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I have a Pi sitting around on my desk that I have never used. Could I use this to mine some Monero? I don’t pay for my electricity, so there is no cost for me.

user36303
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delayel06
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6 Answers6

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I have my Pi3 mining away on my new pool:

Gulf Coast Mining (XMR)
https://mon.gulfcoastmining.com

I've created two "PI" specific ports on the pool to align difficulty: 

PPLNS: 2222
SOLO:  2224

(SOLO of course being a long shot lottery but why not!!)

It's hashing at about 10H/s which even at that rate far exceeds any cost of electricity (yearly estimate is $6). It will get warm though if left on 24x7. I have it encased in an aluminum chassis that acts as a heatsink. I would definitely not do it without addressing the heat. It also gets hot enough in my case that small children should be sure to be beyond reach.

I compiled directly on the Pi3, set it up in a screen session and it has yet to have any issues.

https://github.com/tpruvot/cpuminer-multi

7

I think you would have to do a lot to get a miner running on a pi. The CPU doesn't have much cache, isn’t that strong, and would need the AES-NI instruction set (which not all Pi s have). And it would get a very low H/s anyway. There's a GPU on the pi but I haven't seen much info about using it for mining. However since the power is free it could be fun just to fiddle with it and see what you can get out of it

The Monero project has instructions for Building to Pi

Zigglzworth
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I can confirm that @Mark is right though I get a lower hash rate(some compile tweaking maybe and overclock the board): 

[2017-12-21 04:53:06] Using JSON-RPC 2.0
[2017-12-21 04:53:06] CPU Supports AES-NI: NO
[2017-12-21 04:53:06] Starting Stratum on stratum+tcp://xmr-us-east1.nanopool.org:14444
[2017-12-21 04:53:06] 4 miner threads started, using 'cryptonight' algorithm.
[2017-12-21 04:53:12] Stratum difficulty set to 120001
[2017-12-21 04:53:56] CPU #2: 1.53 H/s
[2017-12-21 04:53:56] CPU #3: 1.52 H/s
[2017-12-21 04:53:57] CPU #0: 1.51 H/s
[2017-12-21 04:53:58] CPU #1: 1.48 H/s

You do have to configure though as in https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer/issues/72

Amit Vujic
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Christopher Andrew Peddle
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I'm working on project focused to provide best-possible RPi3 mining.

Pool used: https://supportxmr.com/

In order to exploit RPi3 hardware at maximum level I'm using Arch Linux. together with my fork of xmrig/xmrig miner - can be found on GitHub

Hashing perfromances are so far between 15-20H/s

Amit Vujic
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Not worth the trouble. You won’t earn enough to get a payout on any pool I’m aware of. And even if you were to find a pool with basically a zero payout threshold, you’d be earning at most $2.47 a YEAR at current price and difficulty. And that’s with free power and after tweaking to get it up to 10 h/s.

Atork
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Yes, you can! It's quite fun to finally see your miner up and running. As you smile at last at your accomplishment, you notice something. Your smile falters.

CPU #0: 1.51 H/s

CPU #1: 1.48 H/s

CPU #2: 1.53 H/s

CPU #3: 1.52 H/s

Damn it, how are you going to pay the electricity bill this month?

CwazyStomper
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