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Raspberry Pi is a series of credit card-sized single-board computers distributed by RS Components, Egoman and Newark Element14.
Based on the Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC) which includes VideoCore IV GPU and 1GB ram, the Raspberry Pi 2 can be connected to any LCD/LED via HDMI, a keyboard and a mouse to operate as a fully operational computer on various operating systems such as Windows 10 and Linux (Ubuntu).
The Raspberry Pi was released in February 2015 and has been sold for a fixed price of US$35 worldwide. Due to its economical advantages and portability, the single board computers have been popular among developers and hackers.
Quite recently, an increasing number of miners and hackers have begun to examine the technological capability of the Raspberry Pi 2, by using it to mine bitcoins or process transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Mining Bitcoin using Raspberry Pi 2
Raspberry Pi 2’s relatively large ram memory and high processing power can handle several miner software such as BFGMiner, a modular ASIC/FPGA featuring monitoring and remote interface capabilities.
Once BFGMiner is installed, users can start mining by providing necessary command lines provided by most bitcoin mining pools including Slush’s pool.
Compared to other alternatives, the Raspberry Pi 2 is a, as it only uses four watts of power, while normal computers consume over 700 watts for the same operation.
Users may connect several Raspberry Pi 2 computers together to increase the mining speed, or plug in ASIC miners into the single board to optimize the mining process.
”What you really need if you’re trying to make money out of the enterprise is a custom ASIC device, which has a much higher hashrate than something like the Pi. And it turns out that the Pi is a very cheap and efficient way to control and monitor devices which are better suited to mining Bitcoins – like the new, thumb-drive-sized ASIC Bitcoin miners that have started appearing on the market recently, which mine at a similar rate to a fast graphics card”
said Liz Upton, Head of Communications of Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Replicating the 21 Bitcoin Computer
Many developers have also discovered different methods to implement the infrastructure and protocol of 21 Inc to replicate the operations of a 21 Bitcoin Computer.
While Raspberry Pi 2 could be used as an efficient bitcoin mining device, 21 Inc CEO Balaji Srinivasan explains that it is ineffective to use the device as a Bitcoin Computer. Furthermore, Balaji announced that the team will start to ban developers from replicating 21 Bitcoin Computers with the Raspberry Pi 2.
“We want to make sure that the first group of buyers and sellers in the 21 Marketplace are folks who’ve bought a 21 Bitcoin Computer. This ensures a higher basal level of trust and will be one of the first functioning digital goods marketplaces using Bitcoin — which will be good for Bitcoin,” said Srinivasan.
References
PiMiner Bitcoin mining machine – Raspberry Pi. (2013, June 23). Retrieved November 23, 2015, from https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/piminer-bitcoin-mining-machine/
Sethi, S. (2015, August 7). Bitcoin Mining using Raspberry Pi. Retrieved November 23, 2015, from https://www.hackster.io/sarthaksethi/bitcoin-mining-using-raspberry-pi-b0da88
Image taken from: Adafruit and instructables
spazzdla 
(((Underbridge 
Papa Big 
MUCH WRONGNESS.
Dude, you can’t mine BTC efficiently at home anymore. Even with this terrific Rpi2 device. Those USB’s are years old and worthless.
“Balaji announced that the team will start to ban developers from replicating 21 Bitcoin Computers with the Raspberry Pi 2.” Can you point to the source of this comment? Blog post, forum, etc? All I saw was that it wasn’t recommended as it won’t automatically update for future releases. But a $35-$50 test run beats a $400 investment for most devs.
The Sidehack USB mines at 8-16gh/s at .3 gh/watt.
* .3W/GH
Sorry to correct you, it’s my inner ‘Dimensions Nazi’ 😉
Wow, 335MH/s Block Eruptors! (pictured). Not seen any of them for a while. I’d be surprised if there’s any still on the BTC network.
This article reads like a reprint of something from 2.5 years ago with “RPi” crossed out and “RPi2” written in with Biro.
I love the RPi, but talking about using multiple Pi’s “to increase the speed” suggests that you’re CPU mining on them, which you simply aren’t. (adding more USB miners would need another hub, not another Pi)
The device in the pic would earn about $1/year (current difficulty and price). At around 12W+ (including the BEs) it costs $10/year to run, unless you get free electricity…
I know very little about mining BTC. I am asking for help getting orientated. Thank you to the people that commented here, your comments are very informative. That said, can anyone tell me what the latest technology is (today is Dec 31, 2015), where to find it, how much it would cost and how much it would mine? (asking this because a user below mentioned the machine in the article could only mine $1 a day) Also, to the one commenter, why is it useless to mine at home? How is it done nowadays?
Thank you in advance.
$1 a day?? No, $1 a YEAR, and that’s before electric costs!
The latest tech runs at about 0.2 – 0.3 W/GH/s. This means that a 5TH/s miner (eg Bitmain S7, cost ~$1,500+) eats 1kW+ of electricity – this kW will end up as heat in your house, full-time, whether or not you’re cold, whether or not you’re in.
Current difficulty means this machine will earn you about .08BTC/week; when more miners join, difficulty goes up and your rewards go down. Your machine will probably be obsolete in a year or so.
If you’re a homeowner paying a lot for your electricity, you could be making a loss at today’s BTC prices. If you’re a Big Boy you can negotiate a lower rate with your supplier. I believe one large mine even runs its own deep-green hydro/solar plant for power. This is what the home miner is competing against for his/her share of 3,600 BTC per day. And halving day comes soon, when there’s only 1,800 BTC/day to go round.
When price and difficulty conspire against you to the point where it costs you more to mine than the value of the bitcoin earned, switch your machine off and buy BTC on an exchange instead of from your electricity supplier.
Check out a mining calculator – eg CoinWarz.