Mining it for two or three weeks usually pays my 3 month plan at airvpn, with a modern AMD processor, not sure how the modern intel processors mine. It’s probably the best way to anonymously obtain xmr. Xmrig has good documentation and is fairly easy to set up. Cake wallet has a way to purchase crypto with a cc, but not xmr directly, would have to purchase litecoin then swap to xmr in the app.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
56 points (88.9% liked)
Privacy
38787 readers
515 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Mining isn’t economically worth it and it’s also bad for your components' health as well as the environment
Mining on a cpu is much less taxing than a gpu, and if you do it intermittently and do not run all cores there’s no additional strain on hardware.
20€ worth of XMR will still be more than 20€ worth of electricity. It ends up the same.
$20 of xmr is no where near $20 of electricity in the states, and having solar helps that number even more.
I believe if it was worth it to mine, everyone would do it until it is not anymore, especially in countries where electricity is extra cheap
After testing on my machine, I ended up losing more than 10x the amount I paid in electricity in France. I’m not sure it’ll be better elsewhere. This was at 0.20€/kWh
Not everyone knows it’s worth it to do it. Fully understand where you are coming from, it’s not viable in some countries right now.
solar helps that number even more
Wouldn't that assume you are not using all the electricity coming from your panels?
Correct, it does assume you took that power usage into consideration
Not sure that's true. And mining on a CPU is even less efficient. Your hash rate will be way lower unless you've got a really high-end system with a really low latency bus and RAM. And if your hashrate is too low, it would take months for you to find a single block unless you're pooling with a bunch of others and splitting the profit. It's quite variable, but very, very few people can make profit on any popular coins. Too many people to compete with to find a block.
Oh and don't forget cooling cost. The fans in the computer, the fans in your house, and your air conditioner in your house need to disipate the heat and there's a lot more generated per clock cycle from a CPU than a GPU using comperably old technologies. If you live somewhere that you're producing more electricity with solar than you consume, then it's probably not a cold climate.
I thought Monero was designed to be mined on CPU.
Even if the algorithm will perform better on CPUs than other crypto algorithms, there's still the fact that the processor in a GPU is much less complex and so: many more tasks can run in parallel because they're all very similar, the bus is much shorter, bandwidth to memory is much higher, and memory is generally much higher performing. So overall, mining on a GPU will generally be more energy efficient than on a CPU. And of course crypto becomes harder and harder to mine as they grow, by design.
What I've read about mining Monero, specifically, is that CPU is so much better, no one uses GPU for it.
Right, but taxing a CPU, PC Bus, and PC memory takes more electricity than doing the same amount of "work" on a GPU with longer, more specialized pathways, allowing more work on a single cycle, but less flexibility on the type of work. So if it takes 1hr fully taxing a CPU, PC bus, etc, vs 1 hour fully taxing a GPU and its integrated memory and bus, the one using the GPU is going to take more electricity. Also, you can chain GPUs which can't be done the same with CPUs since GPUs all have their own discrete bus and memory on a single card. Problem became that GPU production couldn't keep up with demand so they became more expensive for the hardware, but overall, the cost of electricity vs value of the blocks combined with producing fewer blocks on a CPU once the chains reach a similar complexity as a competing cryptocurrency, means that overall you're more likely to make more profit from GPU based mining than CPU based mining.
It's a complex calculation to figure out and many people mine without realizing the money they're spending on electricity, home cooling, and parts wear is more than they're making on the crypyo.
You sound like you know a lot about it. Have you done Monero mining? I looked into it and figured I'd be losing a little bit due to electricity costs, but it might be worth it anyway. No worse than the exchange rate between two currencies.
Exchanging money is also not economically worth it. And if you only pay for renewable electricity it isn't bad for the environment either, at least on paper.
You know that both of your statements are false in a specific way
As are yours. So it balances out.
The components health section is probably nearly void, it seems like the lifespan of a CPU isn’t impacted if it doesn’t overheat. You’re probably right on that, I’m not a hardware expert though.
Mining seems not worth it imo, based on my experience, but someone told me otherwise 🤷
It is most certainly bad for the environment. Even if you use green energy, the infrastructure used to deliver the energy isn’t green when initially created and has a limited lifespan. Also, you probably remove green energy from people that didn’t care at the same time, so it ends up having a negative impact. If the green energy production % doesn’t change, then someone uses more non-green energy if you start using green.
I didn't even address the component wear because I didn't know either way. 😁
But as long as you pay for green energy none of that money will go towards supporting non-green infrastructure. So it should incentivise the energy companies to invest more into green ones.
Of course it doesn't change where your energy is really coming from. Most likely from the gas plant around the corner. But maybe from your rich neighbour's solar panels.
But as long as you pay for green energy none of that money will go towards supporting non-green infrastructure. So it should incentivise the energy companies to invest more into green ones.
I believe people getting non-green energy will just get less green energy, at least that's how I would imagine it if there was already enough green energy for the ones who demand it. Instead of making more green energy, they'll just send less green energy to the people that aren't paying for green energy. If your country doesn't produce a lot of it, then yea it'll certainly incentivise the production of it, but I feel like keeping green energy only for premium payers, without developping infrastructure is more worth it to them.
Thanks!
Go to whatever service/exchange is easiest for you to buy a common crypto that has low fees (either Litecoin or Doge) and use https://changenow.io/ to swap to monero and send to your own wallet.
Use Guiwallet on desktop or for mobile you can use either cake wallet or monerujo wallet to hodl your monero.
Just transfer $20 into monero every couple of months and use it to buy time on mullvad as you need
This is the easiest way.
- Use a centralized exchange (like Kraken, Binance…)
- Buy LTC, BCH, anything you want
- withdraw that
- Swap (exchange) those through a swap service, from the crypto you bought, to XMR.
- https://trocador.app/ is an exchange aggregator that’s privacy friendly and Monero friendly if you want. They don’t take any cut and you can get better margins this way.
- Optional but I recommend it: churn your crypto by sending all of it to yourself multiple times, waiting a few days between each churn. Easier to do with Feather Wallet on desktop as it has coin control. This minimizes the links to your identity: Monero shines through multiple transactions, but tx to tx can statistically be liked. The more you do, the blurrier it gets.
- On Feather Wallet (which is open source), there’s a "coins" tab where you can see each unit of crypto you have, and can "sweep output" to "yourself (churn)" easily.
- Spend your XMR, have fun :)
Additional notes:
The initial crypto should be a relatively famous one with low transaction fees so you don’t lose a lot in the process. The two I wrote are nice.
For swapping, the higher the amount, the lower the fee % will be. Always try trading over $20 to minimize fees.
Thanks!
Doge? No.
Private? I'm pretty sure any of the existing means are private in the sense that I, a random stranger, will not know about that transaction.
Do you mean anonymous? Pseudonymous? Hidden from your government or the government where MullVad is established?
I'm not trying to be pedantic here but rather to genuinely understand so that I can try to answer.
The only crypto worthy of the name
You dont even zcash?
There's several privacy coins
p2p excganges like bisq atomic swaps check https://kycnot.me/ for exchanges js make sure you do your research
You can use a decentralized P2P exchange platform called Haveno to pay in cash (with or without mailing) :
Haveno is exchange software it is not an active exchange where you can trade. RetoSwap is the Haveno instance that is running an actual usable exchange.
So Haveno is exchange platform, that's what I said. II didn't say instance but platform, Lemmy is a platform and lemmy.ml is an instance.
I see you edited the comment, suspect. Anyway there is only one instance so it is useless to tell someone about haveno and not mention the only usable instance.
My comment was edited well before your reply, just look at the date and time...