is it possible to mine bitcoins VIA software on BBB, and if so whats the best way to get started?
I'm sure you can tweak cgminer to re-enable CPU based mining... But that feature was removed for a reason; it's pointless. Even with a high end intel i7 processor, you're wasting your time, electricity, and the usage of the beaglebone.
The bbb can be used as a controller for other hardware specific to mining (aka ASIC hardware).
What he means by that is, it’ll cost you more in electricity to mine (with a crud cpu setup) than to just buy some with cash from an exchange.
Even if electricity is free, mining on the bbb will return next to 0 returns. I have a mining setup for 2gh/s and I'm getting 0.0006 btc a day, that's basically 0.50$ a day. It's not worth the effort and the hardware, but I keep doing it because it's already set up and running w/o intervention. With 1 bbb you're looking at a hundred times less (note: total guess... I think my main PC did 300mh/s CPU so it's probably even worse than -100x) than what I make.
Maybe lite coin might be better because CPU mining is still viable on that I hear.
litecoins would actually have less return than bitcoins. At least the last time I looked this was true. The reason was merely because of the value of litecoin + exchange costs to convert to something that could be used as “real” currency.
Check my video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY2K6wB6sHo
It has all the program you need to mine BTC using BBB