Most lists of Bitcoin mining software are copies of a list that was roughly accurate in 2014. We went through this one program by program and checked each project against its own repository and its own download page. Several have not shipped a release in five years or more, one repository is archived and read only, one download domain now redirects to a cryptocurrency exchange, and the site this article used to link for the most famous program of the lot turned out not to belong to its author.
So this is the version after the checking. What is still maintained, with the release dates we confirmed. What is dead, and how we know. Where to download safely, because mining software is one of the most impersonated categories of download there is. And an honest answer to the question underneath all of it, which is whether any of this will make you money on the computer you already own.
Two things before you download anything.
1. You cannot profitably mine Bitcoin on a normal computer. Not with a fast CPU, not with an expensive graphics card, not with better software. That has been true for over a decade and no program on this page changes it. The section below shows the arithmetic.
2. Mining software is a favorite wrapper for malware. Take binaries from the project's own repository or the developer's own domain, and from nowhere else. Never from a file host, a forum attachment or a link in a video description.
The numbers that decide this for you
Bitcoin adjusts its difficulty so that the whole network produces a block roughly every ten minutes, no matter how much hardware is pointed at it. That makes the math here unusually clean, and unusually unkind to home setups. Here is where the network stood when we checked it.
| Measure | Where it stood | Source we pulled it from |
|---|---|---|
| Network hash rate | About 920 exahashes per second | mempool.space three day average |
| Mining difficulty | 125,807,076,547,197 | mempool.space and blockchain.com, identical to the decimal |
| Block subsidy | 3.125 BTC | blockchain.com, confirmed by a block height of 965,040 |
| New bitcoin issued per day | About 450 BTC | 144 blocks a day at 3.125 BTC each |
All four figures were fetched on September 1, 2026 and they move constantly. Difficulty retargets every 2,016 blocks and hash rate is a rolling average, so read these as a snapshot rather than a constant. Two block explorers reading the same chain on the same day gave us 920 and 938 exahashes per second, which is a fair illustration of how much the averaging window matters.
Your expected share of that 450 BTC a day is your hash rate divided by the network's. That is the entire model. There is no skill element, no strategy and no clever configuration that changes the ratio. A consumer processor or graphics card sits so far below the scale of a 920 exahash network that its expected daily share does not round to a cent, and it draws power the whole time it is trying.
This is not a controversial opinion inside the software itself. CGMiner, the program that used to sit at the top of every list like this one, describes itself in its own README as a multi threaded multi pool FPGA and ASIC miner. Graphics card and processor support were taken out years ago, by the author, because they had stopped being worth the code. If you want to know why your search for mining software keeps turning up hardware you have never heard of, that is the reason.
Who Bitcoin mining software is actually for
Software in this category is a control panel for hardware. If you do not have the hardware, the control panel does nothing for you.
- You already own ASIC hardware and need to configure, monitor or tune it
- You run more than one machine and want them all on a single dashboard
- You are mining a coin other than Bitcoin, where consumer hardware can still be competitive
- You are deliberately mining at a loss, for example to heat a room or to support the network
- You want to try mining on a laptop, desktop or gaming PC and come out ahead
- You are hunting for passive income and this is where the search brought you
- You want to own some bitcoin and mining looked like the cheap way in
- You saw a program advertised as making money in the background while you browse
That third item on the right is the most common reason people land here. If the goal is owning bitcoin rather than running machines, mining is the expensive route to it, and there is a section near the bottom of this page on the alternative.
Download only from the project itself
There is an obvious reason miner malware works so well. Mining software is expected to run the processor at full load, keep a network connection open, use the graphics card and get flagged by antivirus tools. A malicious build behaves exactly like a working one from the outside, which is why every warning sign a user would normally act on has already been explained away before they install it.
CGMiner shows how the problem develops over time. Its author stopped publishing compiled binaries entirely and left a plain text note in his own download directory saying why: antivirus vendors kept flagging the genuine builds as malware, so he stopped providing builds of any sort. From that day on, every Windows CGMiner installer in existence was packaged by somebody who is not the author.
An earlier version of this article sent readers to cgminer.info for that download. That domain is not run by the author. Its download button serves a RAR archive of CGMiner 3.7.2, a version from over ten years ago, hosted inside the uploads folder of an entirely unrelated blog. We are not linking it and we have removed the link. If you want CGMiner, the source tree is on GitHub under the author's own account and the release tarballs are on his own server.
- Start from the repository, not the search results. Find the project on GitHub or GitLab first, then use whatever download domain that repository points to
- Treat any site named after the software as suspect until you have confirmed the developer runs it. Owning the obvious domain is cheap and it is the first thing an impersonator buys
- Never take a miner as a RAR or ZIP from a file host, a forum post, a Telegram channel or a link in a video description
- Check the signature when one is offered. XMRig, for example, publishes a SHA256SUMS file alongside every release together with a detached signature for it, so you can verify what you downloaded is what was built
- Build from source when you can. It is more work and it removes the entire category of risk in one step
- Be suspicious of a Windows executable with no matching source. If a project publishes code, the binary should be reproducible from it
Mining software that is still maintained
Two names you will see at the top of almost every other list are missing here on purpose. CGMiner and BFGMiner are the best known Bitcoin miners ever written, and both stopped being maintained years ago, so neither gets a recommendation from us.
Four programs cleared the bar of having shipped a release in the last twelve months. Two are for Bitcoin. Two are for other coins, and they are here because for most readers those are the only ones where the hardware they already own is relevant at all.
Awesome Miner
A commercial management platform from IntelliBreeze Software AB. It does not do the hashing itself. It sits above your machines and handles monitoring, profit switching, alerting, automatic recovery from hung miners, overclocking and firmware. The company states support for more than 200 ASIC models and more than 50 mining programs, and scale up to 200,000 ASIC miners and 25,000 graphics card or processor miners.
This is the most current thing in the category. The build offered on the Awesome Miner download page was released on April 24, 2026, which is more recent than anything else in this guide by several years. It is paid software, and the company states that its optimized Antminer firmware editions include Awesome Miner at no additional cost for an unlimited number of miners. We have not quoted a subscription price here because the tiers change and we could not load the pricing page at the time of writing. Get the current figure from the Awesome Miner site directly.
Braiins OS and Braiins OS+
Replacement firmware that you flash onto the miner itself rather than software that runs on a PC. It targets Bitmain Antminer hardware specifically, with per chip autotuning and a low power mode, and the point of it is squeezing better efficiency out of a machine you already bought.
Braiins uses a year and month version scheme, which makes its release cadence easy to audit from the outside. The current SD card image for the S19 and S21 series is v26.08.1, so August 2026. Older hardware sits on older builds, with the S17 series on 23.01 and the S9 series on 22.08.1, which is what you would expect for machines that far out of production. Downloads are on the Braiins firmware page.
XMRig
Not a Bitcoin miner, and that is the point. XMRig targets RandomX, KawPow, CryptoNight and GhostRider, algorithms deliberately designed to resist the specialized hardware that pushed ordinary computers out of Bitcoin. Monero is the coin most people run it for. If you own a decent processor and want it to do something, this is the honest answer, and it is the one your searches for Bitcoin mining software were never going to give you.
Version 6.26.0 was published on March 28, 2026, with repository activity continuing through August 2026. Signed checksums ship with every release. Note that XMRig is itself very commonly bundled into cryptojacking malware precisely because it is good, which makes taking it from the official repository rather than a mirror more important here than anywhere else on this page.
cpuminer-opt
A maintained fork of the old pooler cpuminer with hand optimized implementations of a long list of algorithms. Narrower and more technical than XMRig, with no graphics card support at all, but it is genuinely current and it is the right tool if the algorithm you want is one it covers and XMRig does not.
Version 26.1 was published on January 14, 2026. Source and Windows builds are on the cpuminer-opt repository. Neither this nor XMRig will mine you any Bitcoin, and neither is pretending to.
Two categories that were never software
Cloud mining contracts
The previous version of this page covered Shamining and a platform called BTCminer under the heading of mining software. Neither one is software. They are contracts. You send money and are promised a share of hashing that somebody else is supposedly doing, which makes them investment products rather than programs. You receive no hardware, you get no control over anything, and you have no way to audit whether the hash rate you paid for exists at all. A promised daily payout is a claim, not a mechanism.
BTCminer also demonstrates the durability problem in this corner of the market rather neatly. The domain the article pointed at, btcminer.com, now issues a redirect to kraken.com, an unrelated cryptocurrency exchange. Whatever operation was there is gone, and the article was still recommending it.
Browser mining
CryptoTab was listed here as mining software on the strength of earning bitcoin in the background while you browse. A browser tab cannot meaningfully mine Bitcoin. The network figures at the top of this page are exactly why: proof of work on this chain runs on purpose built silicon at a scale that a JavaScript engine is not within many orders of magnitude of, and no amount of boost features closes that gap.
What products in this category actually run on is recruitment. The pitch on CryptoTab's own homepage is to tell your friends, invite them to join, and grow your network to make more, which is a referral structure with mining as the set dressing. We took it out and it is not coming back.
What Bitcoin mining actually does
Almost every explanation of this says miners solve complex mathematical problems. That phrase has done more damage to public understanding than any other sentence in cryptocurrency, because it suggests something a clever computer could be good at.
What actually happens is guessing. A miner assembles a candidate block, hashes its header with SHA-256 twice, and checks whether the result happens to fall below a target value. If it does not, it changes one number in the header and tries again. There is no shortcut, no partial credit and no insight that helps. The only variable that matters is how many guesses per second you can make, which is why the industry is a hardware race and not a software one.
Whoever finds a valid block first broadcasts it and collects the reward, currently a 3.125 BTC subsidy plus the fees attached to the transactions in that block. Every 2,016 blocks the network looks at how fast the last stretch went and moves the target to bring the average back toward ten minutes. More hardware joins, difficulty goes up, and everyone's individual share goes down. That feedback loop is what has made home mining steadily worse every year since about 2013 and it has no reason to stop.
Mining software is what connects your hardware to that process. It talks to a pool over stratum, feeds work to the chips, collects the results and sends shares back. That is all it does. It is plumbing, and swapping one piece of plumbing for another does not change the amount of water.
If what you want is bitcoin, you do not need a miner
A lot of people arrive at mining software because they want to own some bitcoin and mining sounded like a way to get it for the price of electricity. On a home machine it works out as the reverse. You spend real money on power and hardware and receive an amount of bitcoin that rounds to nothing, while the person who simply bought some paid once and was done.
Buying it outright removes the hardware, the power draw, the noise, the heat, the firmware and the malware risk in a single step, and you can size the purchase to whatever you were prepared to spend on a rig.
Open an account at Kraken if you want to buy bitcoin directly rather than mine it.
It is worth comparing more than one before you sign up, since fee structures differ considerably at small purchase sizes. We go through the field in our guide to the best cryptocurrency apps.
Frequently asked questions
No, not in any sense that makes money. Bitcoin mining moved to purpose built ASIC hardware more than a decade ago, and the network was running at roughly 920 exahashes per second when we checked on September 1, 2026. Your expected share of the roughly 450 BTC issued each day is your hash rate divided by that number, and a processor or graphics card is far enough below it that the result does not round to a cent while your electricity meter keeps turning. If you want to point a normal computer at something, an ASIC resistant coin through XMRig is the honest option.
The source code is fine and it is still on GitHub under the author's account, though that repository is now archived and read only, with the last release dated August 2018. The risk is not the code, it is where you get it. The author stopped publishing compiled binaries years ago and said so in his own download directory, which means every ready made CGMiner installer for Windows was built by somebody else. Sites that look official are not. One that this article used to link serves a decade old version as a RAR file from an unrelated blog's uploads folder.
For managing ASIC hardware, Awesome Miner, whose current build was released on April 24, 2026 and is the only actively developed general management platform we could verify. If your hardware is Bitmain Antminer specifically, Braiins firmware is worth looking at instead, with a current image dated August 2026. If you do not own ASIC hardware, the honest answer is that none of them is best for you, because the bottleneck is the hardware and not the program.
Free is not the warning sign. Most serious mining software is free and open source, because it is infrastructure and the money in mining is in the hardware and the pools. The warning sign is a download that is only available as a compiled Windows file from a site that is not the project's own, or any program that offers to mine bitcoin for you without hardware. Mining software is a heavily impersonated category, so verify the domain against the repository before you run anything.
If you are mining Bitcoin at any realistic scale, yes. Solo mining means you collect a full block reward on the rare occasion you find one and nothing at all the rest of the time, and at current difficulty a single machine can expect to wait many human lifetimes between blocks. A pool combines everyone's hash rate and pays out proportional shares, which turns a lottery into a small steady trickle. Every program covered here supports pool mining over stratum.
We would stay away from it. A cloud mining contract is not software and not hardware. It is a promise that somebody else is hashing on your behalf, with no way for you to verify that the capacity you paid for exists. Two of the platforms this article used to list under mining software were of this type, and one of the two no longer exists at all, its domain having been redirected to an unrelated exchange. If you want exposure to bitcoin without owning hardware, buying it on an exchange is the direct version of that trade and you can see exactly what you are getting.
No. Phone mining apps do not do proof of work on the device in any meaningful way, because the hardware is many orders of magnitude short and the battery would not survive the attempt. What these apps generally pay out on is advertising and referrals, with the mining language attached for marketing. The same objection applies to browser based mining.
Buy it, unless you already own ASIC hardware or you have access to electricity cheap enough to run a mining business on. Mining is a business with real inputs: capital equipment that loses value fast, power, cooling, noise and maintenance. Buying is a single transaction with none of those. If the reason mining appealed to you was getting bitcoin without paying for it, that is the part that does not work, and opening a Kraken account gets you the same asset with none of the overhead.
Where to go next
If mining was on your list because you were looking for something that earns while you are not working, it is a poor fit and the alternatives are better documented. Our roundup of realistic passive income ideas is the more useful starting point, and if you want to stay in crypto specifically there are several ways to make money with Bitcoin that do not involve buying hardware.
If the appeal was getting some bitcoin without spending money on it, the closest honest version is faucets and sign up offers, which we cover in our guide to getting free Bitcoin. And if what you actually want is to put a small amount to work rather than run machines, start with how to start investing with little money instead.
