Bitcoin Mining with PI?

Yes it can, if you look around there are plenty of examples. I just googled for "Raspberry Pi bitcoin mining" and there are quite a few hits from the likes of Instructables and hackster.io, youtube and even raspberrypi.org. It seems it may be possible to make it profitable, but I I don't know how profitable. To be honest I haven't done anything with bitcoin mining myself. Looking at the current value of bitcoin I wish I had got into mining early and been mining bitcoins now. But hey, it's too late to cry of spilt milk, or in this case un-mined bitcoin! If I were you I would give it a go and see how you get on!

Best Regards,

Rachael

He'll have to compete against those using FPGAs and video card graphical processors. My advise is to draw a graph with gained bitcoins related to paid electricity bill ...

Yeah compared to running a FPGA or GPU, it's not going to be winning any performance contests but as a bit of fun to try and get it going and experiment with it I thought it might be worth it just for a bit of interest.

However, I just had a look at what is required and it looks like you need a rather large amount of storage. The blockchain history which it needs to download is currently 143Gb and this will grow over time as people (not just you) process more data so you need an awful lot of storage for that!

So, I might set something up as an experiment into bitcoin as I have never looked into it at all in the past, but then I think it might be interesting to move over to an FPGA implementation at some point and see how well that works. I need to do some more investigations!

Awesome, thanks for the response.  I did a bit of googling on the subject and got mixed reviews so I figured I'd check here, where ppl know a little bit more

Thank you and yes I've used a few calculators to get an idea of profitability.  I am currently running a server that is on and serving all the time so I'm trying to figure out how much more watts I'd be using if PI was mining.

Thanks for the info and nudge to move forward.  I will research FPGA and see how it compares to GPU processing.  I'm not looking to get rich though that would be nice.  Like you said that boat has sailed but I can make something.

I think its worth pointing out that this would be a fun project, but not at all profitable. The RPi has such dramatically slower hashing speed over high end graphic cards that it would take a heck of a long time to get anywhere with it. 

BUT... never let profit get in the way of a good story / education.

Phil

e14phil  wrote:

 

I think its worth pointing out that this would be a fun project, but not at all profitable.

Yes I found that last night when I did more research on the hashing rates of various platforms. I think my old Pi is about 0.2Mh/s, even at the current bitcoin rates the calculators show that making almost zero money!

e14phil  wrote:

 

BUT... never let profit get in the way of a good story / education.

I totally agree, it's worth experimenting with just for the fun/education factor alone!