How to Mine Monero

Short answer: Monero is mined with a CPU, not a graphics card or an ASIC. Install XMRig, point it at a mining pool or at P2Pool with your Monero wallet address, and it starts earning small, regular payouts. Solo mining is possible from the official wallet, but on home hardware a solo block is a long wait. Whether any of it is worth doing comes down to one number: what your electricity costs against what your hash rate earns.

Why Monero is still mined on ordinary computers

Since November 2019 Monero has used a proof-of-work algorithm called RandomX. It makes each hash run a randomly generated program that leans on a general-purpose processor's cache, branch prediction and memory, which is exactly what a CPU is built for and what a specialised mining chip is not. The result is deliberate: GPUs mine RandomX poorly, ASICs have no meaningful edge, and the best Monero miner per watt is usually a modern desktop or server CPU.

That keeps mining open to anyone with a computer, and it spreads the network's hash rate across many small miners instead of a few industrial farms. It is also why "Monero mining rig" means something different from Bitcoin: a rig here is a box with a high-core-count CPU and plenty of fast RAM, not a shelf of graphics cards.

What you need

• A Monero wallet address. Mining rewards are paid to it. Use a wallet you hold the keys for; our guide to the best Monero wallets covers which. Check which address formats your pool accepts; some take only a primary address (the kind that starts with 4), not a subaddress. Our explainer on what a Monero address looks like shows the difference.
• A CPU with enough cache. RandomX wants about 2 MB of L3 cache per mining thread, so cache size decides how many threads are worth running. A chip with 32 MB of L3 can usefully run around 16.
• Memory. The fast mode keeps a dataset of a little over 2 GB in RAM. Dual-channel memory helps noticeably over a single stick.
• Mining software. XMRig is the standard open-source miner. Expect antivirus software to flag it: miners are a favourite payload for malware, so security tools treat the category with suspicion. Download it only from the project's own site or repository.

Three ways to mine

1. A mining pool

You contribute hash rate to a pool, the pool finds blocks far more often than you could alone, and it pays you a share of each in proportion to your work, minus a fee. You get small, frequent payouts instead of a rare large one. Setup is a few lines in XMRig's config: the pool's address, your wallet address and a worker name. The trade-off is trust and concentration. The pool holds your earnings until they reach its payout threshold, and a few large pools control much of the network's hash rate.

2. P2Pool

P2Pool is a decentralised pool: miners run it alongside their own Monero node, and blocks found by anyone in the pool pay everyone directly in the block's own reward transaction. There is no operator to hold your earnings, no account and no pool fee. It asks more of you, since you need a fully synced Monero node running beside it. For a small miner, its "mini" or "nano" side-chains keep payouts frequent despite a low hash rate.

3. Solo mining

The official Monero GUI wallet has a mining tab, and the node software takes a start_mining command. Solo mining keeps the whole reward when you find a block, but the odds for one home computer are long: expect to go months, or far longer, without a block. It is how the network should be secured in principle and a poor way to earn in practice. Solo mining makes sense for a large miner, or for someone who wants to support the network and does not mind the wait.

How much a CPU earns

The arithmetic is simple, even though the inputs change daily. Monero produces a block about every two minutes, which is 720 a day, and each block currently pays a fixed tail-emission reward of 0.6 XMR plus transaction fees. So roughly 432 XMR a day is split among all miners in proportion to hash rate:

Your daily XMR ≈ 432 × (your hash rate ÷ network hash rate)

Take the current network hash rate from a block explorer or a pool's stats page. Then work out the cost side: your machine's extra power draw while mining, in kilowatts, times 24 hours, times your price per kWh. Compare the two at the current XMR price.

For hash rate, a modern 8-core desktop CPU typically lands somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 hashes per second depending on its generation and cache, and large-cache, high-core-count chips go well past that. Enabling huge pages in the operating system and in XMRig is the single biggest free improvement; benchmark your own machine rather than trusting a table.

Most people who run the numbers find the same thing: on residential electricity, mining earns little more than it costs, and often less. It pays best where power is cheap or free, on hardware that is already running anyway, or in a cold room where the heat is welcome.

Mining on a laptop, a phone or someone else's machine

• Laptops mine, but sustained full load means heat and battery wear for a few cents a day. It is fine for trying it out, not for running permanently.
• Phones cannot mine at any rate worth the battery. Apps promising phone mining income are, at best, misleading.
• Hardware you do not own is off-limits. Running a miner on an employer's, school's or anyone else's computers without permission is cryptojacking, which is unlawful in most places and the main reason miners are flagged as malware.

Why mined Monero is the most private Monero

Coins bought on an exchange arrive with a record: the exchange knows who bought how much, when, and which address it was withdrawn to. Mined coins have no purchase record at all. They are created in the block reward and paid straight to your wallet. Combined with Monero's protocol-level privacy, mined XMR is about as clean a starting point as the asset offers.

That record only stays clean if you keep it that way when you spend. Selling mined XMR on an exchange that has your passport re-attaches your name at the exit. Swapping it with no account keeps the chain of custody yours: XMR to BTC for the most widely accepted coin, XMR to USDT to fix the value in dollars, or any of the other routes on the Monero exchange pairs page. Mined outputs unlock after 60 blocks, about two hours, so a fresh payout cannot be spent the moment it arrives.