Bitcoin Mining with PI?

Question

I'm fairly new to RPI Zero W (6months) and have played with it extensively and now that I'm learning more about bitcoin mining I'm wondering if a mining machine can be built with it? I am aware that mining profitability requires a high powered GPU.

I know out of the box it PI can't handle out of the box but are there ways to make it happen? If so please advise where I would start my research.

Thank you!

Jan Cumps · Answer

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 ...

rachaelp · Answer

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

rachaelp · Answer

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!

Bitcoin Mining with PI?

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