, My desktop HDD died on me yesterday I have been trying to get my mining rig to get me going again but to no avail, as afore mentioned. I'm not actually IT literate, I might not be around as often as I'd like to. And my mining rig has got some problems while setting up too. Pardon me for the slow updates

And of cuz If you found my post helpful, feel free to send me a tip | 13kHaYGkF9W5xNjF2Ck5hTgVR9MNjr8c3U |

1. Understanding Bitcoin

First you'll have to understand a little bit about Bitcoins, there are many youtube videos and other articles out there that are attempting to explain Bitcoins, below are some of the sources I've found a good place to start.
2. How Do I Get Bitcoins

So now you understand what are Bitcoins and you wanna know how you can get some. Simply put you get Bitcoins by buying them, mining for them, trading them for or have your (set up a) business to accept Bitcoins as payment. Theres also a Bitcoin Faucet that gives away Bitcoins to promote them. Although I didn't receive them since the bank's empty now, do contribute and help the community grow.
3. How To Get Started With Mining

Before you get started, there are 2 types of mining, Solo Mining and Pool Mining. Since mining for Bitcoins is a probability, at the current network if you don't have a substaintial amount of mining/hardware power, chances are you'd have no chance in obtaining any Bitcoins doing solo mining. What Pool Mining does is that miners consolidate mining capacity and mine for Bitcoins and the rewards are then distributed via different sharing methods offered by the Pools, usually a small fee is charged by the pool.
If this doesn't get you started, go to the Mining Support sub-forum and search for solutions
4. Miners

Miners are programs developed and optimize to do mining, other than the official Bitcoin client, others have come up with different mining programs that are optimized differently, check them out and find out which suits you better. Use only published miners as Bitcoins starts to unroll into the global economy many would try to steal them via various means, this is a simple demonstration of such methods. Protecting your wallet is important, I myself has only recently gotten into the subject and would prolly need some help from our nice folks here.
For support, comparisons and other stuff about the miners, find 'em in their individual threads or in the Mining Software (miners) sub-forum
5. Mining Pools

This is a simple list of the more popular mining pools that I've been hearing and some really new ones that need participants, I hope this will point newcomers that do not want to overcommit themselves into mining earn some Bitcoins while also helping the mining community strike a balance between the mining capacity of the different pools. Let me know if you'd like to be in this list, I still don't know every pool out there and is just sticking to Slush.

Also, ~~first in the list is a thread about pool hopping which I found interesting but hasn't gotten into the jizz of it yet~~. The last thread is about how if a pool gets >50% of network capacity is bad for the security of Bitcoin and it's community.
Discussions & Comparisons on various pools are in the Pools Sub-forum, get your answers there
6. Building Mining Rigs

When Bitcoin started, mining is done through the processing power of your CPU Processors, then CPU-Mining was phased out when GPU-Mining took over as GPU could compute in much greater volume than the CPU. Mining for Bitcoins has since become much more serious business for the individuals and even companies. Building a machine dedicated to mining has now become a topic that is commonly discussed on the forum. The most common form right now is building a computer with very powerful graphics processing power but there are research being done on other possibilities to drive down the cost and up the profitability.
The Hardware sub-forum is filled with discussions on maximizing your returns or expandability!! Go check it out!
7. Security & Threats

This is where I will list some security risks, threats faced, and some protective measures about Bitcoins, wallets, transactions and what not such as >50% attack thread listed above.

Remember to have a strong password for your login account at a pooled mining web cite and a different unique password for each miner, Weak passwords or using the same password for your miner and your mining website password leaves you vulnerable to attach (aka. steal your bitcoins). There are password managing programs like keepass and lastpass to help you generate and remember long passwords.

I hasn't really gotten to this part yet as I've been busy reading up on how to build my own rig myself. As mention, I'm a newbie myself and this part is better answered and contributed by someone much more experienced in how this works.
- Securing your wallet
8. Other Stuff

Here I list some useful utilities, tips & tricks that I find helpful along the way. Maybe some press coverage of Bitcoin and just really miscellaneous stuff, if you have anything you'd like to me to put up here do let me know.
9. Advance Tweaks & Discussion

There have been rising demand in answers about making miner's more efficient in areas such as cost, hash rate and power consumption. One main area of such discussion is the overclocking of GPUs while still maintain stability and temperature, this is a very specialized field where the layman would not normally cross. Fortunately, the mining community is in abundance of experts in OC and many analysis have been done in other fields as well. I'll be linking to some more involved tweaks and analysis in this section for those who are getting serious about mining.
10. Bitcoin Thesaurus

I thought of starting a Thesaurus since some of these terms have been quite often asked all around the forum. Please help to contribute words and better explanations for them
- BTC - The unit we use for bitcoins, just like USD, JPY, EUR, SGD, RM, GBP, etc.
- Blocks -
- Difficulty -
- Mining - The hashing of bitcoin blocks in exchange for the creation of more coins and/or transaction fees
- Miners - The software used to do mining, there are CPU miners and GPU miners. Both are programmed to make use of different processing units to compute the hash
- Stales/Rejects -
- Rig - Computer
- Dedicated Mining Rig - Computer built solely for the purpose of mining
- Gaming Rig - Computer built mainly for the purpose of gaming
- Mining/Gaming Rig - A hybrid of the above, since the hardware requirements for both overlaps each other. When a gaming rig is idling, it can be use to do bitcoin mining
- PSU - Power Supply Unit
- MOBO - Motherboard
- CPU - Central Processing Unit, or Processor
- GPU - Graphics Processing Unit, or Graphics card
- Overclocking (OC) -
- Overvolting -
- Unvolting -
- Memory Clocking -

If any link goes bad please inform me and if possible provide the updated link. Pardon me for my English as I'm not a native speaker.

P.S If you found my post helpful, feel free to send me a tip | 13kHaYGkF9W5xNjF2Ck5hTgVR9MNjr8c3U |

Update: I've added a few sections since the guide started. I'd be relying on contributions & anything that comes to mind or catch my eye for updates. I've been busy trying to migrate from LinuxCoin to Ubuntu and getting my 2 mining rigs to run stably 24/7.

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mercredi 14 mai 2014

Beginner's Guide

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