Is there any benefit to setting up a limited company and mining as such rather than mining personally?
We started as a personal mining operation and quickly filed an LLC. There are several things you need to consider:
1. Section 179 deduction (brought up before and is an excellent point). Basically, until you make more than you paid for the miner, no taxes.
2. Miner insurance. As a business entity, you can begin (and I mean begin) to find some levels of insurance for miners. General Business Liability for crypto mining companies is essentially non-existant, but property coverage is key. What if they get stolen? Burn up in a fire? The rates are high, but with a pretty large investment in mining equipment, I don't want to start over with no type of offset.
3. Personal Liability. This is still an emerging space, especially regarding what liability a mininig company can have, but if you hosting in someone else's facility, and your rig bursts into flames, can they sue your LLC / Corp, or will they try to sue you personally for damages to the building, etc.
4. Taxes. I keep my crypto mining gains/losses separate from personal, use crypto mining software to help track what I am making and so its mentally separate from my personal bank account.
5. Banking. Banks do not want to open accounts for Crypto Mining companies. Even a simple checking account. I found 1 that is actually got their head on straight. Mercury bank is an online bank. I am not advocating, I am just sharing what I ended up with after trying at 10 different banks. Even the "crypto friendly" banks are BS because they want $50k or 250k average balances. For small operations like us, I would rather run $10k in an account and pour $40k into miners.
6. Access to capital. There was a warning about using leverage to acquire equipment. You have to decide that on your own. We poured a significant amount of capital into our starting equipment footprint, but wanted to grow more. So we added leverage. You can't get "equipment loans". I have tried both equipment purchase and leasing and it just doesn't really exist until you get into the $2M+ level given institutional scale debt is available, but not for the small guy. I found 1 lender who gave me an equipment focused business loan, but it is a 3 year, high single digit loan. We can talk offline, but its about starting somewhere and building a relationship. I have heard of folks using zero-interest credit cards and then paying them back with mining profits but its a forward risk if crypto drops sharply, build a reserve so you can just pay it off. I have seen working capital loans (we did this route) to expand the fleet, but they are longer term 3 - 7 years at low teen fixed interest. We can absorb the payment if everything falls apart, but it is an option. Leverage at your own risk.
I hope this helps.
