How A Mining Rig Works

Mining rigs are magical devices which earn imaginary money used to purchase real goods.

The device pictured above may appear as though it was assembled by someone who was high on methamphetamine at the time,but it is in fact a mining rig currently mining Ether(eth). Ether is a digital currency earned after solving a puzzle on the Ethereum network.

Many digital currencies generate new coins through a "Proof of Work" concept, where the work is done through a process called 'mining'.  Mining involves a lot of digging, and the technical term for digging here is 'hashing'. Think of hashing as way of translating one spoken language into another: 'muy bien' = 'very good'.  What sets ethereum mining(and other digital currencies) apart from simply translating one spoken language into another is that there is a tremendous amount of guessing required in mining.  Imagine knowing only half of a predetermined complete sentence and you need to come up with the other half using only blind guesses.  Smaller sentences would be easy: "The sky is ____."  But larger ones: "If my uncle didn't lose his leg in that motorcycle accident _____  __ ___ _____ ____  ____?"  As a general rule, the sentences miners have to solve become more and more complex as time passes. These kinds of guesses are best carried out by graphics cards more commonly used in gaming computers. The amount of guesses a card can make is referred to as its hash rate. Higher the hash rate= more guesses per second.  First miner to solve the puzzle is rewarded with ether.  A new puzzle is posted around every 17 seconds or so.


above rig has (2) r9 280x GPU's on an ASUS M5-97 motherboard, 4 gigs of RAM(maybe 8, can't remember),  antech 750watt PSU(power supply),  an ssd @256Gig (can't easily stick mine Ethereum),  and 1-PCIE extension cable.  Ubuntu 15.0.4 is the operating system.

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