Learning to mine Bitcoin is easier than it might be initially portrayed, I’d put a bigger concern on the fact that you might be thinking of Bitcoin as a very easy way to generate some money. In a sense, it is true, but I’ve to put it out there – Mac computers aren’t really built for mining Bitcoins.
However, there are several tools out there that have been built specifically for this purpose alone – to help you get started with mining Bitcoin on a Mac computer. I’m going to try and be as short and sweet as possible, unfortunately – all these tools have documentations the length of the great wall of china. I doubt you’d want to go over the same thing as many as five times.
Bitcoin is a digital currency, a protocol, and open-source software and enables instant worldwide peer to peer transactions for little or no processing fees and no risk of chargebacks or fraud while being immune to seizure or confiscation.
It is the currency of the future, the only thing left to do is to learn more about, learn to make it work for ourselves, and perhaps even integrate it within our own businesses. It seems to be working for so many people, and large companies keep taking the initiative to try the digital currency out. Peer pressure is what’s it all about!
1. cgminer
cgminer is a combined FPGA and ASIC bitcoin miner written in C, cross platform for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, with stratum support, remote interface capabilities, support for multiple simultaneous mining devices, and advanced caching and detection algorithms that maximize cryptocoin mining efficiency.
It’s not a GUI application, which might turn away some potential new miners, but luckily for that special bunch – the same author of cgminer has built another mining tool for Mac users, and it provides a perfectly usable graphical interface. Here it is.
2. Asteroid
It is one of the easiest to use tools when it comes to mining Bitcoin, and also Litecoin on your Mac. The tool is built on top of Mac OS X technology, alongisde the cgminer backend which provides for a powerful and flexible mining experience. A new Mac will provide the optimal mining speeds for both currencies.
In case you’re paranoid about someone taking all the credit for the mining you’ve done, the project is fully open-source and can be previewed and inspected at any given time.
3. Basically a Freaking Good Miner
This is a multi-threaded multi-pool ASIC, FPGA, GPU and CPU miner with dynamic clocking, monitoring, and fanspeed support for bitcoin. Do not use on multiple block chains at the same time! Once again, this is not an application that has a smooth and easy to use GUI; but I find that the command line options for this tool are very easy to use.
You just have to enter the pool address and port, username and password and you’re pretty much ready to go. I’d actually recommend this for beginners, just so they can see their full mining potential of their Mac computers.
4. MacMiner
MacMiner is built on top of Mac OS X, and provides a seamless mining experience that utilizes every aspect of what the Mac has to offer. It works beautifully with Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and many, many more online cryptocurrencies. It does have a friendly GUI to play with, and while the community forums isn’t very active – it does provide some support.
Speaking of communities, I recently published a post about the most popular Bitcoin forums and communities, and I cannot recommend enough to take a look at them, and perhaps even become a member on some of them. You’ll find someone on those forums to help you with all of the tools in the list, and for example; the official Bitcoin Talk forum has a separate section dedicated to this exact subject – digital currency miners!
5. Bitminter
The last tool on our list comes integrated with its own mining pool. I’d recommend this for anyone who’s looking to see their potential for earning some buck using their Mac computer. It is as easy as signing up, and utilizing the custom built Java client for starting to mine Bitcoins.
You can also download their offered client options, like cgminer which we already discussed, among a couple of others that can be found on Bitcoin Talk. They don’t provide a Bitcoin wallet, so you’ll have to find that elsewhere.
Mining Bitcoins on Your Mac
There we have it, a solid list of tools that will keep you busy for at least a couple of days. You should be able to figure out which one works the best for you after a couple of tries to mine. Like I said, a Mac computer isn’t really the ideal technology for mining.
You’ll find plenty of articles online that discuss the sheer power of mining Bitcoins in a united pool, some companies are making millions just by being hosts of these pools, and the people who join to mine are definitely using more power than a single Mac can produce.
I did some research and studying on this, and found that some people are able to sell their Bitcoin mining rigs for as much as $15,000, but then again – such a rig can produce power of up to 3TH/s.
