Cryptomining with Home PC

Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency at Wikipedia: "A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a binary data designed to work as a medium of exchange wherein individual coin ownership records are stored in a ledger existing in a form of a computerized database using strong cryptography to secure transaction records, to control the creation of additional coins, and to verify the transfer of coin ownership."

Cryptomining

calculate transaction blocks and adds to block-chain

I've successfully sent a share, how much money is its value? Nothing. If the pool completes a block it will be rewarded in crypto depending on how many good shares you have sent in the last N shares.

Our pool finished a block. There are 100 miners. How much money will I earn? Nothing. The block has a reward in crypto and this is divided in miners depending on which miner how many shares sent in the last N shares - minus pool fee.

Is it worthwhile in 2021?

I can say that not, not with my PC, but maybe with a faster high end PC, or with the special miner machines.

I have tried with my PC, I've used xmr mining at background while I did my usual computer tasks (emailing, browsing, photo and pic editing and gaming too) maximum 12h/day, my CPU can mine maximum 0,005XMR/month. Every task was a bit slower, mostly I cannot realize that something else is working hardly, but electricity bill grew a bit, so I can say I waisted energy...

I've also tried to make my NVidia card to mine profit, but it uses extra power and it is also not enough fast for profit.

Don't forget the amortization, you have to earn the periodic hardware changes (at least the cooling system renewal).

And in 2022 the crypto's value in EUR much less than 2021 but the energy prices is much more at worldwide. And one more important thing, that not every trader/exchanger are fair, some of them keeps your crypto and won't pay its value.

Also you have to make the decision is it worthwhile for you or not. It is free to try:

XMRig - XMR/Monero miner

Under Mageia Linux I can tune up CPU-XMR-mining with enabling huge pages. It yielded me extra ~20+% on hashrate when I've created /etc/sysctl.d/51-xmrmining.conf:

# This file for speeding up xmrig and XMR mining sw-s
# Enable huge pages for xmr mining:
#   - Randomx  allocated 2336 MB (2080+256) huge pages 100% 1168/1168 +JIT

vm.nr_hugepages=1280

Part of xmrig log:

 * ABOUT        XMRig/6.15.0 gcc/10.3.0
 * LIBS         libuv/1.40.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1k hwloc/2.3.0
 * HUGE PAGES   supported
 * 1GB PAGES    supported
 * CPU          Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-7100 CPU @ 3.90GHz (1) 64-bit AES
                L2:0.5 MB L3:3.0 MB 2C/4T NUMA:1
 * MEMORY       4.7/15.6 GB (30%)
 * DONATE       5%
 * ASSEMBLY     auto:intel
 * POOL #1      <%POOL%> algo auto
 * COMMANDS     hashrate, pause, resume, results, connection
 * OPENCL       disabled
 * CUDA         disabled
[2021-09-11 06:28:24.702]  net      use pool <%POOL%> TLSv1.3 <%IP%>
[2021-09-11 06:28:24.702]  net      fingerprint (SHA-256): "f8cb85d****"
[2021-09-11 06:28:24.702]  net      new job from <%POOL%> diff 175004 algo rx/0 height 2446834 (6 tx)
[2021-09-11 06:28:24.703]  cpu      use argon2 implementation AVX2
[2021-09-11 06:28:24.706]  randomx  init dataset algo rx/0 (4 threads) seed <%SEED%>
[2021-09-11 06:28:24.794]  randomx  failed to allocate RandomX dataset using 1GB pages
[2021-09-11 06:28:24.806]  randomx  allocated 2336 MB (2080+256) huge pages 100% 1168/1168 +JIT (99 ms)
[2021-09-11 06:28:31.160]  randomx  dataset ready (6353 ms)
[2021-09-11 06:28:31.160]  cpu      use profile  rx  (4 threads) scratchpad 2048 KB
[2021-09-11 06:28:31.162]  cpu      READY threads 4/4 (4) huge pages 100% 4/4 memory 8192 KB (2 ms)
[2021-09-11 06:29:52.485]  net      new job from <%POOL%> diff 87502 algo rx/0 height 2446834 (17 tx)
[2021-09-11 06:29:57.574]  net      new job from <%POOL%> diff 87502 algo rx/0 height 2446835 (1 tx)
[2021-09-11 06:30:28.871]  cpu      accepted (1/0) diff 87502 (56 ms)
[2021-09-11 06:31:57.644]  net      new job from <%POOL%> diff 35000 algo rx/0 height 2446835 (24 tx)
[2021-09-11 06:32:13.266]  cpu      accepted (2/0) diff 35000 (50 ms)
[2021-09-11 06:32:20.604]  net      new job from <%POOL%> diff 35000 algo rx/0 height 2446836 (5 tx)
[2021-09-11 06:32:20.888]  cpu      accepted (3/0) diff 35000 (52 ms)
[2021-09-11 06:32:25.091]  net      new job from <%POOL%> diff 35000 algo rx/0 height 2446837 (1 tx)
[2021-09-11 06:32:29.034]  net      new job from <%POOL%> diff 35000 algo rx/0 height 2446838 (1 tx)
[2021-09-11 06:32:44.673]  cpu      accepted (4/0) diff 35000 (50 ms)
[2021-09-11 06:32:52.900]  cpu      accepted (5/0) diff 35000 (54 ms)
[2021-09-11 06:33:13.532]  cpu      accepted (6/0) diff 35000 (53 ms)
[2021-09-11 06:33:16.384]  cpu      accepted (7/0) diff 35000 (53 ms)
[2021-09-11 06:33:17.208]  cpu      accepted (8/0) diff 35000 (54 ms)
[2021-09-11 06:33:31.393]  miner    speed 10s/60s/15m 1077.6 1101.0 n/a H/s max 1123.6 H/s

Latest version: https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/releases

NVidia Plugin: https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig-cuda

If you have a better graphics card in your computer you can grip it to mine XMR.

NVidia and AMD GPUs also capable to mine other cryptocurrencies (you may need other miner sw and wallet), don't forget that your VGA may use extra 100+Watts for this job.

As Monero is for CPU mining other cryptocurrencies is more effective or designed to mine with GPU. If you would like to use your VGA you should search about ether-based and other cryptos.

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