Recommendation Request: Mining Crypto on Idle Hardware (No GPU)

I have hardware in a datacenter that is often underutilized. No GPUs, but I have several ~3ghz cores/threads available and dozens of GB of memory. I always wondered if it was worth mining monero in a vm to monetize the the hardware when idle. Electricity is all paid for, so no additional cost there…

I have no experience with crypto, so just looking for some recommendations or if it’s a complete waste of time, please let me know. That said, I kind of want to try it out for the experience even if it’s only making a few dollars a month or something.

So, my question is what currency is suited for this and how should I go about mining it?

There is no currency worth mining these days on CPU.

Only true if you have to pay for hardware and electricity. Since OP already has the “Hardware” and Pays for Electricity anyways, mining any crypto currency is 100% net income.
I have no clue what to go for though.

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I’ll probably try monero if no one comes up with a compelling alternative.

Interested in this, as I have some spare hardware laying around too. Please let us know how everything goes, and what you do to get things setup.

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I dont know about crypto but if its new enough hardware and in a nice location, I would rent it out to people.

I’m thinking game servers and such.

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I would do that , but I periodically do need to use all/most of it. The crypto thing would be a vm that I turn on and off based on workload.

I’ll post updates here. I will most likely try to setup monero mining with the base tools in cli. I’m assuming I’ll need to join a pool, although if I don’t have to, I won’t. I’d like to go through the whole process of managing the wallet myself.

then just blame the datacenter’s ISP for the lag.

gg no re

I only suggest that because I feel like it would be more profitable than crypto. Anything with a difficulty that would be feasible on CPU only would also probably not be worth much. :man_shrugging:

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I totally agree, but again, it doesn’t work for me in this case. The datacenter hardware is half client services and half testbed. I can’t tell someone that I’m taking their VMs down for a few days because I need to run some tests…

That said, in the future I’d be totally open to hosting, but I’d want to have something more robust for that (ceph/openstack probably). Currently I’m still messing around with different hypervisors and generally doing a lot of experimentation.

You are also forgetting minimal time investment, which is too high for any single cpu VPS to even care about.

Dust you breath is better than nothing, but you will still go hungry.

That’s why I figured joining a pool would be necessary so I don’t have to mine a whole coin to get anything.

There exists coinsat are better suited foe CPU mining than monero, ,I’ve forgotten their names though. Also, it is quite possible that they’ve been weeded out after the slight correction in 2018.

Therefore, due to it’s robustness (in terms of longetivity) monero might he a decemt choice after all.

You could also hold onto your coins and speculate that their price rises in the mid/long term.

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Yeah, I won’t spend them. Most I’ll do is convert to other crypto.

Could also run Folding@Home for the good cause, and get some FoldingCoin and/or CureCoin alongside it :stuck_out_tongue:

actually just interested in this

/edit
actually would be interesting if you could get tax credit for that since you’re technically donating something :thinking:

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If crypto currency was a reward for F@H, then I would be all for it. As is, Crypto is a waste of power.

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Well for F@H alone you get nothing besides e-penis points. FLCD and CURE are rewarded based on how many points you got. So you really don’t loose anything.

The question that remains though, is if participating in a PoS system wouldn’t yield greater profits. However, there is always the initial stake that needs to be tackled…
But with PoW, I doubt something like Monero will be profitable, but you could do some calculations before starting :wink:

@mihawk90’s idea is also nice :slight_smile:

I beg to differ :wink:

S=?

Storage?

Out of left field and potentially off topic, but have you considered trading on the market instead of mining?

Like high frequency trading? How do I do that?