So….. a few years after my previous attempt at CPU mining the Monero crypto-currency I dedicated to give it another try with a few significant changes. Last time I tried this I only used an Lenovo ThinkPad X131e and an HP Probook 4440s and only made $0.56 over the course of a month.
This time I used the following Devices:
On these laptops I was trying to have the most lightweight operating system as possble and mostly used Lubuntu (lightweight Ubuntu), Ubuntu, and also Windows 10. As I was using old End of Life hardware, using the most lightweight operating system made a big different and the devices were able to run the XMR Mining Software without any issues and also provide a half decent hash rate (anywhere from 85 Hashes per Second to 1.3 KiloHash per second per device. All laptops and the mining software ran pretty smoothly throughout the 30 days I was doing this but these machines were strickly dedicated to Monero Mining during this time.
I ran all 6 machines 24/7 for 30 days, but rarely had all machines online and connected to the Monero Mining Pool “Support XMR“. Usually only 4 Machines/Workers were connected and hashing at the same time, and my mining results look as per the above image. I even had these installed on a few raspberry pi’s as well, yet these never were included in the listed workers. I believe that this was mostly related to the low hashrate which I expected.
The only other enhancement I did this time around was had all my workers connected to the internet via Wifi (5 GHz). I was surprised how big of a difference this made, as the speed was so much faster for mining, and also interacting with the laptops seemed pretty smooth. It was also better using using wifi as the amout of space it took to have 6 laptops setup the last thing I wanted was ethernet cables laying around, creating an eye sore and also a tripping hazard.
Results after the 30 days :
| 2022 | 2024 | |
| Monero Mined | 0.002379 | 0.00482625 |
| Monero Price | $235.03 CAD | $164.93 CAD |
| Profit | $0.56 CAD | $0.79 CAD |
While this experiment was enjoyable and provided valuable insights into cryptocurrency mining, it’s clear that CPU mining Monero on old hardware is not profitable, regardless of the number of devices used. Additionally, the power costs exceed $0.79 CAD, and I didn’t even reach the minimum threshold for pool withdrawals.
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