5 ms·

CPU mines Monero not Bitcoin.

by megadethz 9y ago

mrtksn 9y ago
Why do I keep seeing this everywhere on the internet? There's no technical reason not to mine bitcoin on CPU.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  Most of the bitcoin network’s mining power is tied up in ASICs right now, and the difficulty has gone up to keep the block rate constant. A CPU just can’t keep up. There was a time when GPUs could, but now they can’t either. It’s technically possible, I mean nothing is stopping you from running mining code on your machine right now, but you would have little to no return on your electricity investment. Monero makes more sense. To put this in perspective, a modern desktop CPU will do anywhere from 10 to 20 megahashes per second. A single ASIC will do 4 terahashes and up. The single ASIC is getting so many more bites at the pie that you would literally never mine a single block. Every single simultaneous Salon user could leave their browser open and the ASIC would out-hash their combined compute power in the blink of an eye. The developer time they’re spending on implementing this scheme would be better allocated by buying ASICs themselves!
- snissn 9y ago
  practical reasons
- Viper007Bond 9y ago
  Because even when you're not paying for electricity, there's much more profitable coins to mine.
  - mrtksn 9y ago
    That doesn't mean that CPU can't mine bitcoins.
    - saagarjha 9y ago
      Just because you can doesn't mean you should. If you're not going to make money mining Bitcoin, then why do it?
      - mrtksn 9y ago
        Are we mining Bitcoins here?
    - lifeformed 9y ago
      You can mine bitcoins using pen and paper too.
- JohnTHaller 9y ago
  The electricity to do so costs far more than what you generate. And you'd generate almost nothing even leaving a page open all day.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    But these leeches don't care about that. It's not their CPU power and battery power being wasted.
- Kiro 9y ago
  From the Coinhive website: > Monero is different. To mine Monero, you have to calculate hashes with an algorithm called Cryptonight. This algorithm is very compute heavy and – while overall pretty slow – was designed to run well on consumer CPUs. > There are solutions to run the Cryptonight algorithm on a GPU instead, but the benefit is about 2x, not 10000x like for other algorithms used by Bitcoin or Ethereum. This makes Cryptonight a nice target for JavaScript and the Browser.
  - Viper007Bond 9y ago
    Yep, my CPU (i7-4790K @ 4.7 GHz) smokes my dual GTX 780s in hash rate for Monereo.
- hossbeast 9y ago
  Only mathematical ones
- realusername 9y ago
  The difficulty right now is way to high for a CPU to mine bitcoin.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

CPU mines Monero not Bitcoin.

mrtksn 9y ago

Why do I keep seeing this everywhere on the internet? There's no technical reason not to mine bitcoin on CPU.

Karunamon 9y ago
Most of the bitcoin network’s mining power is tied up in ASICs right now, and the difficulty has gone up to keep the block rate constant. A CPU just can’t keep up. There was a time when GPUs could, but now they can’t either. It’s technically possible, I mean nothing is stopping you from running mining code on your machine right now, but you would have little to no return on your electricity investment. Monero makes more sense. To put this in perspective, a modern desktop CPU will do anywhere from 10 to 20 megahashes per second. A single ASIC will do 4 terahashes and up. The single ASIC is getting so many more bites at the pie that you would literally never mine a single block. Every single simultaneous Salon user could leave their browser open and the ASIC would out-hash their combined compute power in the blink of an eye. The developer time they’re spending on implementing this scheme would be better allocated by buying ASICs themselves!
snissn 9y ago
practical reasons
Viper007Bond 9y ago
Because even when you're not paying for electricity, there's much more profitable coins to mine.
- mrtksn 9y ago
  That doesn't mean that CPU can't mine bitcoins.
  - saagarjha 9y ago
    Just because you can doesn't mean you should. If you're not going to make money mining Bitcoin, then why do it?
    - mrtksn 9y ago
      Are we mining Bitcoins here?
  - lifeformed 9y ago
    You can mine bitcoins using pen and paper too.
JohnTHaller 9y ago
The electricity to do so costs far more than what you generate. And you'd generate almost nothing even leaving a page open all day.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  But these leeches don't care about that. It's not their CPU power and battery power being wasted.
Kiro 9y ago
From the Coinhive website: > Monero is different. To mine Monero, you have to calculate hashes with an algorithm called Cryptonight. This algorithm is very compute heavy and – while overall pretty slow – was designed to run well on consumer CPUs. > There are solutions to run the Cryptonight algorithm on a GPU instead, but the benefit is about 2x, not 10000x like for other algorithms used by Bitcoin or Ethereum. This makes Cryptonight a nice target for JavaScript and the Browser.
- Viper007Bond 9y ago
  Yep, my CPU (i7-4790K @ 4.7 GHz) smokes my dual GTX 780s in hash rate for Monereo.
hossbeast 9y ago
Only mathematical ones
realusername 9y ago
The difficulty right now is way to high for a CPU to mine bitcoin.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]