As early as 1-1.5 years after the appearance of Bitcoin for mining started to use powerful video cards running in Crossfire or SLI mode. At that time, miners were able to recoup their investments in a few weeks.

But the minimum requirements to make a profit continued to grow. By 2012, bitcoin mining even on the most powerful CPUs (processors) became unprofitable. There came an era of farms - installations, connecting powerful video cards, as well as ASICs - specialized mining equipment. You also need to have special programs such as best crypto miners

On the PC now it is realistic to mine coins like Monero, FantomCoin, DigitalNote. But even powerful PCs do not mine more than a few tens of cents per day. The situation is similar with single video cards on desktop computers.

Mining pools
Due to the growing complexity of cryptocurrency mining, pools - associations of miners (so-called "miners") began to form.

As we noted above, to get the reward a miner needs to find a digital signature to close the block. In solo mode, even a powerful farm will take a lot of time to do this. Therefore, pools like Minergate are created to unite miners.

Each member of the pool receives remuneration equivalent to the mining power.