this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Mining isn’t economically worth it and it’s also bad for your components' health as well as the environment
Mining on a cpu is much less taxing than a gpu, and if you do it intermittently and do not run all cores there’s no additional strain on hardware.
20€ worth of XMR will still be more than 20€ worth of electricity. It ends up the same.
$20 of xmr is no where near $20 of electricity in the states, and having solar helps that number even more.
I believe if it was worth it to mine, everyone would do it until it is not anymore, especially in countries where electricity is extra cheap
After testing on my machine, I ended up losing more than 10x the amount I paid in electricity in France. I’m not sure it’ll be better elsewhere. This was at 0.20€/kWh
Not everyone knows it’s worth it to do it. Fully understand where you are coming from, it’s not viable in some countries right now.
Wouldn't that assume you are not using all the electricity coming from your panels?
Correct, it does assume you took that power usage into consideration
Not sure that's true. And mining on a CPU is even less efficient. Your hash rate will be way lower unless you've got a really high-end system with a really low latency bus and RAM. And if your hashrate is too low, it would take months for you to find a single block unless you're pooling with a bunch of others and splitting the profit. It's quite variable, but very, very few people can make profit on any popular coins. Too many people to compete with to find a block.
Oh and don't forget cooling cost. The fans in the computer, the fans in your house, and your air conditioner in your house need to disipate the heat and there's a lot more generated per clock cycle from a CPU than a GPU using comperably old technologies. If you live somewhere that you're producing more electricity with solar than you consume, then it's probably not a cold climate.
I thought Monero was designed to be mined on CPU.
Even if the algorithm will perform better on CPUs than other crypto algorithms, there's still the fact that the processor in a GPU is much less complex and so: many more tasks can run in parallel because they're all very similar, the bus is much shorter, bandwidth to memory is much higher, and memory is generally much higher performing. So overall, mining on a GPU will generally be more energy efficient than on a CPU. And of course crypto becomes harder and harder to mine as they grow, by design.
What I've read about mining Monero, specifically, is that CPU is so much better, no one uses GPU for it.
Right, but taxing a CPU, PC Bus, and PC memory takes more electricity than doing the same amount of "work" on a GPU with longer, more specialized pathways, allowing more work on a single cycle, but less flexibility on the type of work. So if it takes 1hr fully taxing a CPU, PC bus, etc, vs 1 hour fully taxing a GPU and its integrated memory and bus, the one using the GPU is going to take more electricity. Also, you can chain GPUs which can't be done the same with CPUs since GPUs all have their own discrete bus and memory on a single card. Problem became that GPU production couldn't keep up with demand so they became more expensive for the hardware, but overall, the cost of electricity vs value of the blocks combined with producing fewer blocks on a CPU once the chains reach a similar complexity as a competing cryptocurrency, means that overall you're more likely to make more profit from GPU based mining than CPU based mining.
It's a complex calculation to figure out and many people mine without realizing the money they're spending on electricity, home cooling, and parts wear is more than they're making on the crypyo.
Exchanging money is also not economically worth it. And if you only pay for renewable electricity it isn't bad for the environment either, at least on paper.
You know that both of your statements are false in a specific way
As are yours. So it balances out.
The components health section is probably nearly void, it seems like the lifespan of a CPU isn’t impacted if it doesn’t overheat. You’re probably right on that, I’m not a hardware expert though.
Mining seems not worth it imo, based on my experience, but someone told me otherwise 🤷
It is most certainly bad for the environment. Even if you use green energy, the infrastructure used to deliver the energy isn’t green when initially created and has a limited lifespan. Also, you probably remove green energy from people that didn’t care at the same time, so it ends up having a negative impact. If the green energy production % doesn’t change, then someone uses more non-green energy if you start using green.
I didn't even address the component wear because I didn't know either way. 😁
But as long as you pay for green energy none of that money will go towards supporting non-green infrastructure. So it should incentivise the energy companies to invest more into green ones.
Of course it doesn't change where your energy is really coming from. Most likely from the gas plant around the corner. But maybe from your rich neighbour's solar panels.
I believe people getting non-green energy will just get less green energy, at least that's how I would imagine it if there was already enough green energy for the ones who demand it. Instead of making more green energy, they'll just send less green energy to the people that aren't paying for green energy. If your country doesn't produce a lot of it, then yea it'll certainly incentivise the production of it, but I feel like keeping green energy only for premium payers, without developping infrastructure is more worth it to them.