<p>After the creation of specialized hardware, created <em>ex-professo</em> for mining bitcoins, difficulty has climbed so high that it's not profitable to mine them in anything but an ASIC (if you can afford it). Anything else and you'll lose money or barely pay the electricity consumption.</p>

<p>Plus, it's definitely <strong>NOT</strong> recommended to do mining on a laptop - having either the GPU or the CPU running at 100% the whole day long produces a lot of heat and will significantly reduce the life-span of components. </p>

<p>Having said that, if just for fun, you could try mining Primecoin, Protoshares or Quarkcoin some hours a day - they're minable only with CPU (for now). Or better yet: mine a scrypt-based with your graphic card (it's usually much more profitable). Maybe mine dogecoins for 3-4 hours a day - Dogecoin and the dog meme are fun :)</p>

<p>Just don't expect you'll get a lot of any coin mining partial-time.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-12-28T20:40:31.913Z
What about malwares who might have thousands of infected PCs doing mining?
Shubham
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-12-26T20:13:08.447Z
2013-12-26T20:13:08.447Z
Joe Pineda
<p>At 2MH/s, you should average about one share every 95 minutes. So running for just 30 minutes gives you less than a 50% chance of finding a share. Right now, a share is worth about .000000021 Bitcoins (about 625 shares to the penny). So in about two weeks, you should mine about one penny worth of Bitcoins.</p>

<p>You're competing against people who have hardware that is 100% optimized for mining Bitcoins from the ground up.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-12-27T00:17:08.610Z
2017-04-21T10:38:53.660Z
2017-04-21T10:38:53.660Z
David Schwartz
<p>I have a MacBook Air running 10.7(Lion) with an Intel Core i5 processor</p>

<p>I want to try to mine bitcoins for fun. I understand that I alone will probably not be able to get any bitcoins from mining so I registered for some mining pools (Slush's pool, BTC Guild) and tried various applications to try to mine (MacMiner, guiminer, and cgminer)</p>

<p>For all of these, I am able to connect to the mining url with my credentials. guiminer shows that I have a speed of about 2 MH/s. However, nothing else seems to happen even after running these programs for about half an hour. I don't seem to be contributing to any of these pools.</p>

<p>Can someone tell me what is going on wrong?</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-12-26T19:19:53.697Z
look into mining an alternate currency that is designed to be mine via CPU such as primecoin or protoshares and then convert to BTC using an exchange
Mark S.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-12-26T19:26:53.090Z
You really need specialised hardware to mine bitcoins. See this question for some more help: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/118/how-much-bitcoin-will-i-mine-right-now-with-hardware-x
Highly Irregular
<mining-profitability><hashpower><cpu-mining>
How fast does a processor have to be to mine bitcoins
Harrison
# How fast does a processor have to be to mine bitcoins

(Asked by: username_0 on 2013-12-26)

I have a MacBook Air running 10.7(Lion) with an Intel Core i5 processor

I want to try to mine bitcoins for fun. I understand that I alone will probably not be able to get any bitcoins from mining so I registered for some mining pools (Slush's pool, BTC Guild) and tried various applications to try to mine (MacMiner, guiminer, and cgminer)

For all of these, I am able to connect to the mining url with my credentials. guiminer shows that I have a speed of about 2 MH/s. However, nothing else seems to happen even after running these programs for about half an hour. I don't seem to be contributing to any of these pools.

Can someone tell me what is going on wrong?

**Tags:** mining-profitability, hashpower, cpu-mining

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: look into mining an alternate currency that is designed to be mine via CPU such as primecoin or protoshares and then convert to BTC using an exchange  
> **username_2**: You really need specialised hardware to mine bitcoins. See this question for some more help: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/118/how-much-bitcoin-will-i-mine-right-now-with-hardware-x  

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## 2 answers

### Answer by username_3 on 2013-12-26. Score: 2 | Accepted answer

After the creation of specialized hardware, created *ex-professo* for mining bitcoins, difficulty has climbed so high that it's not profitable to mine them in anything but an ASIC (if you can afford it). Anything else and you'll lose money or barely pay the electricity consumption.

Plus, it's definitely **NOT** recommended to do mining on a laptop - having either the GPU or the CPU running at 100% the whole day long produces a lot of heat and will significantly reduce the life-span of components.

Having said that, if just for fun, you could try mining Primecoin, Protoshares or Quarkcoin some hours a day - they're minable only with CPU (for now). Or better yet: mine a scrypt-based with your graphic card (it's usually much more profitable). Maybe mine dogecoins for 3-4 hours a day - Dogecoin and the dog meme are fun :)

Just don't expect you'll get a lot of any coin mining partial-time.

> **Comments:**
> **username_4**: What about malwares who might have thousands of infected PCs doing mining?  

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### Answer by username_5 on 2013-12-27. Score: 1

At 2MH/s, you should average about one share every 95 minutes. So running for just 30 minutes gives you less than a 50% chance of finding a share. Right now, a share is worth about .000000021 Bitcoins (about 625 shares to the penny). So in about two weeks, you should mine about one penny worth of Bitcoins.

You're competing against people who have hardware that is 100% optimized for mining Bitcoins from the ground up.


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