Bitcoin Forum

Any advice on a good alt-coin for CPU only mining?

any alt coin with a low difficulty!!! im suprised my cpu can still mine on cex.io but with a setting of the difficult @ 8 or 16

It is very hard to mine with CPU no matter its an alt coin or not . however.  some coins name i found while searching on web are .
1: MemoryCoin
2 : Jackpot coin
3: quazar coin
4: XMR (was good for CPU until the GPU miner came out)


It is also depended on your CPU .. INTEL or Amd ?

or if you want to do it the lazy way .. pools like ispace.co.uk have a port address for random low diff coins it switches now and then and even with a cpu some coins were mined came out in the 1000's   

Memorycoin was fun for awhile, but never profitable for me.  CPU mining is too inefficient, imo. Who wants to burn out a cpu on an unprofitable coin, when there are plenty of unprofitable sha coins that can be mined on cheap usb block erupters.

What does that even mean?

I can imagine that a specific cpu-implementation of a specific PoW is inefficient, in that it could achieve the same solution rate with significantly less cpu-resources, but how can the concept of cpu mining in general be inefficient?

its inefficient as in the electric usage vs profit making...  more power to pay means your profit goes down, unless its free electricity..  but otherwise cpu mining can be done with alt coins with low difficulty settings

So you're saying cpu-mining is "inefficient" at converting electricity into profit.
Well, sure, but so is mining on commodity hardware in general, including gpus.

That is the economic reality of many people able and willing to mine at a minor loss
(or illusion of profit by considering their electricity free).

On the other hand, commodity-mining, mining at a loss on commodity hardware,
could be "efficient" at converting electricity into decentralization, since miners are more diverse and more likely to solo- or p2pool-mine.

 Tromp , youre very correct and I would also add in a given time that the hardware electrical consumption will lessen with proper coding (software or cpu) and low power processing (hadware asic) will try to out race each other..  and as in today the hardware asic is winning the race with better efficiency in electric usage.. but imo the gpu might win the race as software and hardware advancements are usually designed together like for example (nvidia gt700 is the hardware / cuda is the software ) Low power with higher gflops units are just over the horizon.

What you are all failing to grasp is that PoW is dead and PoS or similar scheme is the way of the future. You will never get BTC or LTC adopted with the amount of global pollution produced to secure the blockchain. That shit is coming to an ugly end.

Only low cost/low energy blockchain solutions are worth talking about, otherwise you are trying to jb weld the titanic back together.

I tried CPU mining some alts for testing. Some alts have a very fast block time. New blocks are found using GPU in minutes before my CPU can find a hash. So CPU mining is not very feasible.

Surprising to see that this link hasn't been posted yet:

http://www.cpucoinlist.com/

Go to the column on the side labeled "GPU Advantage". Different algorithms work best with different hardware and certain algorithms might work better on different brands of the same hardware class (e.g. AMD vs. Nvidia). Some, such as SHA-256 and scrypt are now dominated by ASICs. Others like X11 are dominated by GPUs and FPGAs. These categories are fluid and always changing, so it helps to stay up with the latest news. For example, Primecoin was one of the altcoins that was able to hold the front for no GPU miners for quite some time until GPU miners were finally released for it last year.

Looking at that list, the Cryptonote coins can still be mined with CPUs. Riecoin too. Of course, these coins can then be converted into any altcoins of your choosing via an exchange.

This list has not been updated in a while (possibly years).

Wild Keccak has a GPU miner; the advantage is known. There are rumors of a particularly performing GPU miner.
X11 is well known to have private elite kernels which can be easily 2-4x more efficient than public.
Groestl²... there was some turmoil with GRS some months ago... I'm not sure this is worth considering.
JHA remains in the realm of "CPU" coins because nobody taken care of resolving the borderline trivial "complications" they introduced.
Cryptonight is known to have private implementations.

Let's say the others are fine.

Still no BSTY, which is the only coin using a true CPU-oriented hashing system designed from a well-known expert (yescrypt by Solar Designer).

Hmm... You're right. It looks like it hasn't been updated since August 2014 judging by their latest blog post:

http://cpucoinlist.com/big-clean/

I could see that Primecoin was once listed but was removed so I assumed it was updated pretty frequently.

EDIT: Nevermind, it looks like Primecoin was delisted earlier than I thought:


Link: http://cpucoinlist.com/primecoin-eliminated/

Which one is better for mining? Assuming that they could be used, I would assume the answer is AMD since they have those snazzy APUs which Intel lacks?

Wrong. CPU is CPU. APU is CPU+GPU.
To saturate APU you need both a CPU and a GPU coin running on it. It does not accelerate "magically".

Ah, that makes sense. Sometimes I forget that they are really just tiny integrated GPUs mostly separate from the rest of the CPU (despite living on the same die).

CPU is 24x Intel Xeon E5-2620 v2 @ 2.10GHz on a VPS.

Currently mining x11 on a multipool getting 0.95 MH/s

My Dell 2950 2 x Xeon @ 1.8 gets around .75 mhs. half the hashing power compared to the ati 5850 in the same machine @ 1.5 mhs

I'm kind of biased, but I recommend CRE. Low diff, early adoption still. Hasn't even hit an exchange (as of today)

1,000 coins might not be worth much if the altcoin has a tiny market cap or an insanely high coin supply. Most random low difficulty coins probably have both.


If an algorithm has an ASIC already developed for it then I don't see how GPUs could ever catch up. General purpose hardware can't really compete against specialized hardware.



If a coin has a GPU miner built for it, then it's usually the case that GPU mining takes over. Once Bitcoin and Litecoin became dominated by GPUs, CPU mining was no longer recommended. Not all coins have GPU miners yet however.

And sirslayer, were you mining X11? I thought the GPU advantage for X11 was much higher than that.

I got my CPU mining XMR it dosn't get much maybe 2 coins per day, but as my comp is on 24/7 it may as well be doing something.

Lorenzo,  do you know anything about pool hopping?? well I use the cpu to hop around and my ati and nvidia gpus and my gridseeds follows afterwards to pools that are more favourable at the moment. every week its different and x11 was last week and scrypt is this week mining..  I am always mining and searching for different pools and I use my cpu to find the best coins to mine at a givin time..   if its mining good on the cpu then of course pointing my gpus and asics to that pool would be great to mine from... in theory  ... using my cpu is a waste of electricity compare to asics but the cpu is a general purpose device that can emulate all the different hashing codes that can be useful to find different coins and pools to mine from vs of being stuck on one type of code sha256 or scrypt due to asic limitation 

billotronic made this comment


What you are all failing to grasp is that PoW is dead and PoS or similar scheme is the way of the future. You will never get BTC or LTC adopted with the amount of global pollution produced to secure the blockchain. That shit is coming to an ugly end.

Only low cost/low energy blockchain solutions are worth talking about, otherwise you are trying to jb weld the titanic back together.


I live in California and recent laws for solar power is pushing me into installing solar power to my house near Barstow..  and ....  is there a low power mandate for bitcoin wallet overall?? hate to think I will get taxed to death for running a mining farm in my area unless due to power consumption.. the max size i can install is 5000 watts is only allowable to generate from solar power.   looking into a wind power assist but due you think  that the blockchain can also manage or use electric power surplus that you can sell to the electric company and use bitcoin or you have to design a new coin to utilized the electric surplus into a currency??  thats thinking big..   

So $1 per day then? Not bad. That's better than I expected.


Never heard of pool hopping before but then again, my experience with mining altcoins is pretty small. I would have thought that CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs have different requirements and are suited for different algorithms. A gridseed would probably work best in a pool that mines Litecoin or another scrypt-based currency while a GPU might work better if it was pointed towards an Darkcoin/DASH pool or one that mines another X11 coin or perhaps another algorithm such as Scrypt-N.

and if your curious about pool hopping...  here is the pros and cons

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5072/what-is-pool-hopping

 Lorenzo youre correct about cpus, gpus and asic functions ....  just for example if your cpu earning 1 dollar a day at your favorite pool you just discovered  and you upgrade by adding 2 gpus on the same rig and you point your gpus on the same favorite pool.  now your earning 4 dollars a day on the same rig but only at that giving time.. because in time , difficulty, price and maintenance cost can varies at any giving moment and all of a sudden your 4 dollar a day (pc computer) rig is only earning.50 cent a day.    ouch...   explain that to your wife..  you should of been real..  A Bitcoin (SHA256) mining rig is the only profitable solution in the long term and is there any PC computers today that can do SHA256 in hardware??  Its been almost a year since I can mined SHA256 Bitcoin on a home PC... :(   cpu bitcoin mining is dead...

I dis agree with you there, yes its dead to mine BTC of coarse, but you can still turn a little profit on other coins, its just a matter of keeping on top of what is going on, with difficulty, exchange rates etc

Its not easy but can be done ;)

I would fear if your favorite coin to cpu mine that uses sha-3, x-11,n-scrypt or any newer encryption would evolved to an asic soultiion.

Crunck, you are a miner and I can relate ,youre correct and it is hard work!!.