FAQ & troubleshooting

Any 64-bit ARMv8 CPU with the crypto extensions (AES, PMULL, SHA2) — which means virtually every ARM phone and SBC SoC since ~2015, on a 64-bit OS. The APK needs Android 7+. No x86, no 32-bit ARM.

One notable exception: Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 shipped without the crypto extensions — Verus won't run on them and SHA256d drops to a slow NEON fallback. The Pi 5 has them and mines everything.

Verus and Monero — their algorithms are designed to favor CPUs, so phones and SBCs contribute meaningfully. Scrypt (LTC+DOGE) and SHA256d are ASIC-dominated: they work fine and are great for testing, but a CPU's share of those networks is a rounding error. Each coin page has honest hashrate numbers.

A wallet holds your coins; the address is its public identifier — the long string (like RD… or 89KG…) you paste as the miner's "user". The pool sends payouts to it. An address is safe to share: it can only receive. You never give a miner or pool your password or seed phrase — only the address.

Get one from the coin's own wallet app (each coin page names the usual options in its "Get a wallet" section). An exchange deposit address can work, but a wallet you control is the better habit. Copy-paste it, never type it — a payout sent to a mistyped address is unrecoverable.

Mining solo means you only get paid when your machine finds an entire block — at CPU scale that's a lottery ticket that may never hit. A pool combines everyone's hashing into one big miner: whenever anyone in the pool finds a block, the reward is split according to the work each member proved they did. You trade the jackpot for small, steady payouts.

The proof is the share — each "Accepted share" line in the log is a receipt for work submitted. Pools charge a small fee (typically 0.5–2%) and pay out automatically once you reach their minimum. You connect with the stratum URL from the coin page; most pools need no signup at all — your wallet address is your account (litecoinpool's registered accounts are the exception).

Just a label for one device. WALLET.kitchen-pi and WALLET.s10 pay the same wallet, but the pool's dashboard shows their stats separately, so you can tell the phone from the Pi at a glance. Pick any short name — no registration needed, and it never affects payouts. (Account-based pools like litecoinpool are again the exception: there you create workers on the pool's website first.)

Android throttles non-focused apps two ways: cpuset core withholding — you'll see Platform allows this process only N of M CPUs in the log — and frequency capping, where big cores are held at low MHz. This is OS policy, not a bug.

Fixes: keep the app on screen (the APK holds the screen on), or run from an SSH/adb session — those stay unthrottled with the screen off. Withheld cores are re-adopted automatically ~20 s after the app returns to focus.

Some MediaTek firmware uses CPU hotplug as a cooling device — it drops the big cores entirely when the SoC gets hot. The miner re-adopts them when they come back, but the sustained rate is what the cooling allows. Improve cooling (case off, small fan) or accept the lower rate.

Sustained 65–85 °C is normal under load on phones — SoCs self-protect by throttling. Stop if the device is too hot to hold comfortably. Cooling, even a small fan, measurably raises sustained hashrate: the cooler the SoC, the higher the frequencies it holds.

Your Termux packages are stale. Run pkg update && pkg upgrade -y and try again.

The official builds target armv8-a+crypto and run on any ARMv8 device with the crypto extensions. If you built from source with a raised -march (e.g. armv8.2-a), the compiler emits LSE atomic instructions that older ARMv8.0 cores (Cortex-A53/A72 era) don't have — the binary dies instantly with SIGILL on those devices. Rebuild with the stock Makefile flags.

Normal. RandomX builds a ~2 GiB dataset for ~15 seconds at startup; the first hashrate line prints after that.

A rejection rate around one or two percent is normal: shares found in the instant a new block replaces the job arrive at the pool stale and get rejected. Nothing to fix.

All shares rejected (or none accepted after several minutes) is a config problem: a wallet address that doesn't match the coin, the wrong pool port, or a worker-name format the pool doesn't accept. Check the miner log and the pool's own dashboard.

Mine plugged in. Mining drains a battery fast and cycles it hard — battery wear is real and permanent. A phone that mines regularly should live on a charger (ideally a slow one, to limit heat).

The fee funds development and test hardware. It's one 60-second slice of mining per cycle on the developer's pool: Verus 2% (60 s per 50 min), RandomX / scrypt / SHA256d 1% (60 s per 100 min). If the dev pool is unreachable your mining is never interrupted — the slice is skipped.

Verify it yourself: the fee logs itself in the console (Dev fee: 2.0% (60s per 50 min) for verus), and the code is GPL — read it, build it, or fork it without the fee.

Google Play policy bans apps that mine on the device, so the APK is sideload-only: grab it from the downloads section, enable "install unknown apps", and verify the SHA-256. It asks for no permissions beyond network access, a foreground-service notification, and keeping the device awake while mining — no storage, contacts, or location.

Mining binaries are commonly flagged as riskware because criminals hide them in malware to mine on other people's machines. That's a real problem — and it's why the flag exists. This miner only runs when you run it, does nothing in the background, and the source is public. If in doubt, build it from source yourself and compare checksums.

Mining runs your CPU at or near 100% utilization for extended periods. This produces sustained heat, increases power draw, and accelerates battery wear on portable devices. Monitor temperatures, mine plugged in, and never run a mining device covered, enclosed, or under a pillow. Devices with inadequate cooling may throttle, shut down, or in extreme cases suffer damage.

This software is provided as-is, without warranty of any kind. You are responsible for complying with local regulations regarding cryptocurrency mining and for double-checking wallet addresses — payouts sent to a mistyped address are unrecoverable.