Bitcoin mining hardware profitability analysis
The solution to this problem is mining as a member of a pool. Whenever a pool solves blocks, miners are awarded individually according to their contributed hashrate minus commissions and other fees. Since the cost of electricity is a determining factor for your profitability when mining, you should always be aware of the rates for your area.
So, this is what it all boils down to. How much will you be left with once all your costs have been taken into account? The answer to this is that profits are hard to predict currently as it depends on the ever increasing difficulty rate.
However, by running the numbers through a reliable mining calculator like the many found online there is still some profit to be made. By assuming that you are purchasing the Antminer S9, that your electricity cost is at 0.
Your total returns though also depend on your exchange strategy and the value of Bitcoin when you choose to sell it and if you choose to sell it. Occasionally, bitcoin hashrates spikes as a big new mining pool comes online, for example, this happened in early The impact of new mining pools decreases as the total number of miners increases.
It is no secret that in this ecosystem the home miner will find it increasingly more difficult to turn a large profit unless access to low-cost or free electricity is an option. Another factor to take into consideration is that Bitcoin mining hardware is also being regularly updated. What is new now may be obsolete by the end of and its efficiency significantly reduced compared to newer devices.
Always take into consideration shipping, customs, or other delays that can increase the cost of your initial investment. Bitcoin mining is still profitable but it does involve a large initial investment and certain risks that could bring about changes to your plans.
Make your decision by taking into account all the aforementioned factors and by doing your research on the hardware you will select. Skip to content Tokens Basic bitcoin mining terms Block: How can Bitcoin mining be profitable? Determining your profit margins So, this is what it all boils down to. Here's the thing though: Ask yourself seriously, because it's your money you're spending and you should understand the expected returns you might be getting from it.
Just because it's a lifetime contract doesn't mean it's guaranteed to pay out forever, particularly in this case because of maintenance costs and other factors which I'll get to below. Before I start though quick note: I do own a small handful of mining contracts, but this analysis is completely and entirely my own thoughts on the subject. This advice is not intended to be any kind of endorsement which I'm sure will be more apparent further down. So let's look at one of the more reputable mining sites out there, Hashing We could pick any number of mining sites, but I'm going to focus on them since they're among the more well known ones.
Just know that this analysis could apply to any site and not just them. Anyway, Hashing24 is fairly popular and well-known mining contractor because they're a legitimate business always a plus and generally speaking they have quick payouts, good rates, and low maintenance costs. You could also use Hashing24's own mining calculator which is probably a little more accurate in this case:. If you want you can even consider the next difficulty increase to see how the next series of payouts will look:.
Overall it seems pretty promising right? The ROI might take a little longer but at least it's still going to be made back within a few months. End of story, right? The problem with these calculators comes down to two factors that we already know about: Specifically, the problem is that these two factors aren't actually correctly accounted for in most mining calculators.
See, the thing is that most of them only account for those factors as they currently are, not as how they'll change in the future or impact your return over time.
So how do we understand the impact? Well, we're going to need to figure out what these factors actually look like over time. We will want to know expected difficulty changes over time as well as the maintenance costs. From there we can calculate our expected income and ultimately posit whether or not cloud mining may actually be worth the investment. Let's start with block difficulty, since that's easier to calculate. According to BitcoinWisdom, the current difficulty is ,,, That's great, but how do we calculate difficulty changes over time?
Fortunately BitcoinWisdom provides a handy table of difficulty changes over the past couple years:. Of course we can't predict what the exact difficulty changes will be, but we can base our calculation on past averages to at least get an idea. Since we want the average increase over time, I calculated the averages for both every entry in the table goes back to Aug 22 and then just Using the rate, we get average difficulty increases that look something like this:.
Now that we have the average difficulties over time, we can start calculating expected gross BTC earnings, maintenance costs, net BTC income and ultimately total earnings. Unfortunately however here's where things get a little tricky. I based my expected BTC income calculation off the code on BitcoinWisdom, but the problem is that this doesn't match what Hashing24 actually pays out. This discrepancy only increases as you input higher hash rates.
Hashing24's mining calculation is hidden behind a separate network call so I couldn't just read their code to figure out how they calculate it, and all the other mining calculators I could find more or less calculated earnings in the same way. And, even if I did know how Hashing24 ran their calculations, there's no guarantee I'd be able to replicate it since they could be taking their own historical data into account in some way. To counteract this, I didn't change the expected BTC calculation but instead tweaked the maintenance deduction to achieve similar net BTC income that Hashing24 reports.
This means that the daily gross BTC calculation will be off from what Hashing24 reports, but the net income should still be about the same in fact it was slightly higher when I did some comparisons, which means my numbers might be more "ideal" than what you'd actually be getting.
It's also worth noting that even if this was accurate my estimates could still be a little off regardless since as per the nature of Bitcoin mining these are only expected returns based on probability, not an actual reflection of what you'll be getting. The point is that it's averaged over time ;. So if we calculate the expected daily gross BTC income, maintenance fees, and net income we get a table that looks like the following.
Note that the maintenance cost column is a reflection of the actual maintenance cost Hashing24 might report. The "cost" I used in my deduction is just calculated as part of the cell formulas. Don't worry about the "BTC price est. In order to calculate expected earnings at each difficulty, we just multiply by the expected difficulty period which for Bitcoin is 14 days.
That will result in something like the following table:. It means that this mining thing will still pay out after a few months then, yeah? You remember that "BTC price est. Here's what that same table looks like if you assume Bitcoin stays the same until November:. So you can see that the price of Bitcoin over time will affect how much USD value you earn.
Of course that's nothing new, but there's actually something in that data that's a bit more telling. Take another look at the cumulative BTC - it's about 0.
Remember how I mentioned the original cost was 0. If you want to see where you'll break even on BTC, unfortunately you can't. These projections start going into the red around the end of next year, and by then you've only made about 0. Additionally, there's one other characteristic I haven't mentioned yet. See how in the first table the expected BTC earnings is 0. As far as I can tell the maintenance cost is based on USD, not BTC, which means that your maintenance cost differs based on market value.
If BTC is down, expect to pay more in maintenance fees and conversely less when it's up. This is important, because it means you're getting more or less BTC simply by virtue of when it was mined, which affects how much you're able to earn. So where does this leave us? I started doing this research because I wanted to see if mining would actually be profitable vs investing.
And to be honest, I'm having a hard time convincing myself that it is.