Bitcoin mining profitability

Bitcoin mining profitability calculator

Nothing guaranteed, of course this is only a rough estimate!  You can also calculate rented mining by setting “Power consumption” to 0 and “Cost of mining hardware” to the rent per time frame. Default values are for a 50 GH/s Bitcoin Miner .

Estimate Strategy

Extrapolating bitcoin difficulty or price is pure voodoo. It is much easier to predict the relationship of the two parameters in form of the Mining Factor. The Mining Factor 100 is the value in USD of the bitcoins you can generate if you let a 100MHash/s miner run for 24 hours. If the Mining Factor 100 rises above $2 or so everybody buys mining equipment and thus increases difficulty. If it falls people will stop mining eventually. The estimate starts with the current Mining Factor and decreases it exponentially such that the decrease accounts for the factor decline per year. Please note that a profit/loss by holding the coins is not accounted for in this estimate.

Things to consider that might eat into your profit:

The values above are only a snapshot. The network and markets are moving quickly. Check out these diagrams to get a feeling for it.Looks like if your mining operation is not profitable now, it probably will not be in the future.

With rising bitcoin exchange rates it might be more profitable to buy bitcoins than to mine. There are spreadsheets available in this thread or this one (with some FPGA data) for a more custom calculation.Bitcoin exchanges: MtGox. Tradehill. CryptoXchange .

The calculation is based on average block generation time. The closer the average generation time is to the time frame the more the resulting revenue depends on luck.

You will have to pay mining pool fees from close to nothing up to 3% depending on the pool. Unless you want to do pool hopping you should go to a pool with hopping protection. I recommend Arsbitcoin and EclipseMC (with namecoin merged mining). P2Pool is a new completely decentralized alternative.

You will get somewhere from 1% to 3% of “stale shares”. Thread .

When the block count will hit

200000 some time around December 2012 the generation reward will go down to 25BTC. This might partly be compensated by falling difficulty, raising prices, higher transfer fees, etc.

A mining computer generates a lot of heat as a byproduct. This can impact your heating/airconditioning costs depending on outside temperatures. Other byproducts could be noise and an angry wife.

Do you have lots of experience with and like working with computers during lonesome nights? You have to spend quite some time to set up the system (easily several days!) and watch it.

You will not get a 100% uptime.

You will probably not be able to reach the highest values in the Mining Hardware Comparison. Some bragging / measuring error and extensive overclocking of the cards is involved here.

Scaling effects: three cards in one rig do worse than a single card because it gets harder to get out the heat. Results in the list above do not reflect the number of cards.

A disruptive technology like ASIC chips could show up and make GPU mining less profitable.

Politics and legal issues might affect the bitcoin market.

Possible additional benefits:

For suggestions, infos or links on the topic to add, please contact me directly (info [at] bitcoinx.com) or in this thread on the bitcoin forum.

Quick updates

02.02.2014

Datacenter connectivity issues have caused short drop in the hashrate. The problem has been resolved and all stratum servers are now reachable. This all happened when 900 Th/s was within a reach. We will get there again with your support and participation in mining ;-)

17.01.2014

We were having an extremely lucky yesterday's mining session. Unfortunately, around 1.30 AM UTC, we were experiencing stratum server issues that eventually spread across all our stratum servers. The problem has been resolved now and mining continues.

13.01.2014

The pool database backend has been successfully migrated to a new hardware. The website is now fully operational. The whole migration process has been accomplished without interrupting the actual mining.

13.01.2014

We are currently migrating pool database to a new machine. Mining will continue without interruption, only website will be down for 1-2 hours.

18.12.2013

Some recent payouts didn't go thru bitcoin network because of unsatisfied transaction fees. We're finding a soluton and all payouts will be processed soon

16.10.2013

In recent days we experienced some successful thefts of user's funds using compromised email accounts. We strongly encourage all users to change email passwords. There's no reason to think that pool security itself has been compromised.

08.07.2013

Getwork protocol support ended. Please be sure your miners support Stratum protocol. You can still use your old getwork miners with Stratum proxy installed on your mining rig.

21.05.2013

Bug in bitcoind caused many invalid blocks generated in recent hours. Thanks to cooperation with bitcoin developers, a bugfix has been deployed. Pool is now back in normal operation.

26.04.2013

Because the user database has been compromised in recent hack, please change password to your pool account!

25.04.2013

Pool is recovering to normal operation from previous attack. delayed payouts will be processed in the afternoon (UTC).

18.04.2013

Pool is recovering from DDoS attack.

14.04.2013

As announced in Getwork deprecation plan. the hashrate on Stratum is far above 90%, so workers which are still using the deprecated Getwork protocol are now charged by 10% fee. Please update your software and start using modern Stratum miners to reduce your fees back to 2%!

12.03.2013

Bitcoin network recently experienced global problems which caused some pool blocks to be invalid. Everything seems to be fixed now.

10.03.2013

Default mining URL for Stratum is stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 . If you're still using api.bitcoin.cz, please fix your URL to prevent fallback to deprecated Getwork protocol.

08.03.2013

Stratum proxy version 1.5.2 has been released. This is bugfix release which add compatibility with some old miners (phoenix, Diablo).

03.03.2013

Stratum proxy version 1.5.0 has been released. All proxy users are encouraged to update .

13.02.2013

ASIC mining become a reality. Jeff Garzik (bitcoin core developer) is testing first shipped unit of Avalon ASIC miner on our pool.

30.01.2013

Native IPv6 address is now available. You can use ipv6.stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 in your miner if your miners have IPv6 support! Please note that IPv6 works only for Stratum miners.

08.12.2012

If you're using old miners from early 2011 or you're mining on URL "mining.bitcoin.cz:8332", please update your miners and use "api.bitcoin.cz:8332" in your configuration instead. Mining on URL "mining.bitcoin.cz" is not working anymore.

27.11.2012

Only one day remains to halving block reward from 50 BTC to 25 BTC. Thanks to this change in Bitcoin world, mining income will be drastically reduced. As a countermeasure, pool is now paying block fees to miners. Everything you need to collect block fees is to use miner with Stratum support .

24.11.2012

Mining for Bitcoins is profitable? Are you sure?

Pool is now giving transaction fees to Stratum miners! Use miner with Stratum support (latest version of GUIminer, cgminer, bfgminer, poclbm) or use your favourite miner with Stratum proxy to improve your mining income!

19.11.2012

Guiminer with Stratum support has been released. Upgrade is highly recommended.

12.10.2012

All users are encouraged to install or update Stratum proxy to current stable version 1.1.1. Instructions are here .

12.10.2012

New version of cgminer has been released. Please update cgminer to version 2.8.3 . which fixes serious bugs introduced in previous versions.

10.10.2012

In effect from 01.11.2012, pool increases the lower limit for payouts ("send threshold") to 0.05 BTC (around $0.6) as a protection against high transaction fees for tiny payouts. If you have a balance of less than 0.05 BTC and want to withdraw them, please do so before November 1.

20.09.2012

New version of poclbm miner has been released. All poclbm users are encouraged to update their miner, latest version includes major optimization.

11.09.2012

I'm seeking for beta testers of new mining protocol called Stratum mining. If you want to join testing, please download the proxy and point your miners to it. Thank you!

08.07.2012

Do you have some bitcoins from the mining and do you want to sell them for cheap? Add your offer to localbitcoins.com and find a buyer in your neighborhood!

11.06.2012

Follow pool's page for recent updates and news!

05.02.2012

poclbm/GUI miner is affected by serious bug. If your miner is crashing on 'unexpected error' message, please follow miner forums for the newest versions.

26.01.2012

Pool is now supporting BIP 16 protocol extension, as described here. It is just internal change on the Bitcoin network, miners don't need to update anything.

08.11.2011

Implemented prioritization of long polling. Fast miners should expect lower stale ratio.

10.10.2011

Merged mining for Namecoins added. Please fill NMC address on your profile to start collecting Namecoins! Accounting isn't finished yet, but will come very soon.

03.10.2011

Bitcoin.cz is official sponsor of European Bitcoin conference 2011. See you on 25.-27. November in Prague!

26.03.2011

Second server added

Total hashrate at 60Ghash/s

19.01.2011

We're over 20 Ghash/s

20.12.2010

Beginners Guide to Mining Bitcoins

One of the biggest problems I ran into when I was looking to start mining Bitcoin for investment and profit was most of the sites were written for the advanced user. I am not a professional coder, I have no experience with Ubuntu, Linux and minimal experience with Mac. So, this is for the individual or group that wants to get started the easy way.

First thing you need to do is get a “Bitcoin Wallet”. Because Bitcoin is an internet based currency, you need a place to keep your Bitcoins. Got to http://www.bitcoin.org and download the Bitcoin client for your Operating System. Install it the client will begin to download the blockchain. Downloading the blockchain can take a long time and will be over 6GB of data. If you have data caps, I would recommend ordering a copy of the blockchain on DVD to keep from going over as it is growing exponentially. Click to order the bitcoin blockchain by mail. Once the client is up to date, click “New” to get your wallet address. It will be a long sequence of letters and numbers. One of most important things you can do is make sure you have a copy of the wallet.dat file on a thumb drive and print a copy out and keep it in a safe location. You can view a tutorial on how to create a secure wallet by clicking the link on the top of the page. The reason is that if you computer crashes and you do not have a copy of your wallet.dat file, you will lose all of your Bitcoins. They won’t go to someone else, they will disappear forever. It is like burning cash.

Now that you have a wallet and the client, you are probably roaring to go, but if you actually want to make Bitcoin (money), you probably need to join a pool. A pool is a group that combines their computing power to make more Bitcoins. The reason you shouldn’t go it alone is that Bitcoins are awarded in blocks, usually 50 at a time, and unless you get extremely lucky, you will not be getting any of those coins. In a pool, you are given smaller and easier algorithms to solve and all of your combined work will make you more likely to solve the bigger algorithm and earn Bitcoins that are spread out throughout the pool based on your contribution. Basically, you will make a more consistent amount of Bitcoins and will be more likely to receive a good return on your investment.

The pool that I’m involved in is called Slush’s Pool so I will be giving instructions on how to join there but feel free to look at other options. Follow the link to go to their site and click the “Sign up here” link at the top of their site and follow their step by step instructions. After you have your account set up, you will need to add a “Worker”. Basically, for every miner that you have running, you will need to have a worker ID so the pool can keep track of your contributions.

If you are mining with an ASIC, please go to our Mining with ASICs page. The following will only pertain to GPU miners.

Most of the mining programs out there are pretty complicated to setup and will frustrate your average user. Recently a great program has come out to get the most basic of users started. The program is called GUIMiner. Click the link and download the program (Be careful, some of the ads are set up to look like the file download). Install and run the program and add in your information from Slush’s Pool. Remember that the user name is actually the worker name. The worker name will be your user name, dot, worker ID (username.worker ID) and the password from that worker ID.

Mac users should look into using Astroid

Now that you are set up, you can start mining. If you feel like you want to make more Bitcoins, you might want to invest in mining hardware.

To see how much your current hardware will earn mining Bitcoins, head over to the Bitcoin Profitability Calculator .

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