How to mine Blocknet on a Mac

This guide shows you how to mine Blocknet on an Apple Silicon Mac with seine: why M-series chips suit Blocknet’s proof of work, what an M4 Max measured, how many threads your Mac’s memory can hold, and the exact Terminal steps to start mining on bntpool.com.

Can you mine Blocknet on a Mac?

Seine handles the Mac-specific setup itself. It mines on the CPU, schedules its threads on the performance cores first, and sizes the thread count to your memory, so a plain ./seine is all most people need.

Why do Apple Silicon Macs mine Blocknet well?

Blocknet’s proof of work is Argon2id with 2 GiB of memory per hash. Each hash fills a 2 GiB block of memory, reading back earlier parts of it as it goes, so the speed of a mining thread depends mostly on how fast the chip can move data to and from memory. That is why each seine thread needs about 2 GB of RAM of its own.

Apple Silicon is built around unified memory, which Apple describes as high-bandwidth, low-latency memory brought together into a single pool. That gives every mining thread plenty of bandwidth, which is exactly what a memory-hard hash needs. The result is a laptop that mines Blocknet in the same range as server processors.

How fast does an M4 Max mine Blocknet?

These results come from seine’s validation sweep on a 48 GB M4 Max (12 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores) on 2026-07-10:

For context, the 30.9 H/s result is ahead of every Arm server and Intel Xeon result in seine’s performance tables; only the AMD EPYC Zen 5 and Zen 4 servers measured higher. The Blocknet mining hardware guide compares the best result for each hardware generation, and the Apple Silicon guide has the full tuning notes.

How many threads can your Mac run?

Every thread needs its own 2 GiB of memory, so memory sets the ceiling. Seine also leaves 5% of your Mac’s memory free as headroom when it sizes itself. That gives these upper limits:

Two things bring the final number to the right fit for your Mac:

• Free memory. Seine counts the memory that is actually free when it starts, so apps you have open reduce the count a little. If memory gets tight while it runs, seine parks threads and releases their memory.
• Cores. By default on a Mac, seine uses all of the performance cores plus half of the efficiency cores. On the 12+4 core M4 Max, that is 14 threads, the balanced setting in the table above.

You don’t need to work any of this out. Seine picks the thread count when it starts and keeps testing nearby counts while it mines.

Step-by-step setup on macOS

Step 1: get a Blocknet address

Install the official Blocknet wallet, either the command-line wallet or the desktop wallet, and copy your address. If you have a Blocknet ID shortname from blocknet.id, you can mine to @name instead.

Step 2: download seine for Apple Silicon

From the download section, get seine-macos-aarch64.tar.gz. It contains the seine program, its readme and license, and a SHA256SUMS.txt file for checking the download.

Step 3: extract it in Terminal

Open Terminal (in Applications, then Utilities) and run these commands. They make a seine folder in your home folder and unpack the archive into it:

mkdir -p ~/seine
tar -xzf ~/Downloads/seine-macos-aarch64.tar.gz -C ~/seine
cd ~/seine

Step 4: run seine

./seine

The macOS build is ad-hoc signed. If macOS stops the first launch, open System Settings, go to Privacy & Security, and allow seine. You can also clear the download flag from Terminal and run it again:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ./seine
./seine

Step 5: enter your address and start mining

Seine asks for your payout address or @shortname, then for a pool. Press Return to accept the default, stratum+tcp://bntpool.com:3333. The dashboard then shows your hashrate and your first accepted shares. The bntpool.com pool sends your balance to your address once it reaches 0.1 BNT, and you can follow it on bntpool.com by looking up your address.

Why does seine mine on the CPU only on a Mac?

On Apple Silicon the CPU and the graphics cores share one pool of unified memory. Argon2id depends on memory bandwidth, so the CPU and the graphics cores would compete for the same bandwidth. In seine’s testing on the M4 Max, CPU-only mining gave the highest hashrate, so seine selects it automatically on every Apple Silicon Mac. You get the fastest setup with no flags to set.

How do you get the most from a Mac?

• Let seine tune itself. It compares thread counts and CPU kernels on real mining work, switches only after a confirmed gain, and remembers the result for the next start.

• Keep the Mac awake. macOS puts an idle Mac to sleep, which pauses mining. Start seine with the built-in caffeinate command to keep the Mac awake for as long as seine runs:

  caffeinate -i ./seine

• Go for maximum throughput on a dedicated Mac. If the Mac is doing nothing but mining, the setting that measured 30.94 H/s on the M4 Max uses all 16 cores and more memory than the balanced default:

  ./seine --backend cpu --threads 16 --cpu-affinity auto

For every option, see the configuration guide. The main mining guide covers payouts and the other platforms.