I’ve got a Pi 3 that’s hanging around doing nothing so I thought I would try and use it to mine some cryptocurrency, mostly for a bit of fun – I’m not sure I will make much money from it!
Many Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Etherium now have a such a high difficulty that you can only mine them with a rack of dedicated graphics cards – however there are some that you can use a CPU for. I’m trying Monero as the price of it (about $50) isn’t too bad for the mining difficulty at the moment.
I found a great little script which worked first time – starting with a fresh copy of Raspbian Lite. Credit to this github repo!
Here’s a break down of what to install:
# update raspbian sudo apt-get update -y # install the following modules sudo apt-get install autoconf libcurl4-openssl-dev libjansson-dev openssl libssl-dev gcc gawk # clone this miner repo git clone https://github.com/lucasjones/cpuminer-multi.git # navigate to the directory and compile (doesn't take too long) cd cpuminer-multi ./autogen.sh ./configure make # see instructions on how to use: ./minerd --help
Mining
As for mining, you’ll need to create a Monero wallet and find a pool to join. Mining in a pool means you get a small part of the reward for the mining you do – it would still be very very unlikely to mine even one block(?), for which you’d get around 7XMR currently. I signed up to Minergate, which I have heard some complaints about (giving a low hash rate), but they do seem to credit your account. I’m earning about $0.01 per day so far!
Here’s my mining command:
./minerd -a cryptonight -o stratum+tcp://xmr.pool.minergate.com:45560 -u [email protected] -p x -t 4
-a cryptonight : This is the crypto type
-o stratum+tcp://xmr.pool.minergate.com:45560 : This is the pool and port number
-u [email protected] : My pool username
-p x : My pool password
-t 4 : Number of threads (4 because the RPi 3 is a 4 core processor)
So its very easy – next step is to make my own wallet and find a different pool to try.
