UPDATE DEC 2 2017: Please see comment at the bottom for a suggestion of a miner that currently works!

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.