Bitcoin and Monero

When I first heard about Bitcoin (8 years ago), I thought it would pass. It didn’t and I’m one of those suckers who’s thinking “why didn’t I just get a couple when they were worth nothing…”

But, better late than never!

Bitcoin #

I wanted to learn more about Bitcoin, so I bought a small amount and lo-and-behold: it got transferred into my wallet. A couple of hours later on Wikipedia/Youtube and I think I’ve got a pretty good idea how it works.

That’s it for Bitcoin, it’s too established to really do something ‘interesting’ with it (or invest in it, IMHO).

Monero #

Monero is an alt-coin, which is constructed in a more privacy-concerned manner than Bitcoin. But that’s not the reason I got interested in it; The other interesting property is that the coin is designed so that ‘mining’ is more CPU-friendly.

For Bitcoin, the best mining happens on specifically designed machines (ASICs) and 2nd best happens on GPU. For Monero, it’s still possible to do decent mining (generating random hashes) on a CPU.

Which is interesting for two reasons:

• I get to play around with it (I have an old GPU, but a decent CPU)
• the naughty people online can steal your processing power with javascript to generate coins

The latter reason is why I think Monero has a shot towards becoming a viable coin as well 😁

Mining Monero #

After about an hour I managed to compile both the GPU and CPU miner for Monero on OSX. Now I could find out for myself the Hash-rate difference between CPU and GPU!

Interestingly, the GPU miner completely locks up my computer but spits out a rather disappointing 10.5 H/s (NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 512 MB).

As expected, the CPU fares a lot better: 37 H/s per core! My i7 has 4 cores, so if I leave one for myself, I get a nice 111 H/s without locking my computer up. According to the Monero IRC my processor would fare even better on Linux/Windows because of optimization in xmr.

Mine for yourself #

If you want to join the cool kids and mine some Monero, you can do so on my blog. Apparently my blog gets listed as ‘unsafe’ because of the CoinHive-script 😒, so I’ve disabled it.

my computer averages 60 H/s in javascript, higher is better! To stop mining, simply refresh the page

Send me some e-dough #

If you like, you can send me some Monero:

45wPmJdbfy6ALtNBQPbgMBEdmzA6KrhRGdgKUJ4wqXSdg5Nm77qxrPzNQRr7vXok4HCXQqYCYbtaBAFMb6iujU45T7wxYSs

For sending me Bitcoin, let me know and I’ll generate you a link 😇