Where To Pool Mine Bitcoins

2017 Edit: Antpool seems to be the most profitable now Ghash.io has closed its doors. You can still use CEX.io to trade Bitcoins but they no longer run the mining pool

So if you have decided to mine Bitcoins for me there is only one place I would go, it has the fastest pool rates on the internet and controls the biggest share of Bitcoin mining. A block is roughly solved every 17 minutes which for Bitcoins is fantastic.
  The site is cex.io which is affiliated with ghash.io here you can join the mining pool and you can even deposit, exchange or buy coins or hosting power in GH/s, I also believe if you have lots of power you can sell you GH/s to other people. Go check it out

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

Picked My Coin Network What Now?

Now for me this is where it started to get complicated and really, really confusing so I will try my best to explain this. 

  Once you have picked your coin network you need to download the wallet which will store your coins, now this is important, this writes your coins to you hard drive so always back it up. Once you have downloaded and installed the wallet it will update or sync itself with the previous blocks found, now this can take an absolute age so do not worry if it takes a long time its quite normal. Once your wallet has synced with previous data you will need to add a config file to it, now this will vary for each wallet and each network you are going to use so for me to give an example is going to be very difficult. Most networks will give you a demo config file to upload to your wallet with all you having to do is add a username and password. 

It will look something like this, this is for Betacoin which uses SHA-256, ones which use Scrypt look very very different as you will have to put graphics card settings. These config files need to be placed in the correct folder, click start and in the search bar put in %appdata%\roaming and find the wallet you have installed and place the file in there

 rpcuser=yourusername

rpcpassword=yourpassword

maxconnection=50

rpcallowip=127.0.0.1

rpcallowip=192.168.0.*

rpcport=32332

server=1

listen=1

addnode=76.74.177.244

If you have decided to use something like Primecoin which uses CPU then this is nice and easy you will need to sign up to a pool ypool.net and then download a mining program. Ypool recommend jhprimeminer which is designed to be used with it and is nice and easy to setup as ypool will give you your login worker details. Once downloaded and installed all you need to do is right click on the !start.bat click edit and enter your worker details

Now...

Back to the other coins if you wish to mine these you will need to find a mining pool to sign up to and get the worker details ready to enter into the miner. For SHA-256 and scrypt I would recommend using cgminer, this is the main one everyone uses and there are plenty of guides out there for. I will trry and write a quick guide to setting up cgminer but with all different networks some using GPU's and some using ASIC's it is very difficult to get settings for everyone

Alternative Internet Currencies Similar To Bitcoin

There are plenty of other Internet currencies to work with online and the best place to see them all and how they are currently performing is coinwarz.com
  They are the biggest it keeping tabs on all of the coin networks and how they are doing, they even provide you with profit calculators to work out if you can make money from any of these ventures

Now different coin networks use different methods, Bitcoin which is the biggest uses SHA-256 which is the most popular and also the hardest as it is massively exploited with people using ASIC miners. 
 Other more profitable networks currently at time of writing are Litecoin which uses Scrypt to mine for blocks, this makes ASIC miners useless keeping the difficulty down allowing people with good GPU's to mine at good rates but still will not be that profitable due to power consumption
 Alternatively you have Peercoin which uses exclusively CPU and CPU power only, this is one of the best for n00bs to get into as we can start earning straight away and the difficulty has always been relatively low

For mining all of the above I would never recommend solo mining, always mine in a mining pool as it will earn you alot more than solo. There are lots of pools and for the three above these are the ones at the time of writing I would consider to be the best

Bitcoin - I really would not start mining you would be better off trading for coins
Litecoin - I used coinotron.com as it was good rates and lots of users
Primecoin - ypool.net this comes with the highest recommendation for starters as this will use CPU power and be competitive in earning coins which you can trade for Bitcoins

There are other SHA-256 coin networks that are worth mining with beginner ASIC software such as entry level block erupters which can be picked up for £20 off of ebay, if you are going down this route I would advise using Peercoin or Betacoin at time of writing