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Will mining Bitcoin slow or stop other computers on my home network? My son wants to set up a computer to mine Bitcoin but I have a daughter that attends a virtual school and uses the internet. I have charter with 30 mb/s

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    You may want to have a talk with your son about the effect on your electric bill (and air conditioning too). It will likely be substantial, and depending on what kind of hardware he's using, it may far exceed his mining profits.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Feb 9, 2014 at 2:21

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Absolutely not. The bandwidth required to mine Bitcoin is very low as shown here: What are the bandwidth requirements of a mining rig?

So that's 700 bits per second out and about 2,000 bits per second back. Essentially, zero.

This means that your son can mine 24/7 and your daughter won't notice any slowdowns whatsoever.

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Building on top of Mr Mattheis, Your son will have no affect to your network. The way mining works is that his device will receive a small encrypted hash and it will repeatedly try and solve it. When it's done, it will simply broadcast it. However this is highly unlikely.

Depending on your son's hardware, he will get different mining speeds. I doubt you're going to buy him a top of the line ASIC, so let's assume he's mining on a laptop. He will get max 100 million hashes per second. This is a miniscule speed. One Top of the line ASIC will get you about 14 trillion hashes per second, meaning that his laptop will perfom more than a million times worse than an ASIC. Let's put it further into perspective. At the time of writing, the chance of mining a block with an ASIC is 0.00005803657. Now think about his laptop. Effectively 0.

Then we have to think about the physical problems. Bitcoin mining forces his hardware to its limits. Within minutes, the processor could heat up to 80-90+ degrees. If he were to leave it there over a long period, it could cause it damage. Not simple wear and tear, but things like motherboard crashes, his fan grill literally melting off, even warping the keyboard. Computers (not even laptops, actual PCs) are not made to run at 100% for 24/7.

You better tell your son to rethink.

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Mining rigs affects networks. I have a few. No big flow, but big amount of packets, that can overload routeur cpu, and effects on wifi, cause gpu mining causes lots of radio interferences. Tests to be done.

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