[Raion]

With me cooped up at home (no car!) I am gonna put my time towards coding and also learning various things on FreeBSD and other OSes. 

This guide will be updated as time goes on. For now, we're focusing on CPU mining with xmrig, which thankfully is in ports. 

What is xmrig?

It's a monero miner supporting CUDA, OpenCL and CPU mining. Monero is one of the few altcoins where ASIC mining isn't particularly competitive, so GPU and CPU mining is potentially profitable. 

Why FreeBSD?

Because I can? I don't regularly use GNU/Linux, and I didn't see a point to running windows on everything!

How do I get started?

Easy. Firstly, install net-p2p/xmrig from ports or pkgng. The xmrig devs also offer it as a static binary. 

Next, decide a pool. I use "mineXMR" but that's out of convenience more than anything. There may be better/more profitable pools for you. 

Next, setup a command string:

./xmrig --donate-level 1 -o ca.minexmr.com:443 -u [WALLET ADDRESS] -k --tls --threads=8 --cpu-priority=5

Typical for my home boxes, which have 8+ cores. This will allow me to have some cores left over for other uses. The ca.minexmr.com pool is what I use, as it's located on the Canadian East Coast and has far better ping for me than the Pest Coast location, which makes sense. Canada's east coast is closer than California. 

Finally, sit back and wait. 

For those of you who also want to run a local blockchain node, there's also monerod. I have jerked around with that, and decided running it on my zpool would do well (It kinda works??) since that's 90% of my storage, and that's a fat program. If anyone wants a startup script for that, PM me.