I Mined Monero for 24 Hours with Raspberry Pi

Mining Monero on a Raspberry Pi for 24 Hours

The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. It’s capable of doing everything you’d expect a desktop computer to do, from browsing the internet and playing high-definition video, to making spreadsheets, word-processing, and playing games.

What’s more, the Raspberry Pi has the ability to interact with the outside world, and has been used in a wide array of digital maker projects, from music machines and parent detectors to weather stations and tweeting birdhouses with infra-red cameras. We want to see the Raspberry Pi being used by kids all over the world to learn to program and understand how computers work.

Monero (/məˈnɛroʊ/; Abbreviation: XMR) is a decentralized cryptocurrency. It uses a public distributed ledger with privacy-enhancing technologies that obfuscate transactions to achieve anonymity and fungibility. Observers cannot decipher addresses trading monero, transaction amounts, address balances, or transaction histories.

The protocol is open source and based on CryptoNote, a concept described in a 2013 white paper authored by Nicolas van Saberhagen. The cryptography community used this concept to design Monero, and deployed its mainnet in 2014. Monero uses ring signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, “stealth addresses”, and IP address–obscuring methods to obfuscate transaction details. These features are baked into the protocol, though users can optionally share view keys for third-party auditing. Transactions are validated through a miner network running RandomX, a proof-of-work algorithm. The algorithm issues new coins to miners, and was designed to be resistant to application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining.

Monero has the third-largest developer community among cryptocurrencies, behind Bitcoin and Ethereum. Its privacy features have attracted cypherpunks and users desiring privacy measures not provided in other cryptocurrencies. It is increasingly used in illicit activities such as money laundering, darknet markets, ransomware, and cryptojacking. The United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has posted bounties for contractors that can develop monero-tracing technologies.[2]