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Is BitCoin mining still mostly done by huge mining farms running ASIC miners? Can someone with 4 Titan-X cards even mine anything worthwhile? Given municipal e

Is BitCoin mining still mostly done by huge mining farms running ASIC miners? Can someone with 4 Titan-X cards even mine anything worthwhile? Given municipal electricity is very cheap, etc?

illegalsmile 10y ago
> Can someone with 4 Titan-X cards even mine anything worthwhile? Given municipal electricity is very cheap, etc? No.
- jason_slack 10y ago
  and I guess it has been this way for a while. It seems you really need a huge hardware investment to mine anything and you must mine long term to even pay for the investment you made. What are current miners like, hardware wise?
  - teach 10y ago
    If bitcoin prices drop to anything like they were 6 months ago it's even worse than that: you'd spend more on electricity than you would earn by mining.
mikeash 10y ago
It looks like you could expect around 800 million hashes/second doing Bitcoin mining on a Titan X. The current Bitcoin hash rate is about 2.5 quintillion hashes/second. The current reward for a block is 25 bitcoins, plus whatever fees are included in the transactions which are relatively small at the moment, as I understand it. A block is mined roughly once every 10 minutes, so that's 3600 bitcoins/day mined. At $1100, that's about $4 million/day. You could expect to see, on average, an amount relative to the proportion of total hashing power you bring. That would be $4 million * 8e8 / 2.5e18 = 0.13 cents/day, approximately. (Note, not $0.13, but $0.0013.) So, yeah, not really worthwhile.
- jason_slack 10y ago
  What a great explanation! Thank you for taking the time to do so. Are the mining farms still using ASIC miners?
  - mikeash 10y ago
    I was curious myself so I just had to look it up. As far as I know, everything is ASICs now. I don't believe there are any more big steps to take from there, just refinement to chip design and fabrication.
- npongratz 10y ago
  > The current reward for a block is 25 bitcoins If I may offer a slight correction: the reward per block halved to 12.5 bitcoin in July 2016 [0]. Doesn't materially change the results [1], but probably worth mentioning for posterity. [0] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36763524 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36763524 [1] 1800 bitcoin / day mined @ $1100/BTC is $2MM/day, so one would gross $2MM * 8e8 / 2.5e18 = $0.00064/day. And at today's ~$900/BTC, $0.00052/day.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out. I looked it up, but must have found an old source.

Is BitCoin mining still mostly done by huge mining farms running ASIC miners? Can someone with 4 Titan-X cards even mine anything worthwhile? Given municipal electricity is very cheap, etc?

illegalsmile 10y ago

> Can someone with 4 Titan-X cards even mine anything worthwhile? Given municipal electricity is very cheap, etc? No.

jason_slack 10y ago
and I guess it has been this way for a while. It seems you really need a huge hardware investment to mine anything and you must mine long term to even pay for the investment you made. What are current miners like, hardware wise?
- teach 10y ago
  If bitcoin prices drop to anything like they were 6 months ago it's even worse than that: you'd spend more on electricity than you would earn by mining.

mikeash 10y ago

It looks like you could expect around 800 million hashes/second doing Bitcoin mining on a Titan X. The current Bitcoin hash rate is about 2.5 quintillion hashes/second. The current reward for a block is 25 bitcoins, plus whatever fees are included in the transactions which are relatively small at the moment, as I understand it. A block is mined roughly once every 10 minutes, so that's 3600 bitcoins/day mined. At $1100, that's about $4 million/day. You could expect to see, on average, an amount relative to the proportion of total hashing power you bring. That would be $4 million * 8e8 / 2.5e18 = 0.13 cents/day, approximately. (Note, not $0.13, but $0.0013.) So, yeah, not really worthwhile.

jason_slack 10y ago
What a great explanation! Thank you for taking the time to do so. Are the mining farms still using ASIC miners?
- mikeash 10y ago
  I was curious myself so I just had to look it up. As far as I know, everything is ASICs now. I don't believe there are any more big steps to take from there, just refinement to chip design and fabrication.
npongratz 10y ago
> The current reward for a block is 25 bitcoins If I may offer a slight correction: the reward per block halved to 12.5 bitcoin in July 2016 [0]. Doesn't materially change the results [1], but probably worth mentioning for posterity. [0] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36763524 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36763524 [1] 1800 bitcoin / day mined @ $1100/BTC is $2MM/day, so one would gross $2MM * 8e8 / 2.5e18 = $0.00064/day. And at today's ~$900/BTC, $0.00052/day.
- mikeash 10y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. I looked it up, but must have found an old source.