Now Available
A No-Nonsense Field Guide to Building a Small Monero Mining Operation
No hype. No Reddit rabbit holes. No promises you'll get rich. Just the steps that actually work — written by someone who built the fleet, made the mistakes, and documented everything worth knowing.
If you know your way around Windows but Linux feels like a foreign language, this book was written for you. If you've ever typed a command into a terminal and immediately second-guessed yourself, this book was written for you.
It's for anyone who wants to put an old machine to work doing something tangible — without spending weeks piecing together conflicting advice from Reddit threads and forum posts that are three versions out of date.
Follow the steps as written and within three to four hours you can have a machine mining Monero. That's it. No prerequisites beyond basic computer literacy. No expensive hardware required. No guesswork.
The book covers everything from initial Linux setup and command line basics to configuring XMRig, connecting to a mining pool, and actually understanding what your machine is doing and why.
Let's be straight about something: you will not get rich overnight doing this. You probably won't get rich at all. That's not what this is. This is about putting old hardware to work, learning something real, and letting your machines create something tangible while they sit there anyway. If that sounds like your kind of project — welcome.
The book references an earlier release of XMRig. The current version is
v6.26.0. Use the following URL when following the download steps:
https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/releases/download/v6.26.0/xmrig-6.26.0-linux-static-x64.tar.gz
This will be updated in the second edition. The installation steps themselves remain the same.
The setup command shown on page 18 of the book:
sudo apt install -y openssh-server htop lm-sensors cpupower
The package cpupower will return an error on current Debian/Ubuntu systems.
Replace it with cpufrequtils:
sudo apt install -y openssh-server htop lm-sensors cpufrequtils
This will be corrected in the second edition.