Disclaimer: The opinion expressed here is not investment advice — it is provided for informational purposes only. It does not necessarily reflect the opinion of U. Every investment and all trading involves risk, so you should always perform your own research prior to making decisions. We do not recommend investing money you cannot afford to lose. Bitcoin mining is concerned with how transactions are verified and confirmed on the Blockchain network and this is done using special tools and equipment. A Bitcoin mining software works in collaboration with the relevant hardware to solve computational algorithms on the network and execute these transactions. Becoming a Bitcoin miner involves getting the best Bitcoin mining software.
Doing all of that with pool mining requires more time and effort, which is why a lot of people are willing to take a bit less in the way of coins. No, seriously, it's not worth the hassle and you almost certainly won't actually get any coins — at least not with Ethereum or Bitcoin. Statistically, your chances of solving a block are equal to your percentage of the total hash rate of the network.
The proof of stake transition makes any such talk completely irrelevant. In practice, the mining pools have a much higher chance of solving and getting credited with a block. How much is a single block worth? There's a static block reward of 2 ETH right now, plus transaction fees that currently average around 2 ETH, plus some 'uncle' rewards that are relatively small by comparison.
Basically, 3. For all but the most dedicated of mining operations, the steady payouts that come from joining a mining pool are a far safer approach. But let's say you still want to try solo mining. What do you need to do? First, you have to set up an Ethereum wallet and download the Ethereum blockchain.
Even after pruning a bunch of extra data that you don't need, it's still typically around GB in size, and downloading can take quite a while. Once your wallet is synced up, you can point your own mining rigs at your local node, which is mostly the same as configuring miners for a mining pool except now you're using your own pool.
You're now flying solo. Even with a lot of high-end GPUs, you likely won't mine any Ethereum before proof of work mining ends. The theoretical benefit to solo mining is that you get the whole block reward plus fees, with no percentage going to the pool. The downside is that without a massive farm, you'll very likely end up getting nothing.
There are however mining pools that operate on a 'solo' mining approach. Basically, the whole pool works together to find a block solution, which means it's more likely to get incorporated as the 'winning' block, but only the participant mining address with the highest contributions to date since the last credited block gets the reward. This is much easier to use than pure solo mining, but without a decent amount of hashing power it will take quite some time to reach the point where you get the rewards from mining a block.
That covers how to get started, but we're far from done. With the above information, you can now fire up your PC and begin mining. That's the good news. The bad news is that actual long-term profitability is far less clear cut. The real difficulty is predicting where cryptocurrency will go next. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are down significantly from their highest ever valuations, but there's still a lot of up and down movement.
Maybe it will bounce back, maybe it was a bubble. Who's right? Depending on when you look, you'll find ample data-driven support for just about any opinion. The most important thing to keep in mind is that cryptocurrencies are volatile. It doesn't matter if you're treating them like a commodity and day trading, or mining, or running a mining pool.
Things are in a constant state of flux. Just look at the price of Ethereum since it launched back in Note: The following charts were last updated in March, but the patterns outlined here have continued. We've got the linear chart, which includes an amazing spike at the right edge early That spike looks very similar to the one that occurred in , naturally, and we should maybe just ignore the equally dramatic crash in — or that's what the optimistic miners seem to think.
The logarithmic chart doesn't look nearly as impressive, and it's clear the real winners with Ethereum are the people who got in back in , or even Incidentally, about two thirds of all Ethereum was actually part of a 'pre-mine' that went to 'investors' before mining was even possible. Everyone joining the bandwagon now clearly missed the best part of the ride. Alternatively, there's plenty of room left for future growth and spikes, but that's just speculation.
We've passed peak profitability for mining Ethereum, at least for the time being. That's where the HODL hold mentality comes into play. There's another way to look at Ethereum mining. In , you would have accrued an additional Ether — twice the time mined, a bit more than half the rewards.
From up until today, mining has been far less compelling, and it's becoming increasingly so. The point is that you either got in early and made big gains, or you're hoping that things will continue to go up. And if that's your belief, why not just invest in Ethereum directly rather than trying to build a mining farm? Do a quick search for the optimal mining settings on a particular GPU and you're sure to find a bunch of diverging opinions.
Some will throw caution to the wind and look to maximize hash rates in pursuit of short-term gains. Let's be clear: These people are very likely to end up with failed hardware. AMD and Nvidia GPUs are tuned somewhat conservatively, with the intent to allow for many hours of gaming, every day, for several years.
Striking a balance between raw performance, efficiency, and profits is key. The difficulty is that what works well on one GPU, and even on one particular card using a specific GPU, may not work everywhere. We have a whole article about tuning GPUs for optimal Ethereum mining performance , but even that doesn't cover every possibility. Let's discuss things a bit more here, as presumably some of the people reading this are new to mining and GPUs in general and may be led astray by claims made on mining forums.
Our advice: Be more cautious and don't chase every last megahash. First, you need to know what GPU you're using. We use code names a lot, so here's the quick rundown. Each family has different features. Temperatures — for all components, not just the GPU core — and fan speeds are a good indicator of what's safe for long-term use, so let's start there. AMD's Vega cards prefer even lower fan speeds, because no one wants a horribly loud leaf blower while gaming.
With gaming GPUs, the expectation is that cards are only used at most maybe 12 hours per day. A really high-quality fan might last years or more; we've had fans in the past burn out in less than six months. Rather than cranking up graphics card fan speeds, an alternate solution is to just get a big and cheap box fan and aim it at your PC. If you want a reasonable estimate of where a card should run its fans, turn off the overclock and run a game at p ultra settings and just let it run for 15—20 minutes, and then check temperatures, fan speeds, clocks, etc.
Alternatively, use FurMark's x stress test, though be warned that sometimes FurMark will heavily throttle the GPU clocks to keep temperatures and fan speeds in check, so sometimes it's actually less demanding than running a game.
Anything above that and you're more likely to have the fans at least fail. Next, temperatures. Most modern GPUs will have pretty reasonable temperatures on the actual graphics chip, particularly if you follow the advice in our Ethereum optimization guide , but that's not the only critical factor. That makes it a bit trickier to determine what's 'safe' and what might cause premature component failure. We'll get into the clocks and speeds momentarily, but we think your best long-term bet is to let GPU temperatures hit at most 70C, preferably less.
VRM temperatures should be kept to a maximum of 90C again, preferably less , and we definitely wouldn't run with GDDR6X temperatures of more than C and expect a card to remain viable for two years. Maybe that's pessimistic, but we've had graphics cards fail far faster than that in the past, so better safe than sorry is our motto. Again, we think if it's above C, that's too hot for long-term reliability.
It might last a year or more at C, or it might last six months — it's tough to say. Some totally failed and some were just very unstable. Nearly all of them had fans go bad, and RMAs were a complete pain. It took weeks to get a card back, and some manufacturers even refused warranty service "due to physical damage" or other such claims.
The manufacturers are going to see higher RMA rates with another mining boom, and some will use any reason to deny a claim that they can find. Now that we've talked about temperatures and fan speeds, let's talk about overclocking — or even underclocking and undervolting. Memory speed is a key factor in Ethereum mining performance. While tuning memory clocks, you want to pay attention to long-term hash rates.
An RTX with memory running at 20Gbps and a 1. Drop the GPU clocks to 1. This means you can hit higher clocks that aren't unstable, but memory performance actually degrades past a certain point. Trying to balance memory clocks against power and temperature is complex, and it's definitely possible to find 'stable' clocks that will end up causing problems down the road.
One reasonable approach is to find the maximum stable memory overclock, by bumping the clock speed up in 50—MHz increments and letting the mining run, until you get errors or a system crash. Besides overclocking of the memory, you should look into underclocking and undervolting of the GPU, particularly for AMD's previous-generation cards. The Vega and Polaris families are very power hungry at default settings, and it's often possible to drop the voltage by 0.
That's a huge difference, especially since power scales with the square of the voltage. You'll probably need to reduce maximum clocks while reducing the voltage, but the dramatic boost in efficiency makes the effort worthwhile. Ultimately, the goal of miners is to maximize profits, taking all things into consideration. That means balancing the cost of the hardware, memory speeds, GPU clocks, pool mining fees or NiceHash fees , power consumption, time required to manage the mining PC s , the cost to service or replace hardware, and more.
Figuring out the optimal balance between all of those factors is complex, and while it might seem tempting to chase after every last bit of hashing performance, that may not be the best long-term solution. If you're building a larger mining farm again, not something we recommend for a variety of reasons , efficiency will be a top priority.
Two Ti cards for example will basically match a single RTX while using less than half as much power. But let's take things a step further. That's only a rough estimate and does not include AC or other items that potentially need power. But what would those mining farms cost? We've put together a rough estimate of hardware costs per PC. Plus all the GPUs, naturally, at current eBay prices. Yeah, that's a ton of money. Power estimates based on our testing indicate the Ti PC would use about W, including PSU inefficiency and the rest of the PC, while the would need around W and the would consume W.
Based on those prices, power use, and hash rates, we can determine approximate break-even time not including rental space or AC. Hopefully, that explains how far things have fallen. Factor in the warehouse space to accommodate all those PCs, power distribution, and paying someone even yourself to build and maintain all the mining PCs would also be necessary. Those would add to the cost, pushing back the break even point, and if things take a change for the worse as they did in and , the whole operation comes crashing down.
Non-LHR cards cost more, but would probably be worth the premium if you're serious about mining. Note that the RTX does not have an LHR variant, but of course the cost of those cards is already prohibitively high and other models are a better choice. AMD for its part has done nothing to directly curb mining performance or profitability.
Also, note that the LHR limiter only affects Ethereum mining. That's going to end in the coming months regardless, and it's possible some other coin more likely coins will take Ethereum's place as the best option for GPU mining. Note that right now, however, the best non-ETH coins tend to generate about half as much value per day.
Bottom line: We're not big fans of large cryptocoin mining farms. There are arguably worse ways to use power and money, but there are also a lot of better ways — ways that don't carry nearly the volatility and risk of coin mining. Never mind the fact that procuring all of the necessary equipment takes time and a lot of money, or that it makes it difficult for PC enthusiasts to upgrade their PCs.
The bigger issue, by far, is that it's putting a ton of computing power to the task of merely securing the blockchain. Best-case, using the most efficient hardware, the Ethereum network would currently use over a billion watts of power, and Bitcoin would use over 5. Digiconomist pegs the current power use of the Ethereum network at around TWh per year, and kWh per transaction. Ethereum aims to 'solve' all of these issues by switching from proof of work to proof of stake in the coming months.
That's great for power consumption, but it remains to be seen whether Ethereum will continue to be popular once mining stops, and there will still be plenty of other alternative coins that still use proof of work. Determine at what price level Bitcoin mining becomes profitable for you—that is, your break-even price. Given a current reward of 6. Of course, because the price of bitcoin is highly variable, this reward figure is likely to change.
To compete against the mining mega centers, individuals can join a mining pool , which is a group of miners who work together and share the rewards. This can increase the speed and reduce the difficulty of mining, putting profitability in reach. As difficulty and cost have increased, more and more individual miners have opted to participate in a pool. Although the overall reward decreases because it is shared among multiple participants, the combined computing power means that mining pools stand a much greater chance of actually completing a hashing problem first and receiving a reward in the first place.
The two most commonly used payout methods used in Bitcoin mining pools are briefly described below:. As bitcoin's ecosystem has developed, a new form of payment method has developed to overcome drawbacks inherent in both payment method types. For example, a pay-per-share model can remove the incentives for miners from finding blocks altogether since a payout is guaranteed. A proportional mining method is problematic during bear markets or as bitcoin rewards decline. In response, many miners have taken to switching their resources between mining pools based on their payout method and bitcoin price.
Some mining pools have also adapted their rewards strategy between the two payout methods in response to declining rewards of bitcoin. To answer the question of whether Bitcoin mining is still profitable, use a web-based profitability calculator to run a cost-benefit analysis.
Determine if you are willing to lay out the necessary initial capital for the hardware and estimate the future value of bitcoins as well as the level of difficulty. When both Bitcoin prices and mining difficulty decline, it usually indicates fewer miners and more ease of receiving bitcoins. When Bitcoin prices and mining difficulty rise, expect the opposite—more miners competing for fewer bitcoins. Even more telling is another statistic from the research: 0.
This means that bitcoin rewards are distributed disproportionately in bitcoin's network. When you sign up to mine independently, bear in mind that you are competing against established outfits that have enormous capacity, amounting to megawatts, at their disposal. Bitcoin mining is the process by which miners earn bitcoins in exchange for running the verification process to validate bitcoin transactions.
It involves solving math puzzles and requires the application of brute force, in the form of computing power, to solve. During the early days of Bitcoin, mining could be a profitable activity for individual miners. With an increase in difficulty levels of Bitcoin's algorithm and entry of large institutional players into the bitcoin mining ecosystem, its economics have changed, and it is now dominated by mining pools. Individual miners should perform a cost-benefit analysis, taking into account variables—electricity costs, efficiency, bitcoin price—before committing to the activity.
Bitcoin mining is the process of earning bitcoins by running the verification process to validate Bitcoin transactions. Miners earn rewards in the form of bitcoin for running the validation process. In the early days of Bitcoin, when it was mined using CPUs and the difficulty levels for its algorithm were easy, a rising price for the cryptocurrency ensured that mining was profitable for individual miners. An increase in difficulty levels of the cryptocurrency's algorithm has skyrocketed electricity costs for mining operations and made the activity uneconomic for individual miners.
In the main, there are three variables needed to calculate bitcoin profitability:. Two other factors that influence bitcoin mining profitability are the difficulty level of its mining algorithm and bitcoin price. The two most common payout methods for mining pools are pay-per-share and proportional mining. A third payout method is a combination of the two. Congressional Research Service. Accessed Nov, 27, Your Money.
Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Part of. Guide to Bitcoin. Part Of. Bitcoin Basics. Bitcoin Mining. How to Store Bitcoin. Bitcoin Exchanges. Bitcoin Advantages and Disadvantages. Bitcoin vs. Other Cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin Value and Price. Key Takeaways Bitcoin is mined using computing rigs, which include expensive hardware.
Miners are rewarded with Bitcoin for verifying blocks of transactions to the blockchain network. As more miners compete for Bitcoin rewards, the process becomes more difficult. To determine whether Bitcoin mining is profitable for you, consider costs of equipment and electricity as well as the difficulty associated with mining and how the price of bitcoin will affect potential rewards.
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