Episode Details

Bitesize Bitcoin (Cost to Mine & Efficiency)

Greetings Ungovernable Misifts, one of the most looked forward to events of the week for a miner is reaching your threshold on the payout of your mining rewards. Aside from the excitement a solo-miner may feel if they discover a block on their own, the steady payout from your pool is as simple pleasure. Generally, there are no surprises, your pools or in some cases a variety of pools will pay out about what you think they will unless of course there's a spike or drought and pool luck or the difficulty adjustment is drastic, but in general you have an idea as to how many sats give or take, you're going to receive. Now juxtapose that amount of stats versus the cost to run your machines for that time and you have a simple profitability calculation. In this episode of Bitesize Bitcoin, we will explain how to factor the cost to mine and the variables that go into profitability predictions.

You'll notice in the intro of this episode that I said profitability predictions just like Bitcoin price predictions, mining profitability predictions are speculative. It's because of this that I don't personally attempt to answer inquiries about mining profitability. Just like future Bitcoin price, I don't know I just keep hashing. But calculate cost to mine and compare it to what you've received in payouts (assuming you sold the second you received them and honestly what Pleb Miner is doing that) is simple math and simple math is my kind of proof of work and in doing so we can derive a profitability snapshot. Cost to mine is easy to calculate, first we need to figure out the wattage of the device we're going to run (now most Bitcoin mining servers’ power usage specs are rated at plus or minus some percentage. Bitmain rates their machines power usage at ± 5% and Micro BT rates their machines at ± 10%. In this instance we will calculate a generic ASIC miner with the power usage of 3200 watts. Now that we know the wattage and since we know from our previous Bitesize Bitcoin on electricity, that power is the rate at which a certain quantity of work can be done over a period of time, we multiply the wattage by time, since we want to run the machine with a maximum uptime (the halving is always upon us) we will multiply by 24 hours. This gives us a power usage of 76.8 kilowatt hours per day. For novelty’s sake that machine made approximately 2 quadrillion 400 trillion sha 256 hashes in one day. Now we can take that 24 hour usage number and multiply it by your power rate, generally a good rate in the US is $0.10 a kWh 76.8 kilowatt hours times 5 cents comes to $7.68 a day to run our generic miner at 100 TH.

The US average is currently somewhere around $0.14 (.13%) a kW/hr an 10% increase over last year that ends up to almost $10.75 a day to mine. To bring some perspective on cost to mine your locale in Japan it would cost ¥3105 a day or $22.50. The UK at 34 (22) pence a kWh is 26 of the King’s (cus that old bat is dead) of the KING’s slave notes a day. Speaking of countries that still maintain the lunacy of monarchy, in Norway it would cost 141 (107) kroner or $14 a day to run our Bitcoin mining server. South Africa clocks in at about the same as the norse, 200 South African rands a day or 12 cuckbucks. That’s if the power is on mind you, have a listen to Tensai Bankai's Pleb Miner Month edition of Bitesize Bitcoin and see what I mean. And last on our list, THE Rockstar of European energy policy, Germany. At a whopping $0.38 per kWh running a machine on Fiat dictated solar panels and windmills mixed with the coal-fired power plants you had to turn back on will cost you €29 a day to run. The market price of Bitcoin would have to be over $50,000 for a German minor to break even if he sold regularly how's that ph