John McAfee says it costs him 1000$ to mine 1 Bitcoin. Is it really that cheap?

[AGD]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxScg1t0eZI
I thought it was more expensive nowadays. Some big miners here to shine a light on it?

[wforwork]

I want to know to , if $1000 able to gen a bitcoin i think is pretty good , better that invest in other coins

[RawDog]

It is totally not true.  If it were true, John McAfee would buy twice as many machines as he has today.  And then tomorrow, twice as many again.  Even for Jihan who is certainly the very most efficient miner in the world - it cost far more than $1000 per bitcoin.

John McAfee is too busy eating dicks to carefully add up all the costs and report accurately on that. 

[Gigafart]

The research I have done, the less coin in circulation, the harder it is to mine. I am new to crypto and was up in the air whether to mine or buy coins. After much research, I decided it was better for me to invest in coin rather than mining machines. The mining machines cost a lot on electricity, replacing hardware, and machines go out of date pretty fast considering the mining process is getting more complex daily.

[buwaytress]

It's hard to say what the price is - we know for sure that it was still profitable at the most recent dips around $3,200 but should never take anything anyone says too seriously. McAfee's been buying up and expanding like crazy since the past year. Think he just dropped millions more on his farm in Washington but I haven't seen any evidence of it on hash. I'm pretty sure $1,000 is doable but not at his current location. The cheapest is still in China, even then only at optimal setups you won't find outside the industrial mining gigs and they would probably struggle to keep it at $1k per BTC.

Some minor experience at my own hometown where a few people are trying with very modest builds, where they are paying almost equal rates to some places in China (albeit at cheaper domestic use vs higher commercial rates there), and it's closer to $2,000 per BTC (extrapolating from pool share). Add in costs of moving it out to fiat at real market value and you'd need to have BTC above $2100 to break even. A lot of unexpected repairs and breaks as comes with the inexperience, mind you.

[olubams]

I am not engaging in mining but the fact is the basis of arriving at that costs needs to be identified considering costs defer from country to country. If he had to buy the equipment in the shop next door or even set up the farm, it would definitely be cheaper than someone who is going to have to ship it into the country aside that the cost of electricity, labour overheads differ on the basis of countries so before concluding to assume that that's the total amount he spent, then there is need for proper analysis as well.

[CriptoIngresos]

Probably no. Like some of the users already pointed out, it really depends on the technology that you are using and the cost of the electricity. A lot of the times claims done by John McAfee are greatly exaggerated by the media or by the community itself for clickbait purposes.

The articles that I found with this claim are from around September of this year. In context most of these articles are talking about the response that McAfee had to the JPMorgan CEO claims and are quoting him from an interview with the CNBC, the majority of the articles found online had a misleading quote. When the interviewer asked him about his response to Damon's claims he said:

"I am a Bitcoin miner, we create Bitcoins. It costs over a $1.000 dollars per coin to create a Bitcoin, what does it cost to create a U.S dollar? which one is the fraud?"

Keyword here is over. If you watch the full interview he later says the exact same thing, it costs him over a $1.000 U.S dollars to create a Bitcoin which means he probably chose the one thousand dollar mark to make a point. The point is, creating a U.S dollar costs whatever the paper costs, as he immediately said after.

Hope this helped.

[sbrys]

That would be very lucrative if it costs him only 1k ! Everybody would be building mining rigs until it would be closer to 4k no ?

[tyuner4]

$1000 to mine 1 bitcoin worth $4500 seems too good to be true if John McAfee includes the all costs such as equipment and electricity.

[khufuking]

To my knowledge it is impossible to do so , Even if you take out the cost of electricity , We all know the hash rate of most equipment out there and we also know the current difficulty it is really not hard to calculate the numbers .

[pawanjain]

The research I have done, the less coin in circulation, the harder it is to mine. I am new to crypto and was up in the air whether to mine or buy coins. After much research, I decided it was better for me to invest in coin rather than mining machines. The mining machines cost a lot on electricity, replacing hardware, and machines go out of date pretty fast considering the mining process is getting more complex daily.

You have done a good research mate. I was myself planning on to invest in mining rigs and build a decent mining rig out of GPUs and then use them for some years. After some years when they become not so good for mining then I would sell them and get fiat instead of them.
But I think you post makes more sense to me and it must be really hard for maintaining the rigs and electricity. I am thinking to drop the idea of investing in mining and thinking to put that amount in trading instead.

[sbrys]

Maybe he has put some crazy virus into the blockchain Or even better he is just using malware to steal peoples btc. If he calls this 'mining' the story could be true 

[eaLiTy]

I thought it was more expensive nowadays. Some big miners here to shine a light on it?

The context in which John McAfee made that statement is entirely different, he was just point out the fact that to print a hundred dollar note you need to spend that much money and that is not the case with bitcoin and that is the fact,so he was making a point to make them understand why the price of bitcoin is so high and he is not making an exact return from mining.

[audaciousbeing]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxScg1t0eZI
I thought it was more expensive nowadays. Some big miners here to shine a light on it?

Its possible that it could be that amount because of the Learning Curve theory which means that as much as an event is being done, expertise is maintained thereby reducing the cost in the long run which I believe that is what is happening here and not the cost from the initial set up cost.

Also, he might only be considering the relevant costs alone because all other costs such as the equipment they are fixed cost or sunk cost which are no longer important in decision making thereby I agree with him on this. Another reason is that the costs he quoted might be the average costs over a period of time and mining machine.

[squatz1]

It is totally not true.  If it were true, John McAfee would buy twice as many machines as he has today.  And then tomorrow, twice as many again.  Even for Jihan who is certainly the very most efficient miner in the world - it cost far more than $1000 per bitcoin.

John McAfee is too busy eating dicks to carefully add up all the costs and report accurately on that. 

McAffe just wants to be relevant again, cut the dude some slack.

But back on the topic here, there is no fucking way that this is possible. If it was, we'd be in an insane mining frenzy with the difficulity exponentially going up hour after hour. The guy is a bunch of shit, a has been that's trying to get back into the public light anyway he can, and then only way he knows how.

[Kprawn]

Cut the guy a bit of slack, he simply mentioned this amount to prove a point that it has worth and are not just something that

are "generated" without any cost. You have to pay for the electricity and the hardware and the manpower supervising the

mining farms and the total cost of the cooling. For some it might be cheaper and for others it might be more expensive. You

cannot pin a specific cost to each bitcoin that are mined.