Macs are highly productive and performance oriented, suitable for work, school or just casual use. Macs are famous for their sleek design pushing the edge of personal computing. It's hardware is made from highly durable materials with the best componentry available. The formidable construction houses Apples' best of breed MacOS operating system.
The question remains though, with all it's attention to design and performance,
'Can I mine with my MacBook or MacBook Pro?'
While it is technically possible to mine Bitcoin on a Mac or MacBook Pro, sadly it is no longer profitable to do so. There is no denying that in the distant past it was possible to mine profitably Bitcoin with a Mac.
~Times, they are a changin!
Bob Dylan
The algorithm that governs Bitcoin hasn't changed since its inception in 2009, but the growth of this legendary cryptocurrency and it's processing intensive blockchain has grown exponentially. The constantly increasing complexity of the calculations involved, along with phenomenal growth of the network quickly began to outpace the profitability of mining using typical CPUs.
To answer the traffic demands for processing the influx of transactions for Bitcoin's blockchain, a new processor architecture became apparent.
While Macs bring beauty and performance into balance for the end user, this platform falls far short when it comes to battling the modern Blockchain. To meet the fearsome task of taming the Bitcoin tiger, miners rely heavily on ASIC processors to perform the lion's share of the work required to wrangle each precious Satoshi into their wallets.
Grandpa Bruce, tell me how you mined Bitcoin again. Please!
Well kids, gather around for a bit of a history lesson. Back in my day, around 2009 enterprising young minds could fire up their laptops, point it to a mining pool and mine about 50 Bitcoin in a single day. There were no corporate or government sponsored farms, there was very little value and only pockets of minor adoption for cryptocurrencies. I would sit out on my front porch, enjoying a cup of coffee with your Grandma, Bambi --- boy she was wild! She’d do this one thing --- wait, sorry. Ok, mining on a laptop with a CPU was great but it only lasted for awhile, much like my marriage to Bambi.
So a year or so later some developers in the crypto community discovered that GPUs were much faster at mining Bitcoin than lazy old generalized CPUs. They could hash 3-4-5x’s the number of Bitcoin in the same amount of time. It wasn’t long thereafter that yet another developer discovered that mining could go even faster using FPGA hardware and that put the dust on the GPU miners. While everyone was clamoring for more Bitcoin, it was the Chinese manufacturers who brought about ASIC processor to fit the bill. See kids the ASIC processor was formed in the heart of a dying star. That gave it more power to crunch the numbers faster than any of its predecessors.
The ASIC processor was quickly adopted as the de facto standard for mining and the hashrates would never be the same for Bitcoin. It was in the land of Terahashes and Petahashes now where the real money was to be made. The “fuck you” money! The lambo-in-every color money. That was 2013 and the world would never be the same.
With that little history lesson at the knee of Grandpa Satoshi, we learn that even today’s most powerful Mac equipped with the latest and greatest processor can’t even hold a torch to the weakest of profitable ASIC processors. So what is a small scale miner to do? Where can the fledgling wanna-be crypto billionaire go to reap the untold fortunes of the ever changing cryptosphere?
Alt-Coins my boy, Alt-Coins!
There is no doubt that mining can be profitable and fun however, the startup costs associated with getting into mining can be daunting. This is most likely why you began reading this article. What can you mine with your Mac for little to no startup costs? The truth as we’ve discovered is that mining Bitcoin, while possible is most likely not going to be at all profitable for you. Luckily, there are still a ton of alt-coins that you can mine with relatively little effort or additional expense with your Mac.
If you solely have a Mac and just want to get started mining, I’d recommend you checkout mining coins using only your CPU power. Coins like Monero (XMR), Raven(RVN), UPlexa (UPX), XCash (XCASH) or other coins based on the RandomX, X16R or CryptoNight algorithms. We will have an article that goes into further detail about these profitable approaches to mining solely based on CPU power alone. Here to though, don’t expect to break the bank anytime soon. CPU mining also is a pay-for-profit endeavor. The newer & faster CPUs you can apply to your mining operation the better your results will be. Some of the fastest procs to get the job done are from AMD, although Intel has some respectable procs that will churn out some coin too. In future articles we will discuss the use, makes & models of various CPUs for mining.
If you have a bit a cash to start with though and are itching to get to mining the latest and greatest alt coins, the best route to go would be GPU mining. GPU mining alt-coins is very profitable especially now given the price of Ethereum. Graphics cards built for speed like the NVidia 3090 or the latest RX 6900 XT from AMD can earn a pretty penny when it comes to mining. A typical 6 card rig will set you back though. Just to get set up you will need a mining motherboard, a couple of good PSUs, riser cards and of course, your graphics cards. It is the author’s opinion that it’s best to also run with a mining operating system like HiveOS or NiceHashOS. These will streamline your boot time and specialize your mining efforts for maximum profit. You won’t be able to game but in the author’s opinion, a specialized box set to the side dedicated to mining would best serve the need.
In future articles, we will discuss and review specific cards and how they can be utilized for profit. For now though the key take-aways from this article are the following:
Mining is profitable.
You can start now even with a Mac.
You can start small and work your way to larger rigs for mining crypto currencies.