How to mine Cryptocurrency on an M1 Mac
Veruscoin CPU Mining on an M1 Mac
I love my M1 MacBook Air; it’s fast sleek and silent. Like many people I’m very interested in Cryptocurrency and went down a rabbit hole to see if there was any way that I could use the M1 processor to mine some Crytpo, that would actually be profitable.
Bitcoin and Ethereum were a no and so was anything else that needed GPU or ASIC mining. My research lead me to believe that the best options that I had was either Monero or Veruscoin.
I managed to get both working, but Monero was so slow to mine that it just wasn’t worth it, Veruscoin on the other hand can make you a few dollars a month and you can run the miner while working on other applications!
High Level Steps
If you don’t want to read through all of this article, then here are the high level steps of what is involved.
- Create a Veruscoin Wallet
- Install Homebrew
- Install OpenSSL, Curl and Janson
- Download CCminer for the M1 Mac
- Change permissions on the CCminer application
- Run CCMiner with your Pool and wallet address
Create a Veruscoin Wallet
To create your Wallet, you first need to download the Veruscoin Desktop.
Step 1: download the desktop app from https://verus.io/wallet/desktop
Step 2: Unzip the tgz file (just click on it)
Step 3: Run the dmg file to setup the wallet ( you will need to download the Verus block chain the first time your run the app)
Step4: Make a note of your wallet addres. On the wallet tab of the desktop app, click recieve and the dialogue below will appear, copy the address on that screen:
Install Homebrew and the required modules
Homebrew is a package manager for MacOS that allows you to easily install 3rd party packages which are often required for 3rd party developer applications.
Step 1: Install Homebrew
i) In terminal run
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
ii) This will install Homebrew but you need to run two additional commands
echo ‘eval $(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)’ >> /Users/$USER/.zprofile
eval $(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)
Step 2: Install OpenSSL, Curl and Janson
i) Install OpenSSL
brew install openssl@1.1
ii) Install Curl
brew install curl
iiii) Install Janson
brew install jansson
Download and setup CCminer for M1 Mac
A special version of CCminer for M1 Mac was released in August 2021. The release can be seen here: https://github.com/Mr-Bossman/ccminer/releases
To download and setup the CCminer application follow the steps below:
Step 1: Download CCminer from here: https://github.com/Mr-Bossman/ccminer/releases/download/7db3a94/ccminer
Step 2: Copy the ccminer file to the location where you want to run it from eg on my Mac I run it from here: /Users/keith/Miner
Step 3: Change the permissions on the ccminer file from terminal (you need to ensure that this path is correct for where you will run ccminer from)
chmod 777 /Users/keithmyers/Miner/ccminer
Run CCMiner
If you followed all the steps correctly, ccminer will be ready to run. To mine you need to specify a mining pool, your wallet address and a name for the miner.
I use
sudo ./ccminer -a verus -o stratum+tcp://na.luckpool.net:3956 -u yourwalletaddress.M1Baby -p d=6 -t 8
Conclusion
I’ve had a hashrate of just over 8000 kH/s which whilst it’s not enough to make you rich it is enough to mine several Veruscoins per month. Let me know if this article was useful and if you have any questions, please leave a comment.
Bonus
If you found this story useful, please leave a comment, I’m trying to grow my writing and I’d like to know if this was useful. If you don’t have time for that, please at least give me a clap,or better still, hold down your mouse button on the clap to give 50! (it’s free!!!)
