MinerGate Review
These are my impressions of the MinerGate mining program! MinerGate has an easy-to-use GUI interface that gets you mining quickly with your desktop, or even mobile device! Let's take a look into what all this program has to offer 😁
Overview
I started using MinerGate a couple of weeks ago using my home desktop, which is a few years old. It is a decently powerful PC that was marketed for gaming, but definitely not great by today's standards. It has an AMD Radeon R9 360 GPU. Even with a slightly older GPU, I was able to mine enough Crypto to withdraw and start to make some trades on HitBTC.
Pros + Features
The MinerGate desktop client was very easy to download, install, and get running. Once the client starts up, you are presented with various features.
I would suggest heading over to the Benchmark tab to run a Benchmark test on your machine. This stalled on me the first couple of times, but then I realized I had a CPU miner already going with a different program 😂. Once I stopped that miner, I was able to benchmark what my PC is capable of using their client. As you can see, mine is woefully behind the standards!
Once you have Benchmarked your machine, you can start mining! There are 2 ways to do this with their client. The first way is with their Smart Miner. This is a great feature that will evaluate which currency to mine every hour based on the latest coin prices.
There's a few things going on here, but I would like to point out how crisp and clean their UI is. You are able to control the intensity if both your CPU and GPU miners. You can also see your confirmed balance on the left with the currency you are mining. On the right you can see your unconfirmed balance, mining difficulty, shares found, etc. Each currency that you mine will have a different threshold on when your unconfirmed balance becomes confirmed.
The other way to mine with MinerGate is to manually set which currencies to mine. Since my GPU isn't the best, this is the way I set up my miner. I needed to focus on a single currency full-time so that I could mine enough to confirm and withdrawal. As with the Smart Miner interface, you can set the intensity for both your CPU and GPU. It shows you all of the pertinent information as well for each currency. Another good feature is that with some of the currencies you can do merge mining. This means that while you are mining your main currency, you are also automatically mining a secondary currency!! Use this feature to get the full benefit of MinerGate! You are also able to mine multiple currencies simultaneously. Just pick which currencies, and how many cores you would like for each currency! This only works with the CPU miner though.
Another little bonus feature is how they gamified their platform. You are able to earn achievements by doing various things, such as mining at night, mining multiple currencies, etc. It doesn't impact your hash rate or income, but is a nice little add on for people into that kind of thing.
MinerGate also has a web interface that allows you to check in on how your miners are doing. Just like the desktop client, the interface is clean, crisp, and easy to use. You can see your balances, make withdrawals, etc.
The last feature, and sorta unique in my opinion, is that they also have a mobile app that you can link to your account. Not only does it allow you see all of your miners in the dashboard, but you can actually mine with your phone!! Obviously on a mobile device the hash rate won't be great, it'll drain your battery, and your phone will start to get kinda hot, but hey, a little extra tickle into your account doesn't hurt! I have only used the low setting. I tried the medium (and high), but they both made my phone extremely unresponsive and I had to do a hard reboot. Use at your own risk!!
One last feature to mention is that you can do Cloud Mining with their platform. I haven't tried this yet, so I don't have any feedback on how well it does.
Cons
Now that we've gone over their features, let's look at some of the shortcomings that I've seen. There's not a lot to be honest with you. I don't have a strong GPU, so it's hard for me to gauge the hash rates that I'm seeing compared to other mining platforms. That said, one drawback is that they don't have a lot of currencies to pick from. Currently, that would be 13. From those, INF8 and MonetaVerde seem like dead coins that would be worthless to mine. Some of the others may not be much better, but I haven't compared them quite yet.
Another slight annoyance that I've seen is that sometimes the desktop client and web portal will show different balances for the unconfirmed amount. It doesn't seem to keep them in sync 100% of the time. I haven't noticed losing any of my balance, but always go to the web portal to see what your "true" balance is!
A last con of sorts is that you have to meet certain thresholds before your shares are confirmed. This makes sense as far is reducing transaction costs and such, but for me, I have a decent amount of unconfirmed balances that I may never see converted over to confirmed with my lower performance GPU.
Affiliate Program
One last item that I want to mention is that MinerGate has an affiliate program. Basically, MinerGate takes a cut from what you mine, as is normal in these types of platforms. In their affiliate program, you get part of the cut taken from all of your affiliates in the currency they are mining. It starts at 30% and goes up to a max of 75%. I don't have any affiliates underneath of me, but hopefully one of you guys will click on a link in this post and start mining!!
Summary
That is my review on the features and some of the shortcoming of using MinerGate. Overall, I am impressed with their overall platform. It is easy to use and looks great! There is a limited number of currencies to pick from, so that might be a deal breaker for some.
If you like this review, please let me know with an upvote, comment, or follow!!
If you want to support me in my journey, I'll throw some wallet addresses for you guys to use! I really appreciate any amount!!
bitcoin: 1E6oet5bdoJzfv7hnjcXuKaJVwUvEdyx7W
litecoin: LbKJzGYfRqqAsMF8Gns8yd7xYcZw8qvHJa
Eth: 0xacbd5150a66ba90f20d0a5386f08b72ba51aa070
Binance: 0xacbd5150a66ba90f20d0a5386f08b72ba51aa070
Cardano: DdzFFzCqrhsz97vWpzS9GJBKrZmjBGR4YLb4XYDvpqD2hfN8kpxNjzZYKBJdXqURJ6AJZktJN8JX2t4xiAPDHqMj7DxP11M8BmRDyL1b
Here is some legal stuffs:
I am not a licensed financial adviser in any way, shape, or form. All material is based on only my opinion. Any and all investments have risk. I am fully prepared to lose any investment at any time. Please do your due diligence in researching everything that I have mentioned.
Thanks!
Minergate is great for everyone new that wants to get a feel about how mining works.
Good point! What program/pool have you had the most luck with? I've been experimenting with sgminer and claymore as well, but I'm still pretty new to the mining scene.
I downloaded this about 5 days ago. It's working well for now but my mac is slow! I only go to 60 H/s which is horrible. I'm thinking about getting a gaming computer so I can mine better. Working on 1 XMR I have a long way to go though.
Let me know how the new gaming PC works out for you! I hope you get the XMR soon!