Mining Monero on Personal Devices
Mining Monero on Personal Devices
As I see there no point to mine Monero on a typical machine if your point is not to help the network, I do have 10k/h just to help Monero. So, why would anyone mine monero?
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Monero mining is "buying Monero" in the most permissionless and private way possible. Individuals can opt in to creating Monero using their home's electrical grid, and the government mafia would be none the wiser.
Monero's mining network is the most decentralized and permissionless fiat-to-xmr exchange for Monero buyers.
in the most permissionless and private way possible
That is true in a way, especially if you just need a small amount.
Note, however, your IP and wallet address are publicly visible (assuming you're using p2pool). Depending on how you do this and your situation, Monero mining may not be private enough. For example, if hypothetically crypto or "unhosted wallets" are illegal in your country and your local ISP is willing to cooperate with the government, then they might easily know you're mining Monero and arrest you. You could mine more anonymously if necessary, but doing so may involve some cost: e.g. anonymous hosting -> VPS is not free, using Tor -> you might lose some hashrate.
My IP address is visible to whom? And visible as doing what?
Afaik, with p2pool, one also runs a local p2pool blockchain. And his miner connects to his own p2pool node.
I guess the other p2pool nodes can see you IP (assuming not hidden behind vpn) and I guess your ISP can see you are making connectioms to p2pool-specific ports on the network. But that much alone is hardly incriminating (yet).
Surely you can (and should) run a full node locally and p2pool can use it (--host 127.0.0.1). If you do that, many connections are local, except:
- Obviously your local monerod makes connections to and from other remote nodes.
- The same is true about p2pool. For it to work, it needs to make incoming and outgoing connections. Even if you use a not-so-well known option "--socks5 127.0.0.1:9050", the current version of p2pool makes some clearnet connections by default.
- xmrig works locally when you use p2pool (xmrig -o 127.0.0.1:3333), which is very nice! But even so, it also makes remote connections for hashrate donation (unless you disable it e.g. by compiling yourself).
So it's not technically correct to assume that p2pool mining is super-private, where no one knows you're mining. Like you said, this fact is usually not a big problem as running a node or mining is currently legal in most places. It's just that a miner is more visible than a normal end-user.