Mining Crypto Coins

Bit coins(Crypto Currency) have recently gained a lot of attention which has caused it's value to shoot through the roof and made early miners - people that get paid in bitcoins for compute power - scramble to find the coins they mined to cash in. Since the complexity and time it takes to mine bitcoins increases at regular intervals until 21million coins have been mined.

However for regular users mining bitcoins is no longer practical since ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) for mining came along, these ASIC allows for far faster mining but can be costly, not to mention the power requirements it takes to mine a bitcoin with a decent setup is somewhat unpractical.

However there exists other Crypto Currencies such as LiteCoin, PeerCoin, PrimeCoin here a list of other crypto currencies. And one can always trade one crypto currency for another relatively easily.

So how do you mine crypto currencies? Well first you need a few things, 

1. Type of crypto currency you want to mine (LiteCoin, BitCoin etc..)
2. Mining hardware (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC)
1. Not all coins can be mined with GPU, FPGA, ASIC
3. Mining Software for that crypto currency
4. Wallet to store you coins for that crypto currency
5. An account at a pool

So lets work with Primecoins which at this moment can only be mined with cpu, the process to mine other coins are almost exactly the same and if lost reddit will most likely have a community that can help you out.

Step 1 - Mining software
Typically just google for primecoin mining software but as of now the most popular software is  jhPrimeminer which you can get here

Step 2 - Get a wallet
A wallet is a program that will store you coins, you can get a wallet here
The wallet will take a while to update but you can start mining before it is done. 

Step 3 - Create an account
Setup an account at ypool.net here your mining software will connect to and get job to compute they will then either store the money with them or payout into your wallet. Once there click on workers there should already be one. Add a password to it and click on update

Step 4 - Setup the mining software
Go to the folder where you extracted jhPrimeminer create a new .bat file which you can name mine.bat, inside that .bat file add the following:
start jhPrimeMiner.exe -o http://ypool.net -xpt -u <username>.<workername> -p <password>

eg.
start jhPrimeMiner.exe -o http://ypool.net -xpt -u jj.worker_1 -p badpass

Where username is you ypool account username, workername is the name your worker (found in the worker tab of ypool) and password is the worker password NOT you ypool password

Step 5 - Setup payment to you wallet
To get the money to go to you wallet you have to get your wallets address which can be found in the wallet under the Transactions tab and will look like a hash string of random characters. Copy this address right click -> copy address. Then in ypool go to account-> main options and put that address in there.

Now double click on the .bat file you created and presto.