this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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I thought Monero was designed to be mined on CPU.
Even if the algorithm will perform better on CPUs than other crypto algorithms, there's still the fact that the processor in a GPU is much less complex and so: many more tasks can run in parallel because they're all very similar, the bus is much shorter, bandwidth to memory is much higher, and memory is generally much higher performing. So overall, mining on a GPU will generally be more energy efficient than on a CPU. And of course crypto becomes harder and harder to mine as they grow, by design.
What I've read about mining Monero, specifically, is that CPU is so much better, no one uses GPU for it.
Right, but taxing a CPU, PC Bus, and PC memory takes more electricity than doing the same amount of "work" on a GPU with longer, more specialized pathways, allowing more work on a single cycle, but less flexibility on the type of work. So if it takes 1hr fully taxing a CPU, PC bus, etc, vs 1 hour fully taxing a GPU and its integrated memory and bus, the one using the GPU is going to take more electricity. Also, you can chain GPUs which can't be done the same with CPUs since GPUs all have their own discrete bus and memory on a single card. Problem became that GPU production couldn't keep up with demand so they became more expensive for the hardware, but overall, the cost of electricity vs value of the blocks combined with producing fewer blocks on a CPU once the chains reach a similar complexity as a competing cryptocurrency, means that overall you're more likely to make more profit from GPU based mining than CPU based mining.
It's a complex calculation to figure out and many people mine without realizing the money they're spending on electricity, home cooling, and parts wear is more than they're making on the crypyo.
You sound like you know a lot about it. Have you done Monero mining? I looked into it and figured I'd be losing a little bit due to electricity costs, but it might be worth it anyway. No worse than the exchange rate between two currencies.
The issue with any crypto mining is that you can't uaually do it casually. You are generally competing with others to return the result first in order to get paid for a block. If you mine too slowly, you'll never actually complete any blocks. If you mine too fast, you use a lot of energy. The only way I found it economical for an average person over the long term is if it's not a popular coin, but popular enough to have some value or you generate a lot of excess power from solar and your power company either doesn't buy it or the rate is miserably low. There are short term scenarios where it can work, but much like the stock market, you need to be paying very close attention to profit margins, power rates, crypto price, current local temperature, etc.