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December 31, 2014, 06:50:24 PM |
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Step 1.
Recognize that mining for profit is simply an alternative method of purchasing bitcoins. All the money that you spend on the equipment and on the electricity is for the sole purpose of acquiring bitcoins which you then hope to sell at an exchange rate that is higher than what you spent to acquire them.
Step 2.
Convert the costs into bitcoins so you can make a reasonable comparison. If you spend $3500 on mining equipment, you could instead have purchased 11.01 BTC at an exchange rate of $318 per BTC. This means, if you don't acquire AT LEAST 11.01 BTC, then you would obviously been better off just purchasing the bitcoins directly instead of mining for them. You'll want to do the same with any other costs you encounter (such as electricity costs).
Step 3.
Make a prediction about how quickly the difficulty will increase (or if you think it will stay the same, or decrease).
Step 4.
Use a mining calculator to see if your assumptions result in a better result than simply purchasing the bitcoins.
Here's an example.
$3500
6TH miner
Electricity usage: 1600 Watts
Electricity cost: $0.11 per kWh
Current exchange rate: $318
Difficulty increase: 10% every 14 days
Current Difficulty: 40,640,955,017
Mining pool fee: 2%
If the prediction of consistent 10% difficulty increase is accurate, you can expect gross revenue of approximately 2.095 BTC the first month, 1.537 BTC the second month, 1.381 BTC the third month, 1.074 BTC the fourth month, 0.8895 BTC the fifth month, and 0.6951 BTC the sixth month.
Meanwhile, if you are paying $0.11 per kWh for electricity, and if the exchange rate remains consistently around $318 per month, then you can expect to have to pay about 0.412 BTC or so per month in electricity. This means, by the time you reach the 9th month, you will be spending more in electricity than you will be earning in bitcoins.
If we add up your revenue each month, and subtract out the cost of electricity we find that the total you'll earn before you start operating at a loss is about: 5.5 BTC
So, you can simply purchase 11 BTC today, or you can invest that money in mining equipment in the hopes of generating 5.5 BTC for yourself spread out over a time period of 9 months.
If you have any downtime at all (power outages, hardware failures, difficulty setting up and configuring, etc), then you'll generate even less.
Of course, these results change based on your particular situation. If you have access to VERY cheap electricity, and if the difficulty doesn't increase as fast (or perhaps even decreases), then you might find that you'll be slightly better off by mining.
If you can get your electricity for only $0.08 per kWh, and you mine in a pool that only charges a 1% fee, and the difficulty only increases by 5% every 14 days, then you can mine about 12.7 BTC over the next 20 months before it costs more to keep the equipment running than it will generate.
That means, instead of purchasing 11 BTC today, you can invest that money in mining equipment in the hopes of generating 12.7 BTC for yourself spread out over a time period of 20 months. That's an average profit of 0.085 BTC per month (assuming that you can keep the equipment running without interruption and that the predictions of difficulty increase and electricity cost are accurate).
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