Turning a Gaming PC into Money

By ARIA DIMEZZO
Master Controller
Nearly everyone has a personal computer in their home, and it’s surprisingly easy to turn an ordinary PC into a moderate gaming one, solely by adding a video card. While video cards can be expensive, the price pales in comparison the cost of new gaming consoles, and gaming PCs can be used in all sorts of ways that will forever elude consoles. With the tendency of enthusiasts to mention Bitcoin every four seconds, it’s likely that everyone has heard of cryptocurrency, and mining cryptocurrency just happens to be one of the things gaming PCs can do. 

It must be said, however, that mining major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dash simply isn’t possible with a gaming computer. Most of the prominent cryptocurrencies are mined using specialized devices called application specific integrated circuits or “ASICs,” but there are several cryptocurrencies designed to be mined by ordinary people with decent hardware, including XMN (Motion), RVN (Ravencoin), and VTC (Vertcoin). While it’s true that picking one of these currencies to mine is a bit of a speculative gamble, since most are valued in pennies, this was similarly true of Bitcoin years ago, and the possibility, however remote, exists that any one of these could skyrocket in value, as they say in crypto communities, “to the moon.”

Mining cryptocurrencies sounds arcane and bizarre to those who are not well-versed in the language, but it’s simpler than it sounds. Most cryptocurrencies are called “Proof of Work” coins, which means that transactions have been validated on the network by computers crunching a lot of numbers; this process is called “mining.” Because the algorithms are so complicated, it’s not feasible that one computer can do this alone, and so most mining takes place in mining pools, which is exactly what it sounds like: a group of computers working together to solve the problems needed to verify transactions, where each computer gets a cut of the mining reward. 

The seemingly insurmountable wall that prevents people from mining cryptocurrency, in my experience, is this notion of joining mining pools, but even this is simpler than it sounds. Once one has the “cryptocurrency wallet” needed to store the coins, the process of joining a mining pool amounts to finding one online using a search engine, and then editing a text file so that it includes the wallet address coins should be sent to. This address is customarily referred to as the “username,” which is nomenclature that confuses people, since they expect it to mean something for which they have to sign up using an email address and password. 

Mining utilities for specific coins can also be found with search engines, as well, and most don’t require any setup beyond editing a text file (usually with an “ini” extension), which is editable with any text editor, to include the receiving wallet address. In the modern era of EXE files, it may be foreign to launch a utility with a “bat” extension, but this really only means that the program is lightweight and runs from a command prompt instead of with a graphical user interface. Clicking the BAT file included in any mining utility is enough to begin mining; one needs no knowledge of working from a command prompt to make it work.

With the power draw needed to keep a GPU running at 100 percent capacity around the clock, it’s unlikely that mining any X16R cryptocurrencies (those that are mineable with a CPU or GPU) will be profitable, at least in the short-term, but since it’s generally unwise to turn a PC off anyway, and since “doing paid work” is better than “sitting there doing nothing,” when not using the gaming PC for playing games, one might as well be using it to mine cryptocurrencies, on the very remote off-chance that the mined currency one day becomes valuable. This extreme usage of a GPU will reduce the lifespan of the card, but, if one is a PC gamer, the graphics card will be upgraded and replaced long before it stops working from overuse, so that particular downside is already a non-issue. The only real caveats are the extremely low odds that obscure, easily-mined coins will take off in value, and that using a powerful graphics card in this way produces a somewhat increased electricity bill. When we’re dealing with moderate cards and cheap coins, however, the costs and potential profits are minor enough to be considered negligible. 

There is really no reason not to use a gaming PC to mine cryptocurrency. Although it is not “free money,” it can certainly be considered a long-term investment that is likely to pay off to some degree, even if the coin doesn’t reach the value of Bitcoin. Tales of people who reaped thousands of Bitcoin from mining seven years ago, and who are now millionaires because of it, set the expectations a bit too high, though it’s not inconceivable that a dollar of coins mined today could be worth fifty dollars in a year, which is a win no matter how one looks at it.