A small set of Mac tools for people who want to see Bitcoin mining as it is, not as it is advertisedThirteen days. 56,559 accepted shares. 134 satoshis.
At today’s price that is about ten cents. It would not cover the electricity for the USB stick that earned it, let alone the Mac that was hashing beside it.
I know this because a menu bar app tells me so, every five minutes, in sats and in euro. I wrote that app last week. It is the newest piece of a collection I have been building for a year, and this article is the first time I put all of it in one place: https://btcminertools.com/
The question nobody wants answered honestly“Can a Mac mine Bitcoin?”
Bitcoin MinerThe honest answer has two halves. Yes, a Mac can perform exactly the same double SHA-256 proof of work as a mining farm; the test is the same for everyone: is this hash below the target? And no, a Mac will not earn anything worth mentioning, because the global network performs that test close to a zettahash per second, a one followed by twenty-one zeros, and a Mac contributes a few million.
Most mining apps hide the second half behind spinning numbers. I wanted tools that show both halves at once. Everything on btcminertools.com grew out of that.
Bitcoin Miner: watch the raceThe first app was Bitcoin Miner. It builds a real 80-byte block header, changes the nonce, hashes twice and compares against the live network target. CPU and Metal GPU work side by side; the header, both SHA-256 stages, the nonce and the target are visible while they change.
It can follow the public chain tip on its own, or connect to your own Bitcoin Core node and mine a real block template through getblocktemplate. It can also mine for a pool over Stratum. None of this makes a block likely. It makes the process observable.
I wrote about the reasoning behind that app in an earlier article; the short version is that mining has no progress bar, and an app that pretends otherwise teaches the wrong thing.
Coordinator and Workers: one pool, many machinesWhen you understand what a hash attempt is, the next question is how to make more of them.
Bitcoin Miner Coordinator connects to a Stratum V1 pool and hands work to Workers: Macs on the local network, Linux boxes on a VPS, or machines reached through a private WireGuard network so that no mining port faces the public internet. The Coordinator itself does not hash. It shows every worker’s live hashrate, session work and mining profile in one window.
The Mac Worker lets you choose CPU cores and GPU use in four profiles, from “leave my Mac usable” to “everything”. The Linux Worker is a compact binary for remote CPUs.
And then there is the one that actually earned those 134 sats.
Gekko Worker: a USB ASIC, kept localGekkoScience makes small USB ASIC sticks. One of them, in a powered hub, hashes at around two terahashes per second, many thousand times what a Mac manages, while drawing a few watts.
Bitcoin Miner Gekko Worker drives those sticks on a Mac through a bundled, GPL-licensed CGMiner build. It receives work from the Coordinator, watches the chip temperature and halts the stick, with an alarm, before heat becomes a problem. The exact CGMiner source for the bundled binary ships inside the app, as the license asks.
Two terahashes is still nothing against the network. But it is enough to submit real shares to a real pool and receive a real, if tiny, reward. Which brings me back to the menu bar.
Balance: the honest number, always visiblePools show you your earnings on a web dashboard, behind a login, in a browser tab you close.
Bitcoin Miner Balance*Bitcoin Miner Balance* puts the number in the macOS menu bar instead. It reads a Braiins Pool account through a read-only API token: current balance, today’s reward, the account hashrate of the last hour, every worker and its state, and the daily history as far back as the pool keeps it. Switch between sats and BTC; pick euro or dollar and the app converts at the current Bitcoin price.
There is no account with me, no server of mine in between. The token lives in your Keychain, is shared with Bitcoin Miner on the same Mac, and is sent to Braiins only. A read-only token can show figures; it cannot move funds. Remove it and the app forgets everything.
Balance is free. It is the app I open most, because it keeps the whole exercise honest: here is what the machines did today, here is what it was worth.
Learning tools and a transaction finderNot everyone wants to mine. Some people want to understand the thing that mining secures.
Bitcoin Miner Education shows a block candidate, SHA-256 and proof of work taking shape without a wallet or a key. Bitcoin Mempool Monitor, Bitcoin Block Monitor and Bitcoin Transaction Tree make the mempool, the chain and the UTXO graph visible from public data. Bitcoin Address Monitor follows public addresses you name and group, read-only, local to your Mac.
And on the site itself, Transaction Finder draws one transaction as a tree: inputs on the left, outputs on the right, confirmed or pending in plain words. No login, no tracking, no wallet connection.
What is on the site todayhttps://btcminertools.com/Direct downloads, signed and notarized for macOS:
- Bitcoin Miner Worker and Bitcoin Miner Gekko Worker, with the Worker manual
- Bitcoin Miner Balance, free
- The Linux Worker and a WireGuard hub guide for private networks The Coordinator, Education and the monitoring apps are on their way to the Mac App Store; the site links to each as it becomes available.
Everything is read-only where it can be, local where it can be, and honest about the odds everywhere.
Why keep building for ten centsBecause the ten cents is the point.
Bitcoin’s security comes from an enormous number of participants asking the same question at the same time. A Mac and a USB stick in Düsseldorf are a rounding error in that number. But they are a real, verifiable part of it, and a set of tools that shows the real header, the real shares and the real balance teaches more than any animation of coins falling into a wallet.
134 sats in thirteen days. I will take it.
*More on *https://btcminertools.com/
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