Apple stock?
Twitter stock?
How about Tesla?
Pfft. Forget about them. Bitcoin is where it's at.
Mining Software Finally you'll want to install the mining software itself. Again there are a number of options, but a good starting place for those new to Bitcoin mining is MacMiner. All of the mining software above listed for Linux and Windows also works for Mac OS X. Scroll up to learn more! Cash Out your Coins Once you have this setup and are mining, you may need to cash out some of your coins in order to pay off your expenses such as electricity. Multicurrency mining pool with easy-to-use GUI miner. Ethereum, Zcash, Monero & other altcoins. Join our vibrant community of more than a million clients. For those that intend to mine with GPUs, or USB mining devices, cgminer is the program to use and can be downloaded from the developer’s website – unless, that is, you’re a Mac user, in.
Bitcoin is a crypto currency that's been exploding in value since the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke said that it 'may hold long-term promise' at last week's U.S. Senate hearing on the Potential Risks, Threats, and Promises of Virtual Currencies (which aired on C-SPAN). Other U.S. regulatory power houses (including the Treasury and Department of Justice) agreed.
It's not without controversy, however. Bitcoin was the currency of choice at former Internet drug bazaar Silk Road and remains the currency of choice of crypto locker hackers that hold people's computers hostage for money. But don't let that discourage you.
When I first researched Bitcoin (at the end of 2012) the price of a single Bitcoin was $13.50. In May 2013 it was selling for around $200/BTC. When I finally got around to buying some Bitcoin (on November 10) it had jumped to $460/BTC, and as I write this on November 26 the price has skyrocketed to $920/BTC. Not too shabby.
But enough on the background of Bitcoin, there's plenty of places to read about that. Let's get down to business and how to mine Bitcoin using your Mac.
First, some bad news. While it's technically possible to mine for BTC using your Mac's GPU, it's not profitable. The hashing difficulty has increased to a point where you'll spend more on electricity than you'll get in Bitcoin in return. It's possible that the new Mac Pro (with it's dual AMD FirePro GPUs) might be able to mine for Bitcoin profitably, no one's benchmarked its hashing performance yet.
- This Bitcoin profitability calculator will help you figure out your ROI
- This Bitcoin mining dashboard is also excellent
The good news is that you can purchase purpose-built mining hardware that will mine Bitcoin. While potentially profitable, there are several caveats. ASIC mining hardware is backordered, expensive, power hungry and loud. I backordered a 5Gh/s and a 25Gh/s ASIC (both pictured above) from ButterFly Labs in May and just got them this month, a six month backorder. If you're serious about getting into Bitcoin mining I suggest that you either purchase a BFL miner on eBay, or place a pre-order for one of the rip-snortin' fast 300 or 600Gh/s miners that Butterfly Labs will begin shipping in January.
- This GPU mining hardware comparison details the hashing performance most GPUs
- This ASIC mining hardware comparison helps put dedicated hardware costs into perspective
If I haven't scared you off and you're still reading, here's what you need to do to begin mining for Bitcoin on your Mac.
Step 1. Create a wallet
Create a Bitcoin wallet at BlockChain.info and note your Bitcoin address. You'll need it in step 2. A wallet is used to store your Bitcoin and you can have as many wallets as you want. Remember that security is paramount and losing your credentials is akin to losing your physical wallet, except that no one's going to return it to you. Also, if you lose your credentials, your Bitcoin is gone forever, there's no way to recover your password. There are many options for online and offline wallets and an offline wallets are more secure, but if you're starting at zero an online wallet is fine for the time being. (If you plan on purchasing Bitcoin with real money, then I recommend that you educate yourself on the risks and store your Bitcoin in an offline wallet that is backed up.)
![Ltc Ltc](/uploads/1/2/6/4/126436479/841936214.jpg)
Step 2. Join a pool
Join a mining pool, like BitcoinCZ Mining (aka Slush's pool). Bitcoin pooled mining is a way for multiple users to work together to mine Bitcoin, and to share the benefits fairly. Create and record logins and passwords for as many workers as you need. If you purchased ASIC hardware to run on one Mac, one worker is sufficient. If you want use a bunch of computers in your home or office to mine, then create a worker account for each machine that you plan to enlist.
Step 3. Install the mining software
There aren't a lot of Bitcoin mining clients for the Mac and if you uncomfortable with the command line/Terminal (or would just like a little more feedback) I recommend a free OS X mining client called MacMiner. Download it, install it and configure it to send rewards to your BlockChain wallet and to work in the pool that you joined. Here's how.
Best Ltc Program Miner For Mac
Step 4. Connect your ASIC miner to your Mac's USB port.
Step 5. Configure Mac Miner's Pool Settings
- Open the FPGA/ASIC Miner window (from the View menu).
- Click on 'Pool Settings' in the upper-left of the FPGA/ASIC Miner window.
- Enter your BTC address for rewards (from your wallet in Step 1)
- In the BTC area (bottom left) select your mining pool from the drop down menu
- Enter your miner username and password from your mining pool (Step 2 above)
- Click 'Save & start'
Step 6. Configure Mac Miner's Miner Settings
- Click on 'Miner Settings' in the FPGA/ASIC Miner window
- Enter '-S all' (without the quotes, capital 'P') in the Devices/manual flags field
- Click Apply
Step 7. Click Start
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In the FPGA/ASIC Miner window (in Step 5 above).
![Gui miner for mac Gui miner for mac](/uploads/1/2/6/4/126436479/205149995.png)
Step 8. Watch the Bitcoin roll in
To monitor your progress, log into your mining pool account and watch the 'My Account' page. I have Slush's Pool set to transfer my BTC rewards to my wallet every 0.1 BTC (the 'Send threshold' below) and as you can see by the screenshots, I've been getting 35-36Gh/s hashing performance from my two BFL miners pictured above. At 36Gh/s I've been able to mine 0.1 BTC every four days and I'm on a pace to mine 1BTC/40 days at the current difficulty level.
The next generation of mining hardware from Butterfly Labs are a pair of PCI cards based filled with 28nm ASICs that are capable of mining at 300Gh/s ($2,800) and 600Gh/s ($4,680) respectively. Orders places today for the new 'Monarch' cards are expected to begin shipping in February 2014. KnCMiner, based in of Stockholm Sweden, is taking pre-orders for a 3 Terahash miner called Neptune, only 1200 units are being made and one will set you back $12,995. According to the founders, Neptune can mine 2.1 Bitcoin per day at current difficulty levels.
Happy mining!
Update 2013-1203: I've switched from using MacMiner to Asteroid, a new Bitcoin mining client for Mac. More on Asteroid in a future blog post.
FAQ
Q: Can I set up MacMiner on a bunch of computers and mine BTC that way? (ala SETI@home)
A: While you can, it's not economically feasible with the current level of hashing difficulty and the cost of electricity.
Q: Where can I buy Bitcoin?
A: If you're in the U.S., you can buy BTC at Coinbase.com. They're US-based and raised $5M in venture capital in May 2013 (WSJ article)
Q: Where can I purchase ASIC mining hardware?
A: I purchased two minging rigs (pictured above) from Butterfly Labs and they rock -- to the tune of 36Gh. Note: BFL is running a Black Friday Special with 25 percent off mining hardware Friday only (in your local time zone). Minr.info maintains a list of currently discussed ASIC bitcoin mining hardware.
Q: Where can I follow what's happening in the Bitcoin community?
A: I recommend the Bitcoin Talk forums, Bitcoin sub-Reddit, The Genesis Block, CoinDesk, and Bitcoin on Stack Exchange.
Related Topics:
iPhone Hardware Mobility Smartphones Tablets iOSIn my previous post on How to mine Bitcoin on your Mac I recommended MacMiner as my Bitcoin miner of choice. Like Bitcoin itself, the mining hardware and software space moves at the speed of light and shortly after I posted my mining piece I switched to a new OS X mining client called Asteroid.
Although the screenshots below show Bitcoin (BTC) mining, Asteroid is also a capable Litecoin (LTC) miner, which, as I blogged over the weekend, is a better choice if you're just getting into mining crypto-currencies. The BTC difficulty rate is far too high to make any ROI mining with the GPU in your Mac and BTC mining requires dedicated hardware (ASIC) that's both expensive and constrained.
Here are some features in the first release of Asteroid:
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- Easy install, clean UI, with full retina graphics
- Monitor from your smartphone, thanks to support for MobileMiner
- Pre-configured with settings for the 30 most popular BTC/LTC pools
- Crowdsourced Scrypt settings, so you get the best Litecoin hash rates as found by other asteroid users
- Uses keychain to keep your passwords organized and secure
- Temperature monitoring with alerts and automatic cool downs
- Monitor a coin balance from within the app to watch your pool payouts
- Hash rate in dock icon, as well as device stats in dock menu
- In-app feedback
- Automatic software updates
- Open-source and uses the unofficial cgminer for OS X binaries
- Ultra-transparent asteroid is written in an interpreted programming language (applescriptobjc), so you can read the exact same code that runs it (instead of trusting a pre-compiled binary)
- cgminer 3.7.2 on the backend
Here are some Asteroid screenshots:
Besides liking the name, there are other benefits to mining with Asteroid. I prefer its clean and concise UI, Keychain support and remote monitoring and control from my iPhone via MobileMiner. Pictured above is the main Asteroid window which is small, but information dense. At a glance you can grok your total mining output (the large green bar) and the individual performance of each of miners separately.
Astroid displays your hashing performance in a badge on the dock icon.
The Asteroid Pool configuration which is pre-configured with settings for the 30 most popular Bitcoin and Litecoin pools
Asteroid's general preferences allow you to (optionally) make a small donation to the developer, which I highly recommend to help fund development and keep Asteroid free.
Asteroid's Litecoin preferences allow you to adjust its thread-concurrency and work size. Asteroid uses crowd-sourced data to find the best settings for scrypt (Litecoin) on its internal cgminer mining engine. These settings are specific to each graphics card and can involve a lot of time to tweak. Asteroid will automatically check this database and if it finds settings that would get you better speeds for your GPU, it will let you know.
One of Asteroid's best features is its MobileMiner integration. The MobileMiner apps (iOS, Android, Windows Phone) allow you to remotely monitor and control your Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other Cryptocoin mining rigs from your iPhone. Setup is simple and there are no firewall changes or port-forwarding required. A $3.99 in-app purchase enables push and email notifications for when your rig goes offline and you can start, stop and restart your miners remotely.
If you're interested in mining crypto-currencies on your Mac I recommend downloading Asteroid and starting with Litecoin. Here's how you do it: Best free file encryption software for mac.
- Download and install Litecoin-QT for Mac, then leave it running to download the blockchain
- Encrypt your wallet and store printed copies of your private key in a safe location in your home, office and offsite backup locations. Do not store your private key on your computer.
- Create an account at a Litecoin mining pool. If you're in the U.S. I recommend WeMineLTC.com, a powerful stratum-powered Litecoin mining pool that pays out after only 20 confirms.
- Enter your pool credentials in the Asteroid application and mine away.
Awesome Miner For Mac
Don't forget to check the box for 'upload my settings' and to donate a few minutes of your mining time to the developer.
Further Reading:
- A crypto-currency primer: Bitcoin vs. Litecoin – 13 Dec 2013
- How to mine Bitcoin with your Mac – 26 Nov 2013