More than a decade ago, mining bitcoin at home was relatively simple. If you had diamond hands (which you should never sell), sold at the proper moments, or didn’t throw your hard drive away, you could mine enough bitcoin to be set for life with just a few gaming PCs or covertly accessing your school or workplace’s infrastructure.

Given how big the Bitcoin network has become the size that mining firms competing for block rewards now occupy entire warehouses full of potent, specially designed mining equipment. Such wild days have long since passed, despite one in a million outliers like the bitcoin miner who succeeded in mining a block alone in January 2022. However, there are still several ways that cryptocurrency mining might be successful for the common person, and they are not all related to bitcoin. This article will explain how to assess your chances of making a profit and which coins are the best.

Is home bitcoin mining profitable?

The practice of leveraging processing power to produce a winning code (known as a hash) before anybody else is chosen to add a new block to the blockchain was made popular by Bitcoin, the first widely usable cryptocurrency. Each successful miner receives a newly mined bitcoin and any fees associated with the transactions they include in the new block as payment for their work. “Proof-of-work” is the name of this kind of blockchain validation technology.

When mining a cryptocurrency, you need to know the costs that will reduce your income. These costs include the market price of bitcoin, the price of electricity, maintenance fees, the price of your mining machinery, and how long it will probably last in the face of stronger rivals. As more potent devices hit the market, your once-powerful equipment might not be able to keep up. 

You can use profitability calculators, such as those on Nicehash, to figure out whether your business is likely to be profitable or not. Let’s assume, for this example, that you don’t have access to a hydroelectric dam and must instead rely on the average home rate of $0.1411 per kilowatt-hour offered by the U.S. electricity grid.

Mining bitcoin with one of Nvidia’s more recent graphics cards, such as the RTX 3080, will yield $139 in bitcoin every month. The RTX 3080 is currently priced at approximately $1,400. Employing a specially designed AntMiner S19 Pro will result in an estimated daily profit of $17.79. Almost half of your Antminer 19 Pro earnings are lost to electricity bills. On the other hand, a single S19 Pro miner will set you back roughly $10,000 and is exclusively useful for mining bitcoin. It’s hard to predict whether you’ll be able to recoup the cost of an RTX 3080 graphics card in 10 months or the cost of the S19 Pro mining equipment in 25 months, given how erratic the price of bitcoin is. 

The network difficulty, which establishes the computational difficulty of mining new bitcoins, is likewise unstable. The network difficulty decreased by 28% after the crackdown on cryptocurrency mining in China in July 2021, making it considerably simpler for the remaining miners to find new blocks. However, this was just momentary, as it has since nearly reached earlier peaks.

Home miners typically extract less profit per miner than a professional mining firm since mining benefits from scale. Professional mining companies frequently hop between regions with affordable electricity, negotiate with regional power grids, generate their electricity, and dispose of outdated mining equipment at surprising rates to meet their expenditures.

Also Read: What’s Canaan Sr. VP Edward Lu Take On Bitcoin Miners

Which coins may be mined profitably at home?

However, the weekend hacker has a lot of different possibilities for at-home cryptocurrency mining. Unfortunately, there are so many choices and influencing factors that it’s challenging to create precise comparisons.

There are some universal truths: after a certain point, mining ethereum with graphics cards is generally more efficient than mining bitcoin with computer chips, as Ethereum heavily favors GPU miners. However, this won’t last for very long since Ethereum is phasing out miners to transition to a blockchain system that uses “proof-of-stake.”

Another significant issue is finding sources for the actual mining equipment. The GPU market went insane during the 2021 bull run, making it nearly difficult to purchase premium graphics cards at fair market value. Some networks, like Chia, rely on hard drives rather than graphics cards or computer chips, which furthers the confusion. Some have blamed chia mining for the anticipated hard drive shortage of 2021.

To illustrate the profitability ratio, some profitability calculators, such as CoinWarz, assume that your hash power, or the amount of computing power you use to mine a cryptocurrency, remains constant. CoinWarz rates the following coins as the most profitable using a hardware budget of $1,000:

• Ethereum
• Peercoin
• Cash Bitcoin
• Bitcoin
• Bitcoin Classic

According to CoinWarz’s calculation, a thousand dollars worth of hash power will produce $20.94 worth of ethereum each day at the cost of $0.411 per kilowatt, more than double the $9.63 that mining ethereum classic would yield.

Small currencies, which have less mining competition, can be more profitable. However, the value of your returns is considerably less predictable because tiny coins’ prices tend to be more erratic than those of larger well-known coins. Whattomine estimates that if you use three Radeon RX 480 graphics cards, you will earn $1.21 per day mining Firo, $1.07 per day mining Ravencoin, and $0.9 per day mining Sero.

Alternatives to solo home mining

You might also consider joining a bitcoin mining pool to improve your chances of earning mining rewards. This entails teaming up with other miners to improve your chances of finding new blocks and making money, but it also means you’ll be sharing the profits. Finally, if your home computer is underpowered, consider cloud mining and analyze the benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing your hardware requirements.