I've noticed few articles lately devoted to the CPU mining from few different people. All of them were great pieces, however, all of them did lack 1 very important thing. They are not putting the things into perspective. What I mean by that is that they are explaining what else you can do besides Mining Monero(XMR). Let me share with you my story when it comes to CPU mining.

Historically I mine with my CPUs for about 2 and half years now and I don't really think I've stopped at any point since June or July 2017. There was period when I was mining Monero on Minergate, then I switched to Nanopool, then Miningpoolhub, at some point I was selling hashrate at NiceHash marketplace. All that time I was using my Ryzen 5 1600. Back in the day it was making between 550 and 650 h/s which was great, it was comparing to the output hashrates to the most video cards. Anyway, during that time I was more or less profitable and the CPU paid for itself. This brief history side-step is to show you guys that I've "being around" when it comes to CPU mining.

So, let's get back to the topic of Mining with your CPU today. Recently, few weeks ago, Monero(and few other shit-coins) migrated to a new algorithm - RandomX. The thing is, Random X, is literally 100 to 1000% more favorable for CPUs compared to the most powerful GPUs. Just as an example. A mid range CPU:

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 – 7,500 H/s – 135w

MSRP $199



vs high-end GPU:

RTX 2080 Ti (1915/13600 MHz) - 1641 H/s - 242w

MSRP $999

Someone might say: "But, bro, this is a shitty AMD CPU, what about Intel?". The truth is AMD outranks Intel in the aspect of mining by a mile

As you guys can see for yourself we can see that for 5 times lower MSRP, you are getting 4 times the mining speed and about 40% lower power consumption. Just right now, people do not mine/or should not mine XRP with GPU(and there is no ASIC yet). So, now people with few PCs at home can make some bucks mining Monero. I will not bother you with the details how it exactly works, what you need to download and do the set it up. For those who are interested I will leave this link to and article by "1st mining rig". A guy that helped a lot of people back in the day to generally mine. I can guarantee it is a very reliable source.

Additionally I will provide you guys with this calculator where you can check the profitability of the specific coin you want to mine with your CPU:

Here you can see what would you be earning a day with the speed of 7500 h/s and this is not taking into account Electricity. As you saw before one of those CPUs is using about 100-135watts of electricity on full load.

Additional stuff to take into account before starting to mine Monero.

1) the power consumption. It is mandatory that your PC has enough power available to mine, else it will start crashing/restarting and nobody wants that. Here I have a PC power calculator that you can use to find out if your PSU unit is powerful enough. Please anticipate that the high-end Power supply's have about 80-85% effiiciency which means that if you have 400W needs, but you only have 450W PSU, you need to look for a Unit that is over 500W or even 550W. The calculator has great variety of options, both Basic and Advanced for you to pick, but im my opinion you should not ignore this step. CPU mining means that you are putting your CPU under stress 24/7 which could lead to overheating and more issues.

2) Cooling - always, always keep your CPU clean from dust. Cleaning it once every 1 to 2 months will increase it's life by miles, especially when mining.

3) having the correct setup on the mining software and hardware. Sometimes it is not straight forward how to optimize one or another. You should know that overclocking the CPU can have great impact on the mining speed. Also, the correct settings in the Miner you are using also can impact the mining speed. Additionally there are certain steps to optimize the Windows(if you are using Windows) for best performance.

3) What you will be doing with the coins you mine - either Monero, Loki or whatever else is profitable. You should be checking the mining calc more often, since that stuff is changing daily. The Monero Coin is the constant, it is not always the most profitable, but it is floating near the top. Anyway -> you need to decide where will you store the coins and if you will be trading them for FIAT or Bitcoin or something else. One important thing I can tell you from experience is that Monero always had expensive transactions. Not sure how is it right now, but I doubt it changed drastically. Back in time to send monero from 1 wallet to another/Exchange did cost me 0.02 Monero every time, which at the time when it was $200, is not insignificant amount. If you would be trading the monero for something else you should know it also costs a nice chunk of money. I made the following calculation using Swap Radar:

If you can't tell what I am showing you - you will be paying at least 0.0002 BTC to convert 1 XMR to Bitcoin. This is over $1.3.

4) Pool fees and withdrawal prices. Those are not too high, but it is still cutting from your profit.

So what I am telling you guys, is that there are tons of stuff to do and consider before you get to CPU mining.

There are few short-cuts, if you want to try "MinerGate" and their user friendly software, for which I hear good things lately(in the past it wasn't so great), but the problem with MG is that their only "free withdrawal" is to a wallet created by the same company - Freewallet, which has.... Very high prices and limits for either transaction or Exchange, you do not hold the private keys. So this is becoming not so great when you see the full picture. Additional option is trying NiceHash, but as far as I heard from Reddit forums it is not as profitable as it was back in the day.

So let me tell you what do I do at home and why.

With all that "bla bla" above it might shock you that I do not mine XMR. "Why is that" you might ask? Because of all the side hustle, configuring, high fees, exchanges and all the other points I made above. I do not have the time or the will to deal with all that crap at the end of the day when I come back from my 9 to 5 job.

To tell you what I am doing I want to explain first what hardware I do have at home - CPU mining:

1) my PC -> Ryzen 5 1600(no overclock).

2) my laptop -> Ryzen 5 3550H

3) second laptop -> Intel Core I5-3427U

I do use them for earning Bitcoin. Of course, since there is no way I can mine and earn BTC directly with them I use them with CryptoTab.

Basically the browser is using chunk of my CPU resources to mine - what is it mining I have no clue. My best guess is they are mining XMR or some other profitable coin like LOKI and pay to the users in Bitcoin. Withdrawal is as low as 0.00001 BTC which is insanely low. It is free of charge to Blockchain wallet(Not sure about other wallets), for which I have the private keys. Withdrawals are completed within a day after I request them. So far, for about 5 months I have never had an issue with that. The most interesting part here is that Crypto Tab is so well optimized for mining that the speeds I am getting by my hardware are insane:

Ryzen 5 3550H does about 1600-1800 h/s

Ryzen 5 1600 does around 6200 h/s

I5-3427U is in the area of 750-850 h/s

The total speed I get from all 3 is about 8000 h/s. But the best part is that I am not even affected by that mining. On the Laptop(Ryzen 5 3550H), I am also browsing(3 different browsers - including CryptoTab), watching videos, playing some games, torrenting, staking 2 different coins, using office software, skype, viber, telegram, mail client and let me show you my task manager:

And here you can see for yourself that I am not even joking that I have tons of stuff opened:

Anyway, if you are having a slower CPU, but you still want to mine, you can do it, if that slows your other work, you can very easily adjust it with the CryptoTab's lever.

Which adjusts the amount of resources used to mine.

And yes, If you directly compare what would I make with 8000 h/s on mining monero and using CryptoTab, yes, I will be making about 20% more with Monero. BUT, I will be making less at the end after I account all the other hustle -> the time to transfer, trade, pay all the fees and so on. That time I otherwise could use to write an Article on Publish0x to help someone of you guys. So I guess now you can see why I prefer using CryptoTab.

There is also a way to boost your earnings on CryptoTab, which leads to you outperforming XMR mining by a mile. And that is the referral system.

How it works.

a) For CryptoTab to store your mining data it uses Google account.

b) instead of logging all your PCs(if you have more than one ofc) to mine under the same account, you can make each PC with different user as affiliate of each others. This way the 1st PC will be getting 15% of the earnings of the 2nd PC, that used 1st's affiliate link, then the 1st will also get the 10% from the earnings of the 3th PC who is referral of the 2nd PC, which will be getting another 15% from the earnings of the 3th PC and so on. Their affiliate network is multi-layer so you can improve your earnings just by doing this. Another important trick if you are doing that affiliate trail at home, is to put your lowest earning machine fist, then the 2nd lowest then the 3th. This way you will maximize your affiliate profits.

c) of course if you have ways to share your link and other people start mining under you, you'll be getting even more benefits. One way to do that is to start a facebook/instagram add campaign(it is paid service), but hey you might get tons of referrals that way.

Currently i have 15 people in my mining network, of which 3 are mine. But just 1 person outside of my home setup is mining actively with not so great speeds.

By choosing CryptoTab, you will be skipping the hustle to setup the mining, trade the coins, transfer them somewhere, consider the power management. The browser does all that for you. All you need to do is, download it, set it up to run with the start of the Windows, and Withdraw your earnings. Here are some of the latest withdrawals of one of my accounts:

Anyway guys, I hope this was helpful.