Mining Crypto with a Raspberry Pi

I’ve got at least two or three Raspberry Pi’s floating around my house, in a box with old versions of RetroPie on them. After I built my own Raspberry Pi tabletop arcade, they’ve been waiting for a purpose.

Then I saw this YouTube video:

It got me thinking – could I possibly turn an old Pi into something profitable? Short answer, not likely. The video above even states such. BUT – could we do it anyway and possibly learn something along the way? ABSOLUTELY. So, what are we waiting for?

The Process

I’ll spare you all the long and in depth details on how to set this up, the video above explains a lot of it, and very well. Let’s go over a few of the things I did in my particular setup that weren’t covered in his video.

Missing Scripts

In the video, he runs a couple of scripts – sudo apt update & sudo apt install – that appear to handle putting everything into his pi that you need. In my experience, that wasn’t the case. There were a few scripts missing: git, cmake, and a couple others. These scripts are required to make your rig mine – so you won’t be able to get too far without it.

This line should cover anything you might be missing:

sudo apt install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev

Additional Scripts

There is one other script that I included at the suggestion of my good buddy @ascaryrobot – TMUX, or Terminal Multiplexer. The reason for this is pretty simple, if I want to SSH into my rig from elsewhere on my network to check on it, the new connection would stop the Pi and make it wait for new instructions. Likewise, closing out of the Command Prompt where the initial directive was given, would also stop the process.

TMUX gives me the ability to keep the pi running its glorious 10H/s (its actually laughably slow) even while I disconnect or reconnect from any machine on my network. The beauty of it is through their way of connecting to sessions. When your running TMUX and close out of command line, its not actually stopping the session – just detaching from it. So, if I wanted to log in later from another machine, I SSH in and tell it to attach to that session from earlier and I can peek in on whats going on.

This will help tremendously with my uptime for the rig, even if all this only ends up costing me money.