How to: Mine Monero CryptoCurrency on your Raspberry Pi using CPUminer / minergate

 How to Mine Monero CryptoCurrency on
your Raspberry Pi

Source & credits thanks

You probably already asked yourself about mining with your Raspberry Pi

Now that Bitcoin becomes really hard to mine, Monero is the new Bitcoin
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to mine Monero on Raspberry Pi

How to mine the Monero crypto currency on your Raspberry Pi?
Mining Monero on Raspberry Pi is easy when you have the good tools
You can download and install a miner for free, to start mining a few minutes later
You also need an account on a mining pool to do this (I’ll show you how)

So, let’s start learning a little more about this topic
I’ll start with a short introduction about crypto currencies, Monero and mining pool
Then we’ll see how to install a miner on your Raspberry Pi
And finally, we’ll talk a little about profitability when mining on Raspberry Pi

Table of Contents

What is Monero?

Crypto currencies reminder

A crypto currency is a decentralized digital currency
This means that it’s not managed by banks and states

It’s a recent concept. The first one was Bitcoin in 2009
As it is decentralized, it allows anyone to be a part of the chain

By being a part of the network, you lend your device resources to the community to help the network
And the system can reward you, it’s what we call a miner
The more resources you have, the more crypto currency you’ll get

Monero

Monero is one of these crypto currencies, created in 2014

I choose Monero for this tutorial, rather than Bitcoin because it’s easier to get something
In the Bitcoin network, there are big miners, and most of the time you can’t get anything with a standard computer
So, with a Raspberry Pi it’s even worse …

The advantage of Monero is that normal people with a classic CPU can help and get rewards

Mining pool

Just a few words about the mining pool as we’ll use it later

A mining pool is simply a network of miners
When a block is found in a pool, all miners get rewarded depending on how they helped the entire network achieving this

How to install a miner on your Raspberry Pi

Now that the vocabulary is clear, we can move on to the installation process

Create a Minergate account

The first thing you need to do is to get access to a mining pool
What I recommend is to create an account on Minergate
It’s simple, and you can use it anywhere, not only on Raspberry Pi

• Go to the Minergate registration form
• Fill the form
  
• Confirm your email and log into your account
• On the Dashboard, you can check which currency you are currently mining and your winnings
  We’ll check that later
• In the main menu, click on Mining Pools > Monero
• Scroll down the page to the mining pool information
  
• Keep this information safe, you’ll need it later

Install Raspbian

If you already have Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi, you can move to the next paragraph

If not, you can check my post on how to install Raspbian and come back here later
Once you have Raspbian installed, Internet configured and SSH enabled, you can move to the miner installation

Install the Monero miner

To mine Monero, we’ll use the cpuminer-multi tool from Tanguy Pruvot
You can check the GitHub project here

Follow these steps to install it on your Raspberry Pi

• I recommend connecting to the Raspberry Pi via SSH
  So you can just copy/paste commands from this page
• Update your system

  sudo apt update
  sudo apt upgrade

• Install all needed dependencies

  sudo apt install git automake autoconf libcurl4-openssl-dev libjansson-dev libssl-dev libgmp-dev

• Go into the folder you want to install in and run these commands

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

• You can do the compilation and installation with:

  sudo ./autogen.sh
  sudo ./configure
  sudo ./build.sh

  It can take some time on Raspberry Pi

After this, your miner is ready to use

Run it

The executable name is “cpuminer”
I give you the entire command here:

./cpuminer -a cryptonight -o stratum+tcp://xmr.pool.minergate.com:45700 -u YOUR_EMAIL

Replace YOUR_EMAIL by the email address you use as a login on Minergate
Your password is not required

A few seconds later, the mining process starts:

If you go back to the Minergate dashboard, you can see the miner online

That’s it, you’re mining on your Raspberry Pi!

Thoughts about mining on Raspberry Pi

Profitability

After this little excitement, let’s get back to reality

In this profit calculator, we can convert H/s into profit estimation

Even if I remove the electricity cost, with a 2H/s ratio, you’ll not earn anything

This simulation shows us a $0.27 gain after one year

If you consider the $35 of the Raspberry Pi (minimum), and the electricity cost (probably around $0.10 a week), you’ll lose money by mining Monero on your Raspberry Pi

And even if you can get a free Raspberry Pi and free electricity, this is not a good deal

Education

Even if it’s not profitable, you can learn many things by installing a miner on your Raspberry Pi
As it doesn’t cost a lot, and the installation is rather easy, it’s a good way to make a first step in the crypto currencies world

You can now try it on bigger devices and win a little with crypt currencies 

Related questions

My Raspberry Pi is heating when mining, what can I do? The mining process take all the power of your CPU, so it’s normal to see that kind of thing. If you want to avoid this, you can mine with less CPU, by adding the -t option to the cpuminer command (“-t 2” for example, t stands for threads)

How to use Minergate on other platforms? Create an account on Minergate, then click on “Downloads” in the main menu. Choose the download file corresponding to your computer operating system (Windows/Mac/Ubuntu) and GPU, then install it. You’ll get a better rate on your computer, here is an example on my laptop:

Conclusion

That’s it, you now know how to mine a crypto currency (Monero here) with your Raspberry Pi, and on any Linux system

I’m not an expert in crypto currency, so if you see some mistakes or have other suggestions for readers to enjoy this post, please share in the comments below