Monero Mining on a Raspberry Pi 3 Profitability
Mining Monero on a Raspberry Pi 3
After having unprofitable results mining on the Raspberry Pi Zero, it's time to see what the more powerful Raspberry Pi 3 can do. The Pi 3 uses a 4 core 1.2 mhz ARM Cortex-A53 CPU with 1 gb SDRAM. For this example I will still be running the raspbin lite OS with the CPUMiner-Multi program but this time I will be going after a different cryptonight coin, Monero.
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, clone CPUMiner-Multi
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=cortex-a53 -mcpu=cortex-a53 -mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=neon-fp-armv8 -mneon-for-64bits" CXXFLAGS="-Ofast -mtune=cortex-a53 -mcpu=cortex-a53 -mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=neon-fp-armv8 -mneon-for-64bits" --with-crypto --with-curl
sudo make
Start mining
Once again, I'm mining on the minergate.com pool and as I noted before, due to the sites high payout threshold it could be a while before you receive a payout when using low hashing power. The command to start should be formatted like this:
sudo ./cpuminer -a [algorithm] -t [cpu threads] -o [pool address:port] -u [username] -p [password]
The Pi 3 has 4 treads that can be used to get around 9.25 H/s. This should bring in 0.00026 XMR per week at the current difficulty. With the price of XMR at $244.33 at the time of writing this, I will earn 0.064 USD per week.
But what about the electricity?
With the meter registering .86 amps at 5 volts, I can figure out that the Pi 3 is costing me 0.072 USD per week at my electricity rate of 0.10 per kWh. This means that like the Zero, it's not profitable to mine cryptonight coins on the raspberry pi 3. I hate to admit this because I love my Pi farm, but this is where the situation stands. The only way to see a profit mining cryptonight coins on the raspberry is to mine something and hope it's value increases.
I'ts a fun project to do but not really worth the time.
You can use a raspberry to make a steem bot:
https://steemit.com/technology/@niel96/fk5r5hlqw
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The pixel 2, mining monero, will earn me $10/year; if you have higher end Android boxes, the results should be fairly similar. My friends leave their Android boxes on all the time, and so I recommend them for mining altcoins.
This is what I do as well. Also if you search online trough some of the pre-paid phone sites, you can scores some really cheap deals on some decent Android phones, then use them to mine many different crypto coins via the Miner Gate app.
THIS IS PERFECT!! I know the power to profit reward is not great, but that is why I'm going to be setting up my Pis with solar power! Only need to pay the initial cost of the hardware, then the mining will be all free to operate. ( Also what I do with 15 Android phones, each makes about .03 a day, in today's prices)
Sometimes it's good to read something totally out of your comfort zone. I read this and had to Google a few terms! I recently did my first Steemit article on equity release. It's a great platform and I'm enjoying the diversity of content.
Very informative. Thank you.