Cryptocurrency Mining on a Raspberry Pi (it's fun....trust me)

About this video

NetworkChuck sets up a Raspberry Pi to mine Monero and uses the project as a vehicle to explain how cryptocurrency mining actually works: transactions are broadcast to the network, wait in a memory pool, and miners race to solve a cryptographic hash puzzle by brute-force guessing; whoever solves it first adds the next block to the blockchain and earns the block reward. He explains why Bitcoin and Ethereum are hopeless on a Pi — difficulty rises with competition, and rivals use GPUs and purpose-built ASIC machines (he cites an Antminer at a creator-claimed $12,000 and roughly 104 terahashes per second). Monero is the Pi-friendly exception because its RandomX algorithm is deliberately ASIC-resistant, keeping mining open to ordinary CPUs and the network decentralized. The build: flash 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS Lite to an SD card with the Raspberry Pi Imager (enabling SSH and Wi-Fi headlessly), SSH in, install prerequisites, clone and compile the XMRig miner from source with cmake and make, and create a Monero GUI wallet, carefully backing up the mnemonic seed phrase on paper. Because a lone Pi would effectively never win a block, he joins the MoneroOcean mining pool (gulf.moneroocean.stream, port 10128), pointing XMRig at it with his wallet address and a worker label; the pool combines everyone’s compute and pays out shares proportional to contributed work. He shows XMRig’s live keys — H for hash rate (his Pi manages only about 44 hashes per second across its four cores, and his three Pis together roughly 309), S for accepted shares, and C for connection info — and checks earnings on the pool’s website by pasting in the wallet address. His verdict is explicit: this is not profitable. Per the creator, mining calculators show a Pi losing about a penny a day after electricity, and the Monero block reward he cites (1.16 XMR, roughly $300 at recording time) is a pool-level prize, not a Pi payday. The point is the fun and the education. He also notes you’ll want a 4 GB or larger Pi for the fast mining mode. The video is sponsored by CloudSec 2021, a free virtual cloud security conference from Trend Micro.

Key takeaways

• Mining means racing to solve a hash puzzle by brute-force guessing; the winner adds a block of waiting transactions to the blockchain and collects the block reward.
• Bitcoin and Ethereum are out of reach for small hardware because difficulty scales with competition and ASIC miners built solely for mining dominate — Monero’s RandomX algorithm is designed to resist ASICs so CPUs stay viable.
• The working recipe is 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS Lite, XMRig compiled from source, and a Monero wallet whose mnemonic seed you back up on paper.
• Solo mining on a Pi would essentially never pay; joining a pool like MoneroOcean combines many miners’ power and distributes rewards as shares based on work contributed.
• Profitability verdict from the creator: a Pi earns a trickle (his figures: ~44 hashes/second per Pi) and roughly breaks even at best — he cites calculators showing about a penny a day lost to electricity, so treat it as a learning project, not income.

Episode details: published November 12, 2021 · 26:47 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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