Even though not profitable on the mainnet, CPU mining is still valuable on the test network or even a private network to experiment with mining and contract deployment. Private and test networks will be discussed with practical examples in the next chapter, Chapter 12, Ethereum Development Environment. A Geth example is shown on how to start CPU mining here. Geth can be started with mine switch in order to start mining:
geth --mine --minerthreads <n>
CPU mining can also be started using the Web3 Geth console. Geth console can be started by issuing the following command:
$ geth attach
After this, the miner can be started by issuing the following command, which will return True if successful, or False otherwise. Take a look at ...
