Does It Actually Pay?
This is the page people skip and then regret. The math is not hard, and it tells you the truth before you spend money.
Think of it like this: Mining is buying Bitcoin with electricity. If the Bitcoin you dig up each day is worth more than the power it took to dig it, you profit. If not, you are just converting dollars into heat.
The simple profit formula
Daily profit = Bitcoin earned (in dollars) minus electricity cost minus pool fee.
Three pieces:
- What you earn depends on your share of all the world's guessing power. Your hashrate divided by the whole network's hashrate, times the Bitcoin paid out that day.
- What you spend is your machine's watts, running all day, times your price per kWh.
- Minus the pool fee (a small percent).
A worked example (round numbers)
- Miner: 200 TH/s, pulls 3,400 watts. Power price: 10 cents/kWh. Pool fee: 2 percent.
- Power cost: 3,400 watts is 3.4 kW. Times 24 hours is 81.6 kWh a day. Times $0.10 is about $8.16 a day in electricity.
- Earnings: at typical recent conditions, 200 TH/s might earn very roughly $10 to $13 of Bitcoin a day (this moves constantly with price and difficulty).
- Profit: maybe $2 to $5 a day after power and fees, when conditions are good. At 15 cents/kWh that same machine often loses money.
So a $3,000 machine earning $3 a day takes about 1,000 days (nearly 3 years) just to pay for itself, if conditions hold. They usually do not hold still.
The two things that quietly eat profit
- Difficulty keeps rising. As more miners join worldwide, your slice of the pie shrinks, so the same machine earns less Bitcoin over time.
- The halving. Every ~4 years the block reward is cut in half, which can cut mining income unless the Bitcoin price rises to make up for it.
The honest bottom line: at normal home electricity prices, a single miner often breaks even at best or slowly loses. The people who profit reliably have very cheap power, efficient machines, and scale. Run the numbers for YOUR power price before buying.
Do this now: open the Profit Calculator (home page, last tile). Put in a real machine and your real power price. If it shows a loss, that is the calculator saving you thousands.
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