P2Pool update: November 2026
It’s been about eight months since I deployed a Monero node and P2Pool on the eom.dev cluster, so here’s an honest look at where things stand, what the numbers say, and why I’d still like you to point a miner at p2pool.eom.dev.
Where it stands
- Infrastructure:
monerodand P2Pool run in Kubernetes on the same two PowerEdge servers that host the rest of eom.dev. The deployment is open source: DevOps/ansible-role-monero: Deploys Monerod and P2Pool to Kubernetes - ansible-role-monero - Gitea - Sidechain: the node now runs on the nano sidechain. Its share difficulty is about 160M, compared with ~320M on mini and ~4.2G on main, so small home miners actually find shares and get regular payouts.
- Earnings: by July I’d mined about $25 of XMR over the first four months. At the time, XMR averaged ~$354 on Kraken, so that’s roughly 0.07 XMR, which works out to an average of about 8 kH/s.
- Blind spot: P2Pool’s
--data-api/--local-apistats aren’t enabled yet and Prometheus doesn’t scrape them, so I can’t show a live hashrate or share history. Fixing that is the next item on the list (see below).
Is it profitable?
Not on electricity alone, at current prices. Here’s the math, using Kraken’s XMR/USD market and live network figures:
- XMR/USD on Kraken: ~$600 (24h range $594–$615, about 4,000 XMR traded)
- Network hashrate: ~7.16 GH/s, block reward ~0.61 XMR, 720 blocks/day
- So each 1 kH/s earns about 0.00006 XMR/day, or ~$1.10/month
The servers draw about 400 W at idle (192 W + 210 W), but that power is a cost of hosting eom.dev, not of mining. What matters is the extra power the CPUs draw while hashing. On older Xeon hardware like mine, I’d estimate that at roughly 50–75 H/s per watt.
Break-even XMR price by efficiency and electricity rate:
| Efficiency (H/s per W) | $0.10/kWh | $0.18/kWh (US avg) | $0.25/kWh |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 (older Xeons) | $783 | $1,409 | $1,957 |
| 75 | $522 | $939 | $1,305 |
| 100 | $391 | $704 | $978 |
| 150 (modern Ryzen/EPYC) | $261 | $470 | $652 |
At ~$600 XMR and average US residential power, my hardware costs roughly $900–1,400 to mine 1 XMR that I could buy on Kraken for $600.
What it would take to be profitable
Any one of these would do it:
- XMR above ~$940 with 75 H/s/W hardware at $0.18/kWh. XMR traded as high as $799.89 on Jan 13, 2026, so this isn’t fantasy, but it hasn’t happened yet.
- Cheaper power, ~$0.10/kWh or less, which already makes 75 H/s/W hardware break even at today’s price.
- More efficient hardware, ~120+ H/s per W. Modern Ryzen and EPYC chips with large L3 caches get there. Old dual-socket Xeons don’t.
- Using the heat. It’s November. If a miner’s heat replaces electric resistance heating you’d be running anyway, the electricity isn’t really a mining cost, and mining becomes close to free XMR for the winter.
“Mine at a loss now, profit later?”
My working theory has been that if XMR rises enough, coins mined at a loss today end up profitable. Kraken’s chart partly supports this, but there’s a catch.
The good news: the pool went live in early March when XMR was ~$361. It’s ~$600 now, up about 66%. The ~0.07 XMR I mined in the first four months was worth ~$25 then and is worth ~$42 today, if held.
The catch: mining at a loss is effectively buying XMR at a premium. If mining costs me $940 per XMR and Kraken sells it for $600, a rally to $1,000 makes my mined coins slightly profitable, but $600 of electricity money spent on Kraken would have made far more. Price appreciation helps both strategies equally, so it can’t justify mining over buying. On top of that, network hashrate tends to rise with price, which shrinks future yield.
Volatility cuts both ways too. XMR fell from that $800 peak in January to $292 by June 5, and its 90-day annualized volatility is around 56%.
So the honest version of the theory: mining at a loss is a reasonable hobby expense if you value the things buying can’t give you:
- coins with no exchange or KYC history
- supporting a decentralized network
- heat you’d pay for anyway
- learning the stack
It’s not a better investment than buying spot, unless your marginal cost per XMR is below market price.
(In the US, mined coins are generally taxed as income at fair market value when received. I’m not a tax advisor; check your own situation.)
Why you should still join p2pool.eom.dev
Pointing XMRig at my node is good for you:
- 0% fee, no account, no custody. Payouts go straight from the Monero block reward to your wallet. I never touch your coins.
- No need to run your own node. A full
monerodtakes hundreds of GB and a P2Pool instance takes upkeep; mine is already running. - Nano sidechain: a ~5 kH/s desktop finds a share roughly every 9 hours and ~10 kH/s about every 4.4 hours, so even modest hardware sees payouts.
- It decentralizes Monero. Every hash on P2Pool is a hash not controlled by a centralized pool operator.
To be transparent, more miners on my node doesn’t increase my payout. P2Pool splits rewards by each miner’s own shares. The only way to send XMR to eom.dev is to mine to (or donate to) the address in the original post.
Config is in the original post: Monetization đź’µ - #2 by eric. One correction: donate-level in XMRig goes to the XMRig developers, not the Monero developers. Setting it to 1 (the minimum) keeps more of your hashrate for yourself.
If your hardware is efficient, your power is cheap, or you’d like the heat this winter, it can actually pay. Either way, you help the network.
Next steps
- Enable P2Pool’s
--data-apiand--local-api, scrape them into Grafana, and publish a public dashboard with pool hashrate, connected miners, and shares found. - Measure the actual extra wattage per kH/s on each server, so the break-even numbers above are measured, not estimated.
- Switch my own mining to “heat-season only” unless XMR moves above break-even.
Questions or numbers from your own rigs are welcome below. I’d love to see what efficiency people are getting.
Sources: Kraken XMR/USD, XMR/BTC and XMR/EUR market data (Nov 7, 2026); CoinDesk Monero mining calculator for network hashrate and reward; EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook for the 2026 average residential electricity price (~18¢/kWh); P2Pool README for sidechain details.