How often would you hit a block with CPU mining now, mining with a good i7 processor? I mean, is it a matter of hours, days or weeks or... years?
I have 1 4core/8thread and 1 8core/16 cpu mining and I get between 2-4 blocks a day between both of these CPUs. With a single quad core, I would expect 0-1 blocks a day, certainly 3-4 a week.
In order to mine is there anything special you's have to do or is it just sufficient to leave the wallet open? How many of the CPU's resources would the wallet use?
You need to leave the daemon running (it is running when you are using the gui wallet). You also need to set it to generate. You can do this with the debug window in the gui and do:
setgenerate true
Or if you are using the command line, you can do:
$ ./baby-cli setgenerate true
Assuming you are in the directory with the baby-cli binary and it is executable.
In both cases you can limit the number of cores it uses by adding a third parameter which is the number of cores. Using 2 cores would be:
setgenerate true 2
$ ./baby-cli setgenerate true 2
Thank you, this has been very useful. Especially the command to limit the mining to an X number of cores, I would have not been able to use it otherwise.