Right, so I've had 3 people ask me how to mine with a GPU given that the guides everywhere else are quite hard to follow and there are millions of methods.
Terminology
Bitcoin (BTC) - Internet currency
Mining - The process of 'creating' bitcoins by doing caclculations on the CPU or GPU
Mining Pool - I'll come onto this later.
Hash/s - The speed of calculations (normally measured in kH/s or MH/s)
Preparation
First I recommend downloading GUIminer from: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=3878.0
and create an account here: http://mining.bitcoin.cz/
If you use an ATI Graphics card then you'll need OpenCL from the AMD website: http://developer.amd.com/sdks/AMDAPPSDK/downloads/Pages/default.aspx
The Open CUDA for nVidea should be already installed, if not it's included in the latest drivers.
Configuring GUIminer
Once you've got GUIminer installed and have OpenCL/CUDA then open it and use File>New OpenCL Miner (I know some have CUDA, but it's used as a figure of speech) then in the top dropdown select Other.
In the host box type: api.bitcoin.cz
The username is then your http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ account name.second part I reccomend not making the second part too hard to remember as you'll need it later.
The password is also supposed to be easy to remember, not a random number/letter string as this increases the chance of failure. This is not your password on http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ though.
You then need to select your Graphics card from the final menu.
For comparison, my GUIminer screen (this is before the pool moved to api.bitcoin.cz):
Configuring the website
By this point you're probably thinking: WTF is all this shiz on the website?
Well first you need to go to http://mining.bitcoin.cz/accounts/profile/ and click 'Register new worker'. You then get this page:
Now the login suffix is the second part from GUIminer and the password is the simple password from GUIminer.
Then click save and return to profile. It should look like this:
That is the hard part over. The next part you just enter the wallet address you want to send the mined money too in the 'Wallet' box on the profile/My Account page (Clever, I know...). Now you have a choice here. If you want to automatically send the money to JB without having to manually do it, then enter the JB address into the box (It's on the http://bit.ly/jbcoins page). However if you want to control what goes to JB manually, then you'll have to download the Bitcoin client and put your own receiving address in. If you haven't already, click 'Start Mining' on GUIminer and you should be generating monies!
Bear in mind that unless you create a shortcut to GUIminer in the startup section of the start menu GUI miner won't start automatically on reboot, and to make sure it starts mining once open, in the 'Summary' tab in the miner, tick the autostart box.
The more nerdy bit
Slush's pool uses a score system: your score is worked out by the speed you are doing calculations (the hash rate). The faster/more you do, the higher your score. Your share of the 50 BTC released in the block is determined by your score divided by everybody elses and then some other math. On the My account portion of the website there are 4 number boxes.
The Red box is how much the system thinks you'll earn
The yellow box is how much you've earned but the system is confirming that you've earned it with the network.
The green box is what you have definately earned
Then the box below that is pretty clear.
The send threshold is how many confirmed BTC it takes for it to send the money to the wallet address.
This method is better than just having the http://bit.ly/jbcoins window open as that generates only 1-5 kH/s whereas the GPU method, although hard to setup, gets at least 7MH/s on even my 3 year old midrange card (~1400 times more hashes). The pooled method also increases the speed of getting a reward than solo mining, as having 50 GPUs working on the math is quicker than 1 GPU, so the pool has a greater chance of winning the block of 50 BTC and then you have a greater chance of a reward.
Link for Linux users (thanks to Peerkoel): http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=2636
More about it (Including Shiny youtube video): http://www.weusecoins.com/
Please post any Questions & I'll try to answer them.
~Nean
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