Bitcoin mining or buying

Mining VS Buying Bitcoins – Where will $10k get you ?

As Bitcoin’s price continues to rise recently we’ve been getting a lot of emails from people who are asking if it’s better to mine Bitcoins or to buy them. Last year, when Bitcoin was initially covered due to the crisis in Cyprus, many people took up the “hobby” of home mining. At that time (April 2013) it was still possible to generate a nice amount of Bitcoins through mining at home with your CPU or even a graphics card. But since then mining has become much more difficult and today it’s almost impossible to mine at home without investing a substantial amount of money.

The question remains – if you had $10K to invest in Bitcoins today, would it be better to just buy Bitcoins with this money or use it to get mining equipment and mine them.

So how much Bitcoins will $10K get you through exchanges?

Well if you’re going to buy Bitcoins that’s an easy answer. At today’s exchange rate you can get somewhere around 25BTC (I use CoinLlama to calculate the best possible price). So now the question remains can we beat this in the long run by mining.

Of course there is no simple answer to this since the question to is Bitcoin mining profitable depends on many variables such as electricity cost, the increase in mining difficulty etc. But for the purpose of this post I will assume that I live in Louisiana USA (this is the lowest cost per Kilowatt you can find in the US today).

Finding a good Bitcoin miner is quite the hassle

Since most of my money will be spent on my mining rig it’s important to choose wisely. The problem with many mining companies is that their products are out of stock most of the time and they create pre-orders, here is an example form KnCMiner. I don’t like this method since it’s just calling for trouble (e.g. Butterfly labs). After searching some more online I found this pretty powerful 2TH/s Bitcoin miner from Bitmain which seems to be in stock.

how many Bitcoins can I mine with $10K ?

Now I’ll head up to my Bitcoin mining calculator and drop in the numbers, the only problem is that there are 2 variables which I’ll have to guess. The first is how much will the Bitcoin mining difficulty increase over time. The second is what will be Bitcoin’s exchange rate once my money runs out. Fortunately since I’m only comparing mining to buying and not testing for overall profitability I have no need for the second variable – meaning, I only want to see if I can get more than 25 Bitcoins through mining.

I will used up $8750 to buy 7 Antminer S4-B2 miners. On checkout I can choose to host my miners in a hosting center in China. This is probably recommended since it will allow me to avoid storing and cooling the miners myself (they are very hot and loud). Another option would be to host and ship the miners directly to me. Seeing as the shipping costs would be

$825 I may prefer to ship my miners directly to the hosting center (

$277 shipping cost). Even though the electricity cost in Louisiana (

$0.0977/KW/Hour) is lower than the hosting farm ($0.12/KW/Hour) I still prefer to ship the miners to the hosting center.

Total expenses up until now:

Miners – $8750

Shipping – $277

Hosting price per day – $4.587

Electricity cost – $0.12/KW/Hour = $2.88/KW/Day

So now that I’m all set it’s time to see how many Bitcoins I can get out of these babies. My daily expenses add up to $7.467 which mean I can run these miners for 130 days before I run out of money. I’ll put all of the variables into a Bitcoin mining profitability calculator and try to figure out how much BTC I’ll be able to generate.

The result….well it depends 🙂 since some variables need to be guessed different calculators will show different results. However NONE of the calculators I used showed that I will make more than 25BTC through mining. Most calculators suggested I’ll make around 23BTC (almost head to head with buying Bitcoins) and some suggested I’ll make as little as 10BTC. I can’t say which ones are more accurate since many guesses are taken into account with these calculators. Keep in mind that there’s also a time factor where you get the money 4.5 months after you’ve made your initial investment.

So who’s the winner ?

I guess if you’re looking at mining as a long term investment than perhaps it can generate you more coins in the long run but it’s also much more risky. First of all miners can break down, and even if you host them somewhere accidents do happens. Also there’s no way to know how high or low will the Bitcoin mining difficulty reach so numbers can change drastically. If you want an immediate winner than I’d definitely go with buying Bitcoins instead of mining them.

Keep in mind that this post was mainly theoretical and there’s a lot of hassle and unexpected events I didn’t take into account (shipping delays mainly), but it should give you an idea about what to take into account before jumping into Bitcoin mining.

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Is Bitcoin Mining Profitable or Worth it in 2021?

The short answer is yes. The long answer… it’s complicated.

Bitcoin mining began as a well paid hobby for early adopters who had the chance to earn 50 BTC every 10 minutes, mining from their bedrooms.

Successfully mining just one Bitcoin block, and holding onto it since 2010 would mean you have $450,000 worth of bitcoin in your wallet in 2020.

If you’re motivated to learn, and you want to get a semi-passive income of bitcoin, then there are a few basics to get your head round, before working out if it’s even possible for you to profit from bitcoin mining.

Mining is the backbone of all proof-of-work blockchains and can be described with three key concepts:

Bitcoin Block Reward

Miners are rewarded with 6.25 bitcoins. This number will reduce to 3.125 bitcoins after the halving in 2024. The reward (plus transaction fees) are paid to the miner who solved the puzzle first.

This process repeats approximately every 10 minutes for every mining machine on the network. The difficulty of the puzzle (Network Difficulty) adjusts every 2016 blocks (

14 days) to ensure that on average one machine will solve the puzzle in a 10 minute period.

Network difficulty is calculated by the amount of hashrate contributing to the Bitcoin network.

What is Mining Hardware?

Mining hardware is specialized computers, created solely for the purpose of mining bitcoins. The more powerful your hardware is–and the more energy efficient–the more profitable it will be to mine bitcoins.

Miner	Hash Power	Price*	Buy
	Antminer S19	95.0 TH/s	$6k-8.5k
	Antminer S19 Pro	110.0 TH/s	$8k-10k
	WhatsMiner M30S+	100.0 TH/s	$2,550
	WhatsMiner M30S++	112.0 TH/s	$2,850
	AvalonMiner 1246	90.0 TH/s	$5,500

*BuyBitcoinWorldwide.com averages prices from various online sources. Actual prices may vary depending on seller.

What is Hashrate?

Hashrate is a measure of a miner’s computational power.

In other words, the more miners (and therefore computing power) mining bitcoin and hoping for a reward, the harder it becomes to solve the puzzle. It is a computational arms race, where the individuals or organizations with the most computing power (hashrate) will be able to mine the most bitcoin.

The more computing power a machine has, the more solutions (and hence, block rewards) a miner is likely to find.

In 2009, hashrate was initially measured in hash per second (H/s) — Due to the exponential growth of mining, H/s was soon commonly pre-fixed with the following SI units:

Kilohash	KH/s (thousands of Hashes/second)
Megahash	MH/s (millions of Hashes/second)
Gigahash	GH/s (billions of Hashes/second)
Terahash	TH/s (trillions of Hashes/second)
Petahash	PH/s (quadrillions of Hashes/second)

To try and put this into perspective, let’s look at how much revenue 1 TH of power can earn mining bitcoin. As the global hashrate is usually growing the revenue per TH for each miner is usually falling, — and the revenue chart for 1 TH/s looks like this:

When you consider how many TH/s there are in the entire Bitcoin network though, you get a true sense of the scale of the industry:

85 Exahash = 85,000,000 Terahash

That means in May 2020 the daily revenue, globally, for Bitcoin mining is: $8.45M

How do Bitcoin miners calculate their earnings?

You’ve probably heard the scare stories about Bitcoin mining’s energy consumption.

Regardless of whether the impact is overblown by the media, it’s a fact that the underlying cost of mining is the energy consumed. The revenue from mining has to outweigh those costs, plus the original investment into mining hardware, in order to be profitable.

Mining Revenue

In 2020, one modern Bitcoin mining machine (commonly known as an ASIC), like the Whatsminer M20S, generates around $8 in Bitcoin revenue every day. If you compare this to the revenue of mining a different crypto currency, like Ethereum, which is mined with graphics cards, you can see that the revenue from Bitcoin mining is twice that of mining with the same amount GPUs you could buy for one ASIC. Thirteen AMD RX graphics cards cost around the same as one Whatsminer M20s.

WARNING

This graph shows you the daily revenue of mining Bitcoin. It does not take into account the daily electricity costs of running a mining machine. Your baseline costs will be the difference between mining profitably or losing money. GPU mining for Ethereum is more efficient than mining with Bitcoin with an ASIC machine

You can think of it as though the miners are a decentralized Paypal. Allowing all the transactions to be recorded accurately and making a bit of money for running the system.

Bitcoin miners earn bitcoin by collecting something called the block reward plus the fees bitcoin users pay the miners for safely and securely recording their bitcoin transactions onto the blockchain.

What is the Block Reward?

Roughly every ten minutes a specific number of newly-minted bitcoin is awarded to the person with a mining machine that is quickest to discover the new block.

Originally, in 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto set the mining reward at 50 BTC, as well as encoding the future reductions to the reward.

The Bitcoin code is predetermined to halve this payout roughly every four years. It was reduced to 25 BTC in late-2012, and halved again to 12.5 BTC in the middle of 2016.

Most recently, in May 2020, the third Bitcoin halving reduced the block reward to 6.25 BTC.

What about transaction fees?

The second source of revenue for Bitcoin miners is the transaction fees that Bitcoiners have to pay when they transfer BTC to one another.

This is the beauty of Bitcoin. Every transaction is recorded in an unchangeable blockchain that is copied to every mining machine.

Bitcoin doesn’t rely on a central bank to keep records, it’s the miners themselves that keep the records, and they get to keep a share of the transaction fees as well.

Taxes on Bitcoin Mining Profits

Of course, while profiting on Bitcoin mining isn’t certain, paying taxes on your mining rewards is. Every miner needs to know the relevant tax laws for Bitcoin mining in his area, which is why it is so important to use a crypto tax software that helps you keep track of everything and make sure you are still making enough money after you account for taxes.

Here is a great guide on how that software works to pay taxes on Coinbase buys.

How do you know if you can profit from Bitcoin mining?

First of all, Bitcoin mining has a lot of variables. This is why buying bitcoin on an exchange can be a simpler way to make a profit. However, when done efficiently it is possible to end up with more bitcoin from mining than from simply hodling.

One of the most important variables for miners is the price of Bitcoin itself. If, like most people, you are paying for your mining hardware, and your electricity,- in dollars, then you will need to earn enough bitcoin from mining to cover your ongoing costs; and make back your original investment into the machine itself.

Bitcoin price, naturally, impacts all miners. However, there are three factors that separate profitable miners from the rest: cheap electricity, low cost and efficient hardware and a good mining pool.

1. Efficient Hardware

So far in this article I’ve used the Whatsminer M20S as an example of the kind of machine you will need to mine bitcoin. These days there are several hardware manufacturers to choose from.

The price of hardware varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and depends largely on how low the energy use is for the machine vs the amount of computing power it produces. The more computing power, the more bitcoin you will mine. The lower the energy consumption the lower your monthly costs.

Miner	Hash Power	Price*	Buy
	Antminer S19	95.0 TH/s	$6k-8.5k
	Antminer S19 Pro	110.0 TH/s	$8k-10k
	WhatsMiner M30S+	100.0 TH/s	$2,550
	WhatsMiner M30S++	112.0 TH/s	$2,850
	AvalonMiner 1246	90.0 TH/s	$5,500

*BuyBitcoinWorldwide.com averages prices from various online sources. Actual prices may vary depending on seller.

When choosing which machine to invest in, miners should think about the machine’s profitability and longevity.

Profitability is determined by the machine’s price per TH, how many watts the machine uses per TH, and your hosting costs.
Longevity is determined by the production quality of the machine. It makes no sense to buy cheaper or seemingly more efficient machines if they break down after a few months of running.

If the hosting cost is low enough, it often makes sense to prioritize the ‘price per TH’ over ‘watts per TH’, as your lower operational expenses (OpEx) will make up for the loss in your machine’s efficiency — and vice versa if your hosting costs are high.

The manufacturer with the lowest failure rate right now is MicroBT, who make the Whatsminer M20S and other Whatsminer models.

Bitcoin Mining Hardware Turnoff Prices

One useful way to think about hardware is to consider what price BTC would have to fall to in order for the machines to stop being profitable. You want your machine to stay profitable for several years in order for you to earn more bitcoin from mining than you could have got by simply buying the cryptocurrency itself.

The following table shows that the majority of the most modern machines could remain profitable at a bitcoin price between $5000 and $6000. Some machines could handle a drop below $5k, if they are being run with electricity that costs under $0.05 kWh.

Unfortunately most older machines are now no longer profitable even in China. The Bitmain S9 has been operational since 2016 and interestingly enough they are still being used in Venezuela and Iran where electricity is so cheap that it outweighs the risk of confiscation. There may, eventually, be more reputable sources of sub 2 cents electricity as the access to solar and wind improves in North America.

Miner	Hash Power	Price*	Buy
	Antminer S19	95.0 TH/s	$6k-8.5k
	Antminer S19 Pro	110.0 TH/s	$8k-10k
	WhatsMiner M30S+	100.0 TH/s	$2,550
	WhatsMiner M30S++	112.0 TH/s	$2,850
	AvalonMiner 1246	90.0 TH/s	$5,500

*BuyBitcoinWorldwide.com averages prices from various online sources. Actual prices may vary depending on seller.

For the individual miner, the only hope of competing with operations that have access to such cheap electricity is to send your machines to those farms themselves. Not many farms offer this as a service though.

2. Cheap Electricity

Electricity prices vary from country to country. Many countries also charge a lower price for industrial electricity in order to encourage economic growth. This means that a mining farm in Russia will pay half as much for the electricity you would mining at home in the USA. In places like Germany, well as you can see from the chart, that’s another story…

In practical terms. Running a Whatsminer M20S for one month will cost around $110 a month if your electricity is $0.045 kWh in somewhere like China, Russia or Kazakhstan. You can see from the table below that you would make $45 a month in May 2020 with those electricity prices.

Profitability with $0.045 kWh electricity

However, with the typical home electricity price in the USA, of $0.12 kWh, you would be running the machines at a loss from the start and it would not make sense to mine under these conditions:

Profitability with $0.12 kWh electricity

3. Reliable Mining Pool

These days, every miner needs to mine through a mining pool. Whether you are mining with one machine, or several thousand, the network of Bitcoin mining machines is so large that your chances of regularly finding a block (and therefore earning the block reward and transaction fees) is very low.

If the Bitcoin Network Hashrate is 100 EH/s (100,000,000 TH/s), a WhatsMiner M20S ASIC miner with 68 TH/s, has approximately a 1 in 1,470,588 chance of mining a Bitcoin block. With one block per 10 mins they may have to wait 16 years to mine that one block.

The oldest two pools are Slush Pool and F2Pool. F2Pool is now the largest Bitcoin mining pool and they support around 20% of the entire Bitcoin network.

F2Pool’s payout method is called PPS+. PPS+ pools take the risk away from miners, as they pay out block rewards and transaction fees to miners regardless of whether the pool itself successfully mines each block. Typically, PPS+ pools pay the miners at the end of each day.

This is how PPS+ pools calculate how much to pay out to miners in their pool. Here comes the science part…

If the Bitcoin Network Hashrate is at 85 EH/s (85,000,000 TH/s), a WhatsMiner M20S ASIC miner with 68 TH/s, will earn around 0.000702 BTC per day before pool fees.

0.000702 BTC is calculated by 68 (miner hashrate) ÷ 85,000,000 (network hashrate) × 144 (number of blocks per day) × 6.25 (block reward).

Pool fees are normally 2.50–4.00%, so let’s use 2.50% for the example; the net mining revenue is therefore 0.00068445 BTC.

If BTC is priced at $9,000, then this M20S has a daily revenue of $6.16.

Choosing the right mining pool is very important, as you will receive your mined bitcoin sent from the pool payouts every day. It’s important to choose a pool that is reliable, transparent and offers the right suite of tools and services to help you optimize your mining operation.

4. Fees When Selling Bitcoin

An often overlooked facet of mining profitability is the fees one pays to sell the Bitcoin one mines. If you are a small time miner, you may have to sell your coins on a retail exchange like kraken or Binance. Sometimes your fees are low but sometimes your fees are high — it really just depends on the fee structure of the exchange and the state of the orderbook at the moment.

However, if you are a professional miner like F2 or Bitmain, you likely have really advantageous deals with OTC desks to sell your coins at little to no fees — depending on the state of the market. Some miners are even paid above spot price for their coins. Either way, professional mining operations deal with Bitcoin at a large scale and so they have more leverage to get deals that are good for them, and this doesn’t just apply to electricity purchases.

If you think you have what it takes be mine profitably, we suggest you make sure first by using our mining profitability calculator.

QUICK TIP

Unless you have access to very cheap electricity, and modern mining hardware then mining isn’t the most efficient way to stack sats. Buying bitcoin with a debit card is the simplest way, but we also recommend using a payment network like Skrill or Interac e-Transfer or use a bank transfer such as SEPA when available.

To buy bitcoin in your country or state, check our guides! A few of our most popular are listed below!

…or visit our exchange finder if your country is not listed above.

Professionals vs Amateurs

It’s common knowledge that it has become very difficult for individual miners to get access to the best machines and the cheapest electricity rates. Bitcoin farms that operate at scale use these advantages to maximize their returns.

As the difficulty of mining bitcoin increases, and the price lags behind, it is becoming harder and harder for small miners to make a profit.

It all comes down to scale and access to cheaper prices. When people enter the space, without prior relationships, they struggle to compete with established mining operations.

Bitcoin mining is starting to resemble similar industries as more money flows in and people start to suit up. With increased leverage, margins are lower across the whole sector. Soon, large scale miners will be able to hedge their operations with financial tooling to lock in profits, whilst bringing in USD denominated investments like loans or for equity.

As mining becomes more professional, it will make things even harder for DIY miners.

Can you Mine direct to an exchange?

If you have put in the effort to learn about mining, and you have found a location with low cost electricity for your machines, then you still need to consider where to store the bitcoin that you mine.

It is possible to mine direct from the pool to an exchange, but we recommend you keep your bitcoin in a wallet where you have access to the private keys.

Here are our top picks for Bitcoin wallets:

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