Hey guys,

First off I'm entirely new to cryptocurrency (I think I get the basics of it?) and have never mined a coin in my life. I am however in a fairly nice position whereby I work in architectural visualisation, so have access to a lot of heavy-duty machines (CPU mostly) and a few with some decent GPU's. I'm looking at mining monero (have just started on my quadro M4000 and a separate 1080 ti strix). Obviously the hardware costs and power costs are covered by the practice, so in theory it's "all profit".

I guess I have a lot of questions.

1 - Provided I'm doing it correctly on this (currently) modest setup, how long can I expect to see some coins (or fractions/denominations of) coins in my account/wallet? Is it a thing that I can expect to see incrementally creep up every hour, or day, or week? I have no idea on the timescales to expect.

2 - What difference does it make being in a big/small mining pool? Is it even feasible to go-it-alone?

3 - I'm sat looking at the command line interface scrolling away whilst the GPU calculates things wondering what it all means. Will it give me any kind of indication when I've "mined" something, or it's "paid out"?

4 - Assuming I've mined a coin, or percentage of one. What now? How do you exchange it for money?

Any help is much appreciated.