Two open-source projects for running a private, optimized Monero + Tari mining operation at home: an orchestrator (Pithead) and the miners that feed it (RigForge). Decentralized, zero-fee P2Pool payouts straight to your own wallet, all behind Tor — no custodians, no exposed home IP, no pool fees, no hand-tuning.

🌐 p2pool-starter-stack.github.io · free & MIT · Tor-first · self-hosted

A professional-grade, containerized stack that runs a private Monero full node, P2Pool, Tari merge mining, a single mining endpoint, and a live dashboard — all behind Tor, in one command.

• 🧅 Private by default — Tor hidden services for Monero, Tari, and P2Pool, and all runtime egress routed over Tor; a fail-closed host firewall drops any direct clearnet dial. Your router stays shut, your home IP stays yours.
• ⛏️ Monero + Tari, merge-mined — every hash mines Monero on zero-fee P2Pool and merge-mines Tari at once: a second payout for zero extra power or config.
• 🧠 Algorithmic yield optimization — watches the XMRvsBeast raffle and shifts hashrate to grab bonus rounds, donating only the minimum to hold your tier, then handing every spare cycle back to your own P2Pool payouts.
• 🔌 One endpoint for every rig — all your miners point at a single address; no wallet in the miner, no per-rig pool config.
• 📊 A dashboard worth leaving open — live hashrate, the P2Pool/XvB split shading in real time, per-worker stats, and persistent trends: blocks found, pool luck, reject rates, and expected-vs-confirmed earnings after power costs.
• 🎛️ Control from the browser — opt in to edit any setting from a guided form, retune each rig with versioned history, and one-click upgrade when a release lands — every change host-validated behind a login, with a full audit log.
• 📟 An operator bot on call — Telegram alerts the moment a node or worker drops (and when it recovers), plus a daily digest, read-only status commands, and a Healthchecks dead-man's switch for the failure the box can't report itself.
• 💾 Encrypted backups — one command writes config, secrets, Tor onion keys, and the dashboard's history to an AES-256 archive; restore brings the box back on new hardware with the same onion address.
• 🔒 Hardened out of the box — non-root containers, read-only filesystems, SHA256-verified pinned binaries, digest-pinned images, scoped Docker-socket proxies — and every release cosign-signed end to end.

Turn any Ubuntu/Debian — or macOS — machine into a tuned mining worker in one command. RigForge compiles stock, commit-pinned XMRig from source, applies CPU- and kernel-level tuning for maximum RandomX hashrate, and runs it as a managed service — then points it at your stack, or any RandomX pool.

• ⚡ One command from bare metal to a running, tuned miner — on Ubuntu/Debian or macOS.
• 📈 Measurably faster, and cooler — +3.5% hashrate and +7.6% efficiency on a Ryzen 7800X3D, measured live against stock XMRig (and +6.6% on a 48-core EPYC).
• 🧠 Hardware-aware — detects your CPU (AMD EPYC, Ryzen X3D, …), applies a matching profile, then live-A/Bs the hardware prefetcher to keep the fastest.
• ⚙️ Kernel-tuned (Linux) — HugePages (1 GB / 2 MB), MSR access, NUMA binding, and a performance governor, done for you.
• 🔗 Plug-and-play — connects to Pithead, or any RandomX Stratum pool. Stock XMRig pinned to a verified commit — no custom binary; keeps XMRig's standard 1% dev fee (funds upstream XMRig), one line to disable; idempotent re-runs.

flowchart LR
    Rigs["🔥 RigForge miners<br/>(many machines)"] ==>|"hashrate · :3333"| Orc["🟠 Pithead<br/>(the orchestrator)"]
    Orc ==>|"merge-mine, over Tor"| Chains["🪙 Monero + Tari"]
    Orc -.->|"bonus rounds"| XvB["🎲 XMRvsBeast"]

Point as many RigForge miners as you like at a single Pithead. The stack handles the nodes, privacy, payouts, and optimization; the miners just hash.

How do I mine Monero privately at home? Run the P2Pool Starter Stack. One command stands up a private Monero full node, P2Pool, and a single mining endpoint behind Tor — your home IP is never advertised to an inbound peer and you never forward a port. Point any XMRig rig (or a RigForge worker) at it and you're mining straight to your own wallet, no account and no custodian.

Do I have to forward ports or expose my home IP? No. Monero, Tari, and P2Pool run as Tor hidden services, so inbound peers reach you over an onion address and your router stays shut; RPC is localhost-bound. All runtime egress routes over Tor by default behind a fail-closed firewall — the few opt-in exceptions, like a faster clearnet initial sync, are mapped in the privacy guide.

What is P2Pool, and why mine to it instead of a centralized pool? P2Pool is a decentralized, peer-to-peer Monero mining pool: no operator, no account, and no pool fee — the network pays block rewards straight to your own wallet. The stack runs your own P2Pool node, so you get decentralized, zero-fee payouts without the fiddly setup.

Is it free? Are there any fees? Yes — free and MIT-licensed, and P2Pool charges no pool fee. RigForge keeps XMRig's standard 1% dev fee — that funds the upstream XMRig project, not us — and makes it one line to turn off. The only optional extra is a Monero donation if a stack saves you time.

Can I point my existing XMRig miners at it? Yes — point any XMRig or RandomX rig at the stack's single endpoint (host:3333), no wallet in the miner. For maximum hashrate, RigForge provisions a kernel-tuned XMRig worker in one command (+3.5% hashrate / +7.6% efficiency on a Ryzen 7800X3D vs stock).

What hardware do I need? Stack host: Ubuntu Server 24.04, 16 GB+ RAM, an SSD (~330 GB pruned / ~530 GB full to start — the chains grow, so 2–4 TB is set-and-forget). Mining itself is CPU-bound — Monero's RandomX runs on any modern AMD/Intel CPU, and large-L3 chips (Ryzen X3D, EPYC) shine. RigForge tunes per-CPU automatically.

A few principles you'll see throughout the code:

• Privacy is the default, not a setting. Inbound rides Tor hidden services — no port forwarding, your home IP never advertised to a peer — RPC is localhost-bound, and all runtime egress routes over Tor by default. The opt-in clearnet exceptions are documented in the privacy guide.
• Least privilege, everywhere. Capability-scoped containers, a read-only Docker-socket proxy kept separate from a start/stop-only one, owner-only secrets. Nothing gets more access than it needs.
• Verifiable and pinned. Third-party binaries are SHA256-checked and version-pinned — no curl | bash trust.
• The why lives in the code. Non-obvious decisions are documented inline with their reasoning and the issue that drove them, so the next person — or the next you — understands the trade-off.
• Small, reversible, issue-driven changes. Work is scoped to focused issues; config changes are previewed and warn before anything disruptive; failures degrade gracefully (clean OOM handling, node-down failover, hold-the-miner-until-synced).
• Respect the operator's time and hardware. Sensible auto-tuning, one-command setup, and docs treated as a first-class deliverable — "a setup you can finish before your coffee gets cold."

• New to this? → Pithead gets the whole operation running in one command.
• Already have the stack? → RigForge provisions your miners.
• Want the overview? → p2pool-starter-stack.github.io

Both projects ship in the open, release by release — nineteen minor Pithead releases since v1.0, with RigForge in lockstep (the badges above always show the latest). Next up: Pithead OS, a flashable appliance image, in review on Pithead's develop-v2 branch. Everything here is MIT-licensed and built in the open. Issues and pull requests are welcome.

If these projects saved you time and you'd like to support the work, donations to this XMR wallet are appreciated:

486aGn4qhH1MkaASjnEWMDN7stD1SVtPF5fvihmjffeBE5ACL1u1jU95KxiqmoiaPZMexi4R4W11MLXut66XWVVF8wjAE5R