When most miners think of mining, they tend to have visions of stacks of graphics cards (GPU) all lined up mining their favorite crypto-coins. It’s true, a GPUs are great at mining and you can mine lots of different coins with GPUs. But lots of new miners ask a question no one else ever dreams of asking. “Can you mine without a GPU?” or more specifically “Can you mine with your CPU?” Mining with a CPU is almost unheard of right? I mean no one mines with a CPU these days do they?  Seriously?

Not so fast. You might be quite surprised at the answer to these questions!

Mining with a CPU in 2018

You might be surprised to learn that not only is mining with CPU still a thing, but that there are actually some coins that are designed to only be mined with a CPU (meaning you can’t mine them with GPUs or ASICs. Period.  Some of these coins were specifically designed this way to stop what happened with Bitcoin and to keep miners with lots of money from centralizing the network into just a few small pools.

List of CPU only Coins

The coins in this list can only be mined with CPUs.

  • MonteVerde – CPU Only (site currently down, coin my have died)
  • Riecoin – CPU only, mined with private miner.

List of CPU and GPU Coins

These coins can be mined with a CPU, but using a GPU will give some advantage.

  • Bytecoin – GPU mineable on both ATI and AMD or CPU.  Mined using Claymore ATI Miner (closed-source, mandatory 5% to developer) or Tsiv’s ATI Miner is which is open-source.

We will update this list as more coins become available. Mining with a CPU is still possible.

Technically All Coins are CPU Mineable

Mining cryptocurrencies with a CPU is possible, regardless of the coin. The same goes for GPUs. Just because a coin is mined with an ASIC doesn’t mean you can’t mine it with a CPU or a GPU too.

The problem is that you’re not likely to every find a coin and you’re going to spend an absolute fortune in electricity. Mining a Bitcoin for example with a CPU would be like trying to win the lottery by gambling in a pool with a million other people and you only contributed a penny.  Even if the pool wins, you’re not going to see any of the return.

The game is all about hashing power. The more you have the more likely you are to get some of the pie (or coin).