Bitcoin Forum

I know that everyone strongly recommends against CPU mining, however, I would like to know if CPU mining is still possible however inefficient it may be?  CGMiner appears to have dropped support for CPU mining even though there is a CPU version that is still included as of 3.3.1:

Q: What happened to CPU mining?
A: Being increasingly irrelevant for most users, and a maintenance issue, it is
no longer under active development and will not be supported. No binary builds
supporting CPU mining will be released. Virtually all remaining users of CPU
mining are as back ends for illegal botnets. The main reason cgminer is being
inappopriately tagged as a virus by antivirus software is due to the trojans
packaging a CPU mining capable version of it. There is no longer ANY CPU mining
code in cgminer. If you are mining bitcoin with CPU today, you are spending
1000x more in electricity costs than you are earning in bitcoin.

Are there any other mining programs that still do CPU mining for either bitcoin or litecoin?

In terms of BTC yes, CPUs put out less than 10 % than average GPU's can manage. in todays markets even GPU mining becoming a outdated system. with the level of difficulty we experience now even the highest end GPU only have the potential to break even after a few months.
However that being said the alternative currencies will beging to demand the physical hard ware again. BTC is on the way to dedicated hardware only. other coins might be back at CPU mining and then make a similar progression much like BTC.

this i trusts counts as substance...

Cpu mining is done. Difficulty is way too high now for it to be viable. If you want to use a cpu miner, best advice is to go for LiteCoin.

Yeah man I hate to be the bearer of bad news but cpu mining in now completely obsolete. Your gpu is just so much better for mining. if you are going to mine for coins which is really hard to do now because of the difficulty you need to go gpu or go home.

CPU on litecoin barely does anything anymore. If you have a CPU, go to primecoin or quarkcoin.

There is a CPU litecoin

Go CPU Bitcoin! ;D

No, not really. But you could cpu new coins when they come out

intel cpu mining??

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-sha-extensions

Yes.

CPU mine Primecoins, sell for Bitcoins.

XPM is the only cpu-mined coin.

Even the question itself is phased out. Sorry you are very late to the party of CPU mining. Try again after you invest a time machine.

Litecoin CPU miner: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55038.0

mistery:  blocks are endless?


bitcoins: are limited?? (they have a cap)


someday... something... will happen!

Primecoin was a blast at first with CPU.  Lots of fun were had.  But now even it is slowing down pretty quick.

Once GPU is made for it(assuming it happens) it will blow CPU away.

Miners are paid BOTH the block subsidy + transaction fees.

2009 - 50 BTC subsidy + ~0 BTC tx fees.
2013 - 25 BTC subsidy + ~0.25 BTC tx fees.
2017 - 12.5 BTC subsidy + ~?? BTC tx fees
2137 - 1 satoshi subsidy (0.00000001 BTC) + ?? BTC tx fees.
2140 - 0 BTC subsidy + ?? BTC tx fees.

You can use pooler's cpu miner if you would like to give it a go. It will not mine fast but if electricity is free and the computer is on already something is better than nothing. With the Alt-coins you will be able to still get some shares accepted by a pool if you join one.

If I had a time machine I would go back to early 2009 and bring my laptop along (which incidentily was built in 2009) with my Block Erupter. It would have made all the cryptonerds who were mining back then crazy and me very rich! Then forward to August last year and buy as much AM shares as I could afford (at least 10 board seats worth). ;D

Or maybe go to the future first to see how everything will pan out in the long run. :D

You could mine Fastcoins or another newer coin with a CPU.

To respond to the topic starter's last question (are there still miners that will do CPU mining):
Yes there are. At least the client provided by Bitminter still supports CPU mining out of the box.
However, while still included, it is not being actively developed and hence it will be quite slow.

I tried it once, just for fun, on an Athlon64 X2 3800EE (dualcore 2Ghz) and it did around 300Kh/s.
Compared to Bitcoin.it's hardware comparison page, this is very low and with a good miner it should be able to do around 1.5Mh/s (around 5x faster)
(source: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#AMD)

Still, compared to a GPU, it just doesn't cut it.
Even a low power Radeon HD7750 (120Mh/s) will outrun any CPU, even if it's an 8core Intel i7 (70Mh/s).
Then you should consider the fact that a Radeon HD7750 will only draw about 50 watts when running at max, and that is only a third of a Core i7.

It just isn't profitable, that's the whole reason why people have abandoned CPU mining for Bitcoin and Litecoin.

there are only 2 coins that you can cpu mine for (some) profit: primecoin and quarkcoin. as long as they don't offer gpu mining

That is correct and the good news is coders are having slight difficulty making GPU miners for these coins so CPU should be good for a long time still

Thanks for all the feedback

Do you know if it's still possible to do CPU mining for Litecoin?  It seems like there's a lot of talk about GPU mining for LTC, although I thought I remember a mention that LTC was supposed to be less resource intensive than BTC.

its actually the opposite, more resource intensive. a cpu on bitcoin such as the i5 processor i have gets about 5.4 mhps, where as on litecoin the same cpu gets about 4.8 kh equating to a 10% of what it can get on bitcoin. however on scrypt jane, this same cpu gets 50 khs, making it cpu mineable.