Mining bitcoin is not profitable for the average Bitcoiner. But it might be a feasible way to acquire KYC-free bitcoin for some. It’s like buying KYC-free coins and paying a premium.
I won’t be explaining HOW to mine, but I’ll explain how to calculate costs. Whether this is doable for you mostly comes down to how cheap you can get electricity. These calculations completely disregard other costs like cooling and renting space.
Income (in bitcoin)
Here are the specs for a used Antminer S9 that I saw for sale at $445 AUD including postage, and power supply.
Using high power, it produces 13.5 terahashes per second. It’s necessary to use that data to calculate what percentage of the total Bitcoin hash rate it can produce right now (and in the future, with a projected Bitcoin hashrate increase). I will only demonstrate with the current hashrate and make no projections. You can do the projecting yourself.
The current hashrate is 133.5 exahashes per second. Remember, it can’t be known for sure, it is calculated from the difficulty and the rate of blocks being produced. It’s roughly correct and always changing.
1 terahash is 10^12 hashes per second
1 exahash is 10^18 hashes per second
Calculating how much this Antminer contributes:
((13.5×10^12) ÷ (133.5×10^18)) =
0.000000101124
From this fraction and the block reward, we can calculate how much bitcoin we can earn (before any pool fees) per hour…
0.000000101124 x block reward x 6 blocks-per-hour =
0.000000101124 x 6.25 x 6 =0.0000037921 bitcoin per hour
Expenditure
The miner, at full power, consumes 1324 Watts (Joules per second, ie energy per second), or 1.324 kW.
Running for 1 hr, 1.324kWh of energy is consumed.
Where I live, 1 kWh costs 0.24 AUD.
So running for 1 hr, it costs 0.24 x 1.324 = 0.3177 AUD.
Right now, 1 Bitcoin costs $30,200 AUD each.
0.0000037921B was earned at a value of $0.1145
So in 1 hr $0.1145 – $0.3177 income was generated = negative 0.2032 AUD
Let’s look at it another way… If you can get electricity at 0.1145 AUD, and a free Antminer S9, you can get KYC-free bitcoin for the market price.
Or, looking at it another way still, you can run a noisy 1.324 kW heater in your home for 0.3177 AUD per hour., and accumulate market price bitcoin, KYC free. The heater is expensive to buy though.
And yet another way… 0.3177 AUD ÷ 0.0000037921B = $83,779 for each KYC-free bitcoin, excluding the cost of the miner.
So you can see, it’s probably not a great way to get bitcoin unless your electricity price is very cheap.
Tips:
Static Lightning Address: dandysack84@walletofsatoshi.com
On-chain or Lightning