What Hardware For Mining

This is where all of this can spiral out of control, if you are going to mine SHA-256 then you will require ASIC's, there is no point in using a CPU or GPU as you will not compete with ASIC's. A simple place to start will be with a block erupter USB stick, I would find one from eBay and I would not pay no more than £$20 as even that would hard to earn its money back. I must emphasise that getting into this now such as me seems to be more for a hobby than making the fortunes that people made early on, although do not get me wrong there is some money to be made. Have a look on eBay for some cheap block erupters but if you look at the picture above you can see why you will not be able to compete with the people that vast equipment that early mining paid for

Scrypt Mining
This can be a bit more profitable for beginners mining as most people who inquire about mining already have a good graphics car which can pull good numbers for mining. The only issue that makes it less profitable is graphics cards are expensive and they use lots of power. I would recommend using a profitability chart to work out if this will make you money

XPM CPU Mining
For me if I wasnt given some ASIC's for free I would have got into this alot earlier. This system uses Primecoin and only allows CPU's to crunch the numbers and earn money and is also very easy to setup. You will need a good CPU to earn good money but at the moment ypool is giving good rates for there pool and you can mine on your pc while still using it. I do warn though that it will get hot as it will have very high CPU usage so make sure your pc is well ventilated. Now the profitability is something again that you will have to work out how much power your computer uses mining on full throttle CPU compared to the money you will earn in the mining pool as if your CPU is not a high standard then it may take you a while to earn