The best answer for this question would be “it all comes down to how much you will invest.” However, to get a more meaningful answer, there are multiple factors to be considered:
1. The price of bitcoin is constantly changing and the volatility is currently extremely high. One bitcoin is currently worth more than $11,000, and less than a month ago it was worth around $6,000, so its price increased by more than 80% in just a single month.
2. Bitcoin mining difficulty is constantly rising. In other words, the same hash rate you are using today to mine a single bitcoin won’t yield the same amount the following month.
4. You won’t be easily able to buy bitcoin miners from the manufacturers’ websites as they are usually sold out there. So, you won’t be able to buy miners from the Bitmain website; instead, you will have to buy them on eBay from someone who managed to pre-order them.
5. The prices of bitcoin miners are constantly changing and a large percentage of individuals involved in the mining business price-gouge most of these miners.
6. Bitcoin miners generate a considerable amount of noise and heat.
7. Bitcoins you mine will be taxed as they are considered a stream of income.
As such, since the profitability of bitcoin mining depends on many factors, bitcoin mining profitability calculators were created to help you find out if mining will actually be profitable to you. These calculators utilize a number of parameters, including power costs, the price of your mining hardware, your hash rate and other variables, to predict the profit of your mining efforts.
- Using Mining Calculator To Predict Profitability of Bitcoin Mining Today:
There are many calculators available online to help you predict the profitability of your mining rig. We will use the mining calculator on Whattomine.com to estimate the profitability of bitcoin mining today. This calculator takes into account many parameters including the difficulty, hashrate of your miner(s), BTC/Block reward, bitcoin price, pool fees %, consumed power in Watts, Power cost per kWh and the price of your mining hardware. The below figure shows the calculator we will be using:
We will propose that we are using Antminer S9, which is one of the most advanced ASIC miners available today. It has a hash rate of 14 TH/S, or 14,000 GH/S. The price of Antminer S9 is $3,000 (note that this is the miner’s price on Bitmain’s website, so it will probably cost more if you buy it on eBay or other online markets). The electric power consumption of the Antminer S9 is 1370 Watts. We will consider a power cost of 0.12$/kWh which is the average power cost in the US. Currently, the block reward is 12.5 BTC, the mining difficulty is 1347001430558.6 and the bitcoin price is $11,015. We will use a pool fee of 2%, which is the average fee on most mining pools. After entering the aforementioned parameters into the calculator, we will get the following results:
So, as you notice from the results, you will be able to generate 0.002561 BTC per day using this mining rig, which is worth $24.27 at today’s bitcoin exchange rate. Consequently, if you do the math, you will find out that you will be able to get back the amount you invested in the Antminer S9 in less than 4 months. As such, if you have gotten your Antminer S9 at $3,000, bitcoin mining will be very profitable to you as you will be able to make more than $700 per month after deduction of the power costs. However, it is worth mentioning that the price of the Antminer S9 can exceed $5,000 today, especially that the price of bitcoin is skyrocketing.
To sum up, bitcoin mining is still profitable if you are willing to invest at least $3,000-$5,000 to purchase heavy duty ASIC mining equipment. It is also worth mentioning that high electric power costs can markedly reduce your profitability, so always do the math accurately and keep an eye on the network difficulty levels and the bitcoin exchange rates.
