Mining Bytecoin on a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero?

In this little experiment, we will see if mining on a Pi Zero is possible or practical. For this example I am using a Pi Zero W running Raspbin Lite. If you are not familiar with the Pi Zero W, it's a super tiny variation of the Raspberry Pi with a single-core ARM1176JZF-S CPU rated at 1.0 GHz. The 'W' version comes with wifi support which I recommend since none of the Zeros come with Ethernet support.

Getting a miner

First step is to download all the dependencies required.

sudo apt-get install automake autoconf pkg-config libcurl4-openssl-dev libjansson-dev libssl-dev libgmp-dev make g++ git

Next, we will need a CPU miner compatible with ARM CPUs. I chose CPUMiner-Multi for this example.

sudo git clone https://github.com/tpruvot/cpuminer-multi

Once it has been downloaded, enter the new folder

cd cpuminer-multi

Compiling

Now let's compile the program.

sudo ./autogen.sh

sudo ./configure CFLAGS="-Ofast -mtune=arm1176jzf-s -mcpu=arm1176jzf-s -mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=vfp" CXXFLAGS="-Ofast -mtune=arm1176jzf-s -mcpu=arm1176jzf-s -mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=vfp" --with-crypto --with-curl

sudo make

Compiling will take a while so use this time to find a pool and register. I'm using minergate.com for this example but be warned that due to the sites high payout threshold it could be a while before you receive a payout when using low hashing power.

Start mining

The command to start should be formatted like this:

sudo ./cpuminer -a [algorithm] -t [cpu threads] -o [pool address:port] -u [username] -p [password]

Bytecoin uses the cryptonight algorithm so enter this after the -a and the Zero only has 1 cpu thread. On this setup I'm getting about 1.64 h/s which should give me 2.81535 BCN per week at the current difficulty. At the time of writing this the price of BCN is $0.004561 USD making the total $0.013 USD per week before accounting for electricity.

What are the electricity costs?

The meter shows .25 amps while mining Bytecoin which means it's using about 1.25 watts. At my electricity cost of $0.10 per kWh, the Pi Zero is costing me $0.02 per week to run. Sadly this means at the current value of Bytecoin you would be loosing money.

This is not the end for the Pi Zero however, there are other coins and other uses. These make excellent stake boxes or hard wallets and can also be used to control some ASIC miners. My future write ups will look at these other uses as well as other Single Board Computers like the more powerful Raspberry Pi 3 and Orange Pi One.