Mining with Bitcoin Core

The Bitcoin Core wallet has built-in capabilities for mining; therefore, it is really easy to use the wallet to mine on your machine. The wallet will use your CPU to mine. As you might recall, mining is basically hashing of a candidate block over and over again until the result is smaller than the current difficulty threshold.

To mine with your CPU and Bitcoin Core, open up the wallet software:

1. Now click on the Help menu and select Debug Window.
2. Then click on the Console tab—the console will appear. Remember, to see a list of all available commands, type help and press Enter.

The command to mine with your wallet is setgenerate. The syntax of the command is as follows:

setgenerate <true|false> <number of cores to be used>

To start mining with only 1 core, type setgenerate true 1:

Fig. 2.1: Starting mining in Bitcoin Core

To make sure that your wallet is mining, you can go to your Task Manager in Windows, Activity Monitor in Mac OS, or System Monitor...