Bitcoin Forum

Assuming you don't have a current rig to set up, is it still possible to make money mining?  I am thinking not because of electricity cost/etc.  But I just wanted to come ask the question that has been asked numerous time since the start,

Can you actual profit by purchasing rigs and mining?

There is so many varibles not a one size fits all anwser.  For example electricity is very important.  What is your electricity?  Does your country have a vat/import tax? If so how much?

You really have to do your own ROI math as just to many varibles for it to be as I call one size fit's all.

Thanks for the response, my electricity is actually rather expensive roughly I use 11.6KwH per day for about $1.72 at the moment, I believe its about .15 cents per KWH.

(I think that is expensive anyway)

I know that back when I was looking to getting into mining the block and difficulty was going up so fast it was next to impossible to gain anything from it, just seeing if times have changed.

At .15 cents I would not recommend getting into mining.  You might find a place to host and stand a better chance to ROI.

Just that electricity price kills most ROI chances.  It is sad but electricity makes a huge difference in this game.

he can have a good profit actually even with that rate, but only with the s7 and maybe the s5+

the s7+ is currently producing around $10 per day while consuming only 4.5 with his rate(1200x24x0.15)

the problem is that ROI is very long, because of the initial investment for the new S7

The problem is I don't think at that he will be able to reach ROI by running it.   He might get ROI from running it to a point then selling.  But don't see .15 as that profitable.

It would be more profitable to have it hosted somewhere for chances are around .10 and save compared to OP's home.

The S7 will never achieve ROI at .15 cents/kwh - unless bitcoin price rises a lot more than it has been doing, or diff suddently stops increasing.

 Even at a 3% average diff increase and 6.7 cent / KWH power cost, the S7 costs more than it will ever return - and recent diff increases have been a LOT more than 3%.

 I'm not sure at this point if an S7 will be profitable AT ALL past the halfing, unless your electric is in the UNDER 5 cents/KWH range.

i have ordered a U2 for the fun...
soon i will give you the answer.

Mining is not profitable for home users anymore.

Only large companies can make profit out ot mining at the moment. Costs are too high for home users and ROI is also too long.

if you're talking about 3% diff increase per month, it's more than doable, look at the antminers s5, its profit remained at 0.01 for a very long time, at least since january which is 9 months already, this is more than enough to roi with everything out there

only recently , dropped to 0.009, so the whole diff increase is a bit overestimated...

Very short answer, probably not. Maybe you can if you have an access to a very, very cheap electricity, like China does. Economies of scale have taken over here as well. Someone just tweeted a week ago that it's not surprising how Bitcoin mining got centralized when you effectively need around 10 million to invest to be productive in mining.

 3 % diff increase per increment, or about double that per month - the last couple months have been closer to 5% per increment.

 At 3% the S5 has ZERO profitability after the halfing, and it's noticeably UNDER .01BTC/day even now on GROSS income unless you overclock it a LOT.

 The December-July or so timeframe saw an average diff increase of appx. 1.6% - MUCH flatter than the last couple months, and VERY ABNORMAL for Bitcoin in general to date.

 If you bought an S5 late last year or very early this year, it's probably hit RoI already and will make you some decent money - but the market has CHANGED since then, if you don't already own the hardware, get it VERY cheap, or have VERY CHEAP electric your probability of achieving RoI on currently available mining gear is almost zero.

 Don't forget to factor in cost of power supplies too, that can make a noticeable difference - though at least most power supplies can be "recycled" to other usages after your mining gear goes unprofitable or you sell it.

Thanks for all the responses, was out of town for the weekend couldn't log on to respond.

That is sort of what I figured with my electric cost but I figured people have run into this question a lot already.  I think I will not be doing any mining in the mean time, it sucks cause I would love to have a solid income of coins:)  Guess I will just have to wait to see if we can ever mine again!

How can you say it's overestimated?  I still don't understand.   Here shows direct changes in earning - https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

To say my one S5 stayed close to same payout there difficulty does not really matter is crazy.

A big chunk of "Mining Profitability" these days is related to when you sell the miner (i.e. asset) and the resale value at that time. You may well not "Break Even" (aka ROI) until you actually sell it. I am certain that the S7 will need to be sold in order to generate any actual profit for most folks. As to when that happens, it all depends on your situation, and what's happen in general (e.g. difficulty, BTC price, new miners, etc). The S7 probably set a new record for how long it held it's value in terms of price. It never got priced real high, and difficulty and BTC price remained fairly stable for months. I don't think you can expect the same for the S7.

Do you agree with me that difficulty will have an effect on it?  I mean if low difficulty... you don't have to sell for long time.   If high difficulty changes less time with miner and it get's sold sooner.


I'm just still trying to understand how difficulty is overestimated from earlier in thread.

Part of it may have to do with how folks express a difficulty change. I'd swear I saw 3%/month, which is really pretty low, and way lower than 3%/adjustment (i.e less than 2 weeks). Folks that have been mining for more than a year consider 1%/month to be a SMALL change. In virtually any other industry, 1%/Month would be HUGE.

it simple man, look at the past, don't look at the diff only, right now the s5 is still doing 0.097, before it was 0.01 and some time 0.011 and this from a very long time

if you were to look at the diff change only, could you ever think for once that the s5 profit would have been dropped so little?

Gross income /= profit.

 Just because a S5 might be pulling in close to 0.01 bitcoin a day does NOT make that 0.01 it's PROFIT - and as the electric cost for most folks doesn't change more than once a year, every 1% loss in GROSS INCOME usually represents quite a bit higher lost PROFIT.
 The only exception to that is if your electric is FREE (or effectively free, like you have electric heat and you're using your S5 to do part of your heating, WHILE you need the heat).

 The current diff drop is a very short-term phenomon related to Bitmain shipping a bunch of S7 units they sold (and obviously were mining with before they sold them), rate will buck back up and then some once the buyers recieve them and get them back online.

It's profitable on somebody else's money and you keeping the BTC for yourself  ;D

Seriously, you won't make ROI unless you steal electricity or equipment, or at least the money for either. On the bright side your proceeds are virtually untraceable so that plan is not that far off. Otherwise your home mine operation won't pay off. You're competing with efficient dedicated datacentres.

I will start mining next week...
the profit is not the first point.
it will just be for "to see" if I can earn at least 1 satoshi with my U2.

then I will open a site talking about...and i'm sure this site will make more money that my antiminer U2
I will of course propose to investors to invest in my business...
so one again one will more talk about ponzi or scam than the real subject.
But i'm use about this  :(

remember that if the profit is not too much the miners will simply leave the scene, maintaining as a result the same ratio as before, the equilibrium will be untouched,

and if the bitcoin price increase again we are the same as before, so no matter what is the diff nothing will really change

Currently, bitcoin mining isn't profitable with small rigs because electricity cost and maintance. But you can get profit if you use a new Antminer S7 rig because it consume lower power than older generation, so you can reduce your electricity cost while increasing shares with new chips.

But it's hard to achieve ROI if you buy S7 right now because its high price and maximum profit you can get in one day. Also profitable or not profitable depends on your price per KWh.

The only way to make money of mining is so incredibly large scale, and then you're still talking about pennies. Or if you dont have to pay for electricity at all, like Turkmenistan or other countries where you can pay off officials :)

The misconception seems to be that mining was ever profitable, it never was. Only for a real short period when the gold rush and the spike to 1100 dollar came, then it was very profitable, and a lot of people that stept into bitcoin then lost alot of mining in mining. They bought in the high days, and crasht and had to sell everything low...

Mining isnt profitable and therefore also leads to centralization sadly. Staking isnt much better, an even way for distribution, the holy grail hasnt been found yet :)

so far it is not profitable for me because I have bouth a miner and i am not able to use it...

 No, you can make money and achieve RoI on many miners if your electric is cheap enough - even now.
 It's just that "cheap enough" on Electric is now limited to very few areas of the world.


 I've seen profit out of mining at times in the past, paid for several of my current video cards via Litecoin mining back before the Gridseeds were introduced.
 They're currently doing other stuff I had intended to buy them for anyway, just got to buy them sooner and more OF them....


 Folks that bought Sp20s and S5's back before around March 2015 have probably made most or all of their investment back by now, most of the rest will probably RoI real soon.
 Sadly, I figure the only reason I'll manage to get RoI on my S5s and single SP20 is that my electric during winter heating season is "effectively free" most of the time.

inevitably electricity costs should be included. If you buy the current rig rigs make sure that you use has a hash and eco-friendly consumption. many today who have Fiture like it. profit? depending you choose altcoin be mined .. good luck

Good question:  Is mining profitable?  Easy answer too:  Yes, if you can afford to go big, and no, if you can't rally the capital to go big.  But, there are ton's of other alternative coin that one can turn their miners onto from what I understand.  So, my thought, keep mining the alts and, maybe, get lucky with one that takes off!

Mining is like a lottery.... So u need to think on things sometimes a better way.... Take on a better calculation with bitcoin mining calculators.......its all about how u plan... Ur assumption... If its correct and right up to mark it will sure hit u some with bitcoins...

Mining isn't exactly like a lottery.  It is more a calculations based on what your electricity costs, how much the gear costs, what you would roughly be making a week, and then figuring out your ROI.  The only gambling part of mining is essentially the diff. increase, but that should pretty much be normalized roughly every 10 days.  So calculation is important on mining.

Mining solo can work pretty much like a lottery. Mining in a proper pool is from "not much of a lottery" to "absolutely not a lottery". If OP or anyone else give us their electricity cost, we will give a pretty good recommendation back, i'm sure.

It's very profitable for me, it could be for "you".

So mining solo basically if you hit a block(odds are not good correct?)  that is what you consider gambling?

Its about .15cents per KWH.  From what I gathered earlier it is not a good choice for me to go ahead and try to start mining

Yes unless you have a mega farm. For instance i have a small USB stick on the solo.ck pool, it does 9-10GHs~ take 3watts of powers~ The odds of finding a block are very small. Hence its a bit like buying a small lottery ticket.

I would call it gambling/lotto. If you have a farm with 500THs+ at the moment its not really gambling but your expected average will take a long time. At less than a PH i would probably pool mine.

And with your cost, mining at home with those price is a no go. Even cloud hosting would be much better for you and dedicated ASIC coop hosting somewhere with really cheap electricity is your best bet.

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator (https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator)

At $0.15 per kWh, there isn't much gear out there that will be profitable for you.  The S7 (if you had one mining right now) would expect to earn you about $9.46 a day.  At 1.2kW power usage, it would cost you $4.32 a day, meaning you'd make about $5.14 in profit a day.  So, if the network difficulty and exchange rates remained static (which they will not), it would take you nearly a year to pay off your initial investment in the hardware.

How about an S3?  Well, one of those currently expects to earn about $0.86 a day.  At 340W, it'll cost you $1.22 a day to run.  Oops... that's not gonna work.

Ok, how about an S5?  1155GH/s expects to make you $2.25 a day.  590W will cost you $2.12 a day.  OK, you're making about $0.13 a day.

So, in a nutshell, you can take your chances with the S7 - and it's taking a hell of a chance - or look at other options like hosting.

That is not going to happen, for the S7. Don't forget the halving coming, at which point it would be half 9.46$ = 4.73$ per day minus 4.32$ =41 cents per day. And with the reality of raising difficulty, this is simply not ROI-able.

That electricity cost is completely prohibitive. I think the host fee for cloud hosting is 0.08$/kWh which is already high in itself and take up nearly if not all profit away from the investor. So if you "Really" want to invest in mining, the best bet that i can tell right now would be to buy a S7 on Hashnest.

Check the hosting cost, if its still 8 cents per kWh then you're in for not much profit but at least you can bail out at any time.