cpuminer

CPUminer is a software application designed to mine cryptocurrencies with the computer's processor. It is an open-source miner (GPLv2) by pooler, a fork of Jeff Garzik's reference cpuminer, and it runs on Windows, Linux, macOS and other systems. CPUminer is a command-line program without a graphical interface; the Windows download is a ZIP archive with the minerd executable.

Features

1. Command-Line Operation: CPUminer is started from the command prompt or a batch file. The mining server, user name, password and other settings are passed as options, and "minerd --help" lists all of them. Settings can also be loaded from a JSON configuration file.

CPUminer allows users to efficiently use their computer's processing power to mine cryptocurrency.

2. Supported Algorithms: CPUminer mines with the scrypt algorithm used by Litecoin (the default) and the SHA-256d algorithm used by Bitcoin. Scrypt variants with a custom N parameter are supported as well.

3. Pool Support: Users can connect to mining pools over the Stratum protocol, including Stratum over TLS, or use the older getwork protocol with long polling.

4. Multi-Threaded Mining: CPUminer runs several mining threads at once. By default it starts one thread per processor, and the number can be changed with the --threads option.

5. Solo Mining: With the getblocktemplate protocol, CPUminer can mine directly against a local wallet node. The payout address is set with the --coinbase-addr option, and Segwit and bech32 addresses are supported.

6. CPU Optimizations: On x86 processors the miner detects SSE2 support at runtime. On x86-64 it uses AVX, AVX2 and XOP instructions when both the CPU and the operating system support them; on Windows this needs Windows 7 SP1 or later.

7. Proxy Support: Connections can go through an HTTP or SOCKS proxy set with the --proxy option, or through the proxy defined in the environment variables.

8. Hash Rate Output: CPUminer prints the hash rate of each thread and the accepted shares in the console window. A benchmark mode measures performance offline, without connecting to a server.

9. Network Options: Users can set the number of retries after a failed network call, the pause between retries and the long-polling timeout, and can switch off individual protocols.

10. Status: The last release, version 2.5.1, came out in June 2020 with 32-bit and 64-bit Windows builds. CPU mining of Bitcoin and Litecoin earns very little today, because both networks are dominated by specialised ASIC hardware.