Monero mining is based on the CryptoNight proof-of-work algorithm. This was specially created to mine Monero using consumer CPU and GPU hardware. This can be seen as one of the most important advantages that Monero has over Bitcoin. In terms of mining decentralization, anyone who has a PC can start mining Monero straight away and still make profits without having to buy all kinds of expensive ASIC based mining hardware.
For starters, you have to create a Monero wallet and then choose a mining pool. For the resilience of the Monero mining network, it’s advisable that we choose different mining pools in order to avoid an unhealthy concentration at one particular mining pool.
Mining Monero on Windows via MoneroSpelunker
MoneroSpelunker is a Windows GUI for the popular Wolf CPU miner. All you have to do is download the zip file and unzip it. Then run monerospelunker.exe file and enter your Monero wallet address where you would like to be paid for your mining. Enter the mining address of the pool that you have chosen and click on “Start mining.”
Mining Monero on Fedora 24 and above
You will have to replace WALLET_ADDRESS_HERE with your own Monero wallet’s public address. The “-t 3” option find out how many of your CPU threads will be used for mining.
yum -y install git curl-devel libcurl glib-devel libtool
git clone https://github.com/hyc/cpuminer-multi
cd cpuminer-multi
./autogen.sh
CFLAGS="-march=native" ./configure
make
sudo ./minerd -a cryptonight -o stratum+tcp://pool.minexmr.com:4444 -u WALLET_ADDRESS_HERE -p x -t 3
Mining Monero on Ubuntu 14 and above
sudo apt-get install git libcurl4-openssl-dev build-essential libjansson-dev autotools-dev automake
git clone https://github.com/hyc/cpuminer-multi
cd cpuminer-multi
./autogen.sh
CFLAGS="-march=native" ./configure
make
sudo ./minerd -a cryptonight -o stratum+tcp://pool.minexmr.com:4444 -u WALLET_ADDRESS_HERE -p x -t 3
How to check your mining earnings
In order to check how much Monero you were able to earn based on your mining efforts, all you have to do is enter your wallet address into the Lookup box at the mining pool site. This will let you know how much you have earned and how much was paid out by now.
It’s important to remember that each one of the mining pools has their own payment threshold which will save on transaction fees by only paying out once you have mined a certain amount of Monero. You have to understand that this can take days or even weeks before you will be able to receive your first payment. This will depend on the speed of your computer.
There are also some pools where your Hash Rate will be reported as zero for most of the time until you submit a share to the pool from your mining. This will make you see your Hash Rate reported only temporarily and after this, it will return to zero.
This is quite normal for some pools, and you don’t need to worry that something is not working correctly. As long as you will be able to see “total hashes submitted” figure increase, then this means that the mining setup is working.