Best Bitcoin Mining Software for Mac in 2024
Undoubtedly, Apple Macintosh are the best personal computers, built with robust hardware components available.
After Apple introduced their own chip. M1, which even elevated the performance of MacBooks.
The M1 chip took Mac performance to another level, enabling users to process hefty tasks like graphic design and gaming faster than the Intel chip.
Mentioning the hefty task, Bitcoin mining is one of them. Yes, you can do Bitcoin mining with your Mac, but to do Bitcoin mining, you’ll need software to help you.
There are two types of Bitcoin mining software.
- Pool Mining Softwares.
- Solo Mining Softwares.
Some software has the option to configure to do both minings.
1. Pool Mining Softwares.
As the name implies, Pool mining is where you mine with a group of other miners to increase the odds of winning the block and earning the reward.
Mining Bitcoin individually is a challenging task because as Bitcoin grows, so does the competition. In pool mining, all miners in the pool have a higher chance of mining Bitcoin. If the pool successfully mines Bitcoin, the reward is shared between the participants according to their contribution.
Here is the list of software that can help you connect with the mining pools using your Mac.
MacMiner.
MacMiner claims to be the first 100% native Bitcoin miner for Mac. This means you can set up and start mining in seconds without worrying about complex install processes traditionally associated with mac miners.
With MacMiner, you can mine Bitcoin, Litecoin, DogeCoin, VertCoin, QuarkCoin and MaxCoin.
The application even allows you to run the backends in the Terminal if you want an easy installation of bfgminer, cgminer or cpuminer (minerd) for setting up mining in CPUs, GPUs, FPGA or ASICs.
As a Mac user, you don’t have to worry too much about setting up the software, just install, and put in the Bitcoin address, pic mining pool, enter username and password, at last click on “Devices/Manual Flags Field” and enter “-S all.”.
To make things easier, MacMiner will come with the option to automatically generate configuration files, which is a great relief to anyone who fears that their knowledge may be a little insufficient to set up the software.
Cudo Miner.
Cudo Miner is a feature-rich mining software for mining Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, and Revencoin. However, you can configure Cudo Miner for ASICs or CPU mining.
The software is available for Mac users, but GPU mining is not yet supported.
So you can configure Cudo Miner to ASICs or CPU mining.
The mining process is easy. You don’t need to worry about setting up. Just signup Cudo Miner will take care of the rest.
They have several algorithms in place for intelligently configuring your device and suggesting profitable mining coins. Cudo Miner sits dormant in the background on your computer and will intelligently start mining whatever is most profitable for you when your system is idle.
Their user interface shows you hash rates, revenues, hardware health stats like wattage and temperature, recommendations, and transactions from afar.
Not only mining, but you can also receive mining rewards in a variety of currencies and no limit on the number of devices per account.
DiabloMiner.
DiabloMiner is an open-source mining software that uses the OpenCL framework to quickly perform hashing computation.
There is no UI to use DiabloMiner you have to use a terminal for setting up.
You need to set up the application once. The server and account information is stored in a setting file on your Mac. So double-clicking on the application icon again will be sufficient to get the miner going again.
Using DiabloMiner, you can do both Solo Mining (I’ll explain later) and Pool Mining supporting unlimited pools and will switch to the next pool on connection failure and return to the first pool every 60 minutes.
Not only Mac, you can also run DiabloMiner on any operating system if you have ATI Stream SDK 2.1 or the latest Nvidia software.
2. Solo Mining Softwares.
Contrary to Pool Mining, Solo Mining is where you mine Bitcoin yourself, not joining any Mining Pool, using available resources.
As Bitcoin Mining difficulty increases day by day, solo mining also becomes difficult because as difficulty increases, you have to increase your hardware capacity, which is not economically feasible.
Even configuring Solo Mining software is not that easy, especially if you are not familiar with the terminal.
Keeping these facts in mind, if you have the technical know-how and expensive hardware setup with Mac, then you can use the software below to do solo Bitcoin mining.
BFGMiner.
BFG Miner is a popular Bitcoin mining software written in C and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows machines, and even offers an option to install on Raspberry Pi.
The software lacks a proper UI, so you have to use a terminal setup. Additionally, it does not support GPU mining, requiring configuration with ASIC or FPGA.
Despite being text-based, BFGMiner offers features like dynamic clocking, monitoring, and remote interface capabilities.
A popular feature of BFGMIner is support for mining multiple cryptocurrencies at the same time by simultaneously hashing on mining algorithms like Scrypt and SHA256d. The software lets you mine, hedge, and redistribute their risk with multiple cryptocurrencies.
CGMiner.
CGMiner is a Linux based open-source written in C and has cross-platform and cross-hardware compatibility, which makes it possible to run in Mac.
Not only Mac, you can also use CGMiner in ASICs, CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and are compatible with Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin.
Additionally, CGMiner supports both solo and pool mining. It allows you to independently distribute your power to different pools to find the most profitable combination and control fan speeds and other settings with simple keyboard commands.
To scale up your hashing power. The software offers advanced detection of new block features.
The one drawback of CGMiner is the lack of a graphical user interface, which may be daunting for beginners, making it a better choice for advanced users.
Conclusion.
These are all the software you can use to mine Bitcoin with your Mac.
Some of the above software doesn’t allow you to directly mine Bitcoin or other cryptos using Mac. But if you have external hardware like ASIC, you can use a Mac to configure the software.
Before I wrap up, let me remind you that even with a high-end Mac computer, mining Bitcoin is challenging. So, before using a Mac for Bitcoin mining, familiarize yourself with the technical specifications of the device and understand the hashrate it can produce.