Is Monero mining on a Raspberry Pi financially worthwhile?

No. A Pi's processing power is tiny compared with normal mining hardware, while power consumption rises noticeably under sustained load. As a learning project it is technically interesting; as income it is not.

Why Monero and not Bitcoin?

The Monero algorithm is designed to run on ordinary processors. Bitcoin mining depends on specialised hardware against which a Pi is irrelevant.

Do I need a heatsink?

For sustained load, yes. Without cooling the Pi throttles its clock speed, computes more slowly and the benefit drops further. A passive aluminium case is enough and stays silent.

Can I run mining and bandwidth sharing at the same time?

Technically yes. Bear in mind that mining loads the processor and power consumption rises accordingly – the whole point of bandwidth sharing was that it costs almost nothing.

Monero mining on a Raspberry Pi: an honest assessment

First: create a wallet

Before you install anything you need an address for payouts to go to. Without one the miner will not even start. A Monero wallet is essentially a keyring: you hand out the public address and keep the secret 25-word recovery phrase to yourself.

Download the official wallet software from getmonero.org – the light variant without the full blockchain is enough to start.
Create a new wallet and set a password.
Write the 25-word recovery phrase down on paper. Do not photograph it, do not type it into a notes app.
Copy the public address – it starts with a 4 and is fairly long.

The recovery phrase is the money Whoever has it has access. Whoever loses it loses everything – there is no hotline that resets this. And never retype the receiving address later, always copy it. One transposed character means payouts go nowhere.

Build XMRig yourself

You compile the miner once yourself. Depending on your Pi model that takes a few minutes.

Dependencies and build

sudo apt install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev -y
git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git
cd xmrig && mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. && make

Start it in a screen session

Why screen shows up here and nowhere else XMRig runs in the foreground. Close the SSH window and the miner is gone. screen creates a session that keeps running independently of your connection. The Docker services do not need this – there --restart unless-stopped does the same job.

Start

sudo apt install screen -y
screen -S miner
./xmrig -o gulf.moneroocean.stream:80 -u [YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS] -p [NAME_FOR_THE_PI]
# Detach: Ctrl+A, then D   ·   Back: screen -r miner   ·   List: screen -ls

What the parameters mean:

-o — address and port of the mining pool
-u — your wallet address from the step above
-p — a device name you can choose freely

Where it falls down

Sustained load heats the Pi up – without a heatsink it throttles and computes even more slowly
Power draw rises well above the idle figure of roughly two to five watts
A screen session does not survive a reboot

Do the maths yourself rather than believing promises: the home page has a calculator where you enter your actual consumption and your electricity price. Under sustained load, consumption is considerably higher than the idle figure preset there.