How To Mine Bitcoins On A Mac

As you may know, obtaining Bitcoins is done through an online peer-to-peer protocol called mining. It is done by un-hashing certain blocks, which contain 25 Bitcoins each. A new block is released every 10 minutes, so there is a constant flow of new Bitcoins coming in. Mining Bitcoins can also be done on a Mac OSX computer, and we will show you exactly how to do it. This tutorial is pointed at users with no computer experience at all, as I couldn’t find any good and simple mining tutorials for the Mac. Before you continue with this guide, please read our explanation of Bitcoins, Blocks, and Wallets here.

When we are starting to mine Bitcoins on a mac, it is important that you have a Wallet and a miner client ready to use. We have made a selection of the most stable and most powerful mining clients, which you can find here. Download a miner client of your choice  and you can then continue with this tutorial.

There are 2 types of mining bitcoins: Solo and pool mining. Solo mining means that you are mining a block of bitcoins on your own. This is a long process and it can take days just to mine a single block on your own, especially if you are using a lower end Mac with low specifications. The second type is pool mining, which means that multiple users in a “mining pool” are all mining the same block, thus getting faster results. The downside of this is that the Bitcoins that are gained via pool mining have to be split up amongst all the miners in the pool.

The first thing you need to do before you go bitcoin mining on a mac, is signing up on a mining pool. Solo mining on a Mac is not advisable, as these machines just aren’t powerful enough. Therefore pool mining can be advised. There are several mining pools, like coinotron, deepbit and bitcoinpool. Create an account, and then you need to create a worker with a password. After you have done that, we will need to go to our mining client and then we will need to start it up. Before we can go mining Bitcoins we need to download the blockchain. Your mining client will do this automatically, just wait till it is finished (can take a while).

You then need to insert your worker details into the client, the correct host of your mining pool, and the correct port which your chosen mining pool uses. After you have done that, you can start mining! If you have any troubles, please ask them in the comments below, so we can answer them for you.