Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys,

im very new to this and have just bought some coins, the new form of currency excites me.

Im sure this is a silly question but is it possible to mine BTC on my mac?

Thankyou.

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Yes, but it will hardly be profitable for you (will not cover your electricity costs). The competition with specialized hardware is just too large.
You might look into alternative cryptocurrencies (possibly YAC), where Mining on non-specialized hardware is still slightly more worthwhile.

To add to what the previous poster said, at the current price of Bitcoins it is still marginally profitable to mine on a Mac if you have a relatively recent AMD graphics card that has decent hashing power. See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#Card_Comparison_Spreadsheet to find out what works best.
Generally, Bitcoin mining is moving to specialized hardware that will use less electricity for a lot more hashing power. Since Bitcoin is designed to only release a certain number of coins over a defined period of time, as a result the difficulty to find a block is rising and soon commodity hardware will no longer be able to mine at a profit, unless of course the price of Bitcoins goes up dramatically.

If you want to mine on a Mac, I recommend that you do it under Windows in Boot Camp, if you can. CGMiner will run in OS X, but your hash rates will be somewhat lower. I hear that this is due to Apple's OpenCL being broken in some way.

wow thankyou for your replies everyone,

I will look into YAC,
and I didnt know the the difficulty of mining rises, I wonder what will happen if the price doesn't go up and people stop mining.

I dont think ill bother trying on this computer, instead ill save for a better one and then mine.

Well if people stop mining, the difficulty goes down again, making it easier to mine. But I don't think people will stop mining, just that it will take some upfront investment in ASIC based mining gear to mine profitably. So it makes it a bit harder for the average user to just mine for a few coins...

I you should try mining alt coins like powercoin. Mining btc is not profitable anymore without specialize hardware.

I don't think you'll even get 1/2 a coin if you left your Mac on all year.

For CPUs and GPUs, you need to look out for new altcoins, and mine them from the begining. I saw someone who made $4,000 (several months wages for them) by mining FeatherCoin from the off.