Miner types

There are two types of miners these days—classified on the basis of procuring the hardware themselves, or on purchasing the hashing power online.

Cloud mining

In this type of mining, the miners do not own the hardware, and instead they purchase hashing power remotely from other miners. Cloud mining has various pros over mining by procuring one's own hardware, such as low cost of entry, and minimal risks. For people who want to invest in cryptocurrency but do not want to purchase from an exchange or have enough technical knowledge, this is the best possible option for them. Now, there are various organizations that have large data centers at various places with GPU-, ASIC-, and FPGA-based miners available for people to purchase. Some of these organizations are Genesis Mining, SkyCoinLabs, Nicehash, hashflare, and so on.

Hardware mining

Enthusiasts are always interested in setting up self-hosted hardware for mining; mining can be done by a high-end home computer or acquiring an ASIC...