62
votes
Accepted
In the ASIC-age, is it worth starting mining Bitcoin at home?
Generally, it's not worth your time and effort to mine at home! (Some exceptions may apply.)
Age of ASIC mining
CPU mining has been unprofitable since 2011, GPU mining just slightly later.
Today, ...
- 73k
30
votes
Accepted
Does bitcoin miner heat as much as a heater
A device that consumes N watts of power (and doesn't output electricity or some other form of energy) will eventually produce N joules of heat per second.
Thus, if your goal is converting electricity ...
- 102k
25
votes
Why don't miners charge more for high value transactions?
Miners don't charge anyone.
Users put aside some amount of satoshis to incentivize a miner to include a transaction in a block, as the miner takes those satoshis if they are successful in mining that ...
- 3,324
23
votes
Accepted
Current FPGA Competitiveness
First a bit of perspective on FPGA mining.
Around 2011 some miners started switching from GPUs to FPGAs, (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), after the first implementation of Bitcoin mining came out ...
- 1,133
19
votes
Why would anyone sell a Bitcoin miner instead of just mining themselves?
The difference is that with cloud mining, all you are doing is lending the company money. And you are expecting them, for no rational reason, to pay you back an interest rate higher than they would ...
- 51.5k
16
votes
Accepted
Why do leading ASICs manufacturers sell their chips?
I think the simple answer is that a company doesn't have to be a "Bitcoin believer" in order to manufacture Bitcoin mining hardware. The companies that produce ASIC chips also produce other products ...
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16
votes
Accepted
Is there a logical reason to buy bitcoin for more than it costs to mine it?
Mining:
It's a lot of trouble and expensive to set up a proper rig and the return on investment can take a long time when mining. It's not as cheap or profitable to mine the coins as you make it seem.
...
- 308
14
votes
Accepted
Is Gpu mining still an option?
Thanks for asking this question. I see a lot of people all the time who assume GPU mining is profitable.
Try googling "bitcoin mining calculator" and see.
Presently (in 2015) the calculator will ...
- 8,419
13
votes
Accepted
Is Lightning Network a risk for Bitcoin security since it reduces miner fees?
The idea that Lightning will reduce the amount of fees going to miners is very common, and we probably won't know for sure until we actually try it. However, I'll try to provide some arguments as to ...
- 9,319
12
votes
Javascript Bitcoin miner is it even worth it?
It is true that mining Bitcoins like this is impossible. (I can't speak for altcoins though.)
Let us run through a back-of-envelope calculation based on some facts and assumptions.
Network hash rate ...
- 882
12
votes
Accepted
Why don't miners charge more for high value transactions?
The biggest counter question is identifying what constitutes high value transactions. Bitcoin works on an Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXO) based model rather than an account based model. The input ...
- 7,348
12
votes
Does bitcoin miner heat as much as a heater
It may be practical to use a miner to provide some of the heat for your home, bringing some miners into your home during the cooler months and moving them elsewhere during summer.
It's pretty much 100%...
- 249
12
votes
Where to find exact number of hashes required to mine most recent block?
You cannot know how many hashes were actually performed for every block, because non-winning hashes aren't published.
There is however a simple formula to compute the expected number of hashes a block ...
- 102k
12
votes
How would faster blocks cause mining centralization?
Why faster blocks?
This conversation often starts with someone pointing out that shortening the block interval would allow for a quicker first confirmation, reduce variance in mining revenue, and ...
- 73k
11
votes
Bitcoin mining, do you do the work or does the computer?
The extent of human involvement in mining is to get the software and hardware and then run the software on the hardware. No one actually has to sit at a computer and do anything in mining. They don't ...
- 68.6k
10
votes
Is it possible for a slow computer to beat the world mining Bitcoin?
It is of course possible... however it is incredibly unlikely!
Mining with a CPU has not been profitable since the earliest days of bitcoin, the expected time to find a block is likely on the order ...
- 18k
10
votes
Beginner's question: Why must proof-of-work be useless?
In addition to the technical factors mentioned by MCCCS, it's important to consider economical factors as well.
If the problem being solved has value outside of the Bitcoin network, it allows miners ...
- 17k
10
votes
Why would anyone sell a Bitcoin miner instead of just mining themselves?
There's a couple of reasons I can think of:
They might not think mining is profitable and are simply looking to sell hardware and treat BTC miners as a good target market, media attention probably ...
- 201
8
votes
Is there a logical reason to buy bitcoin for more than it costs to mine it?
You are talking about two very different investment options. One is investing cash into a type of commodity that has shown extremely high volatility; the other one is investing low amount of cash, but ...
- 181
8
votes
What is the estimated price of Bitcoin which will push miners to stop mining if its price dropped to uneconomical level ?
When a bitcoin was worth less than $10, miners were mining.
When a bitcoin was worth more than $15,000, miners were mining.
The key point is that there is no exact price that would make mining ...
- 18k
7
votes
Accepted
Is it possible for a slow computer to beat the world mining Bitcoin?
It is theoretically possible.
Blockchain.com estimates that the hashrate of bitcoin is 13,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes/second. Any one of those hashes could be "The lucky one" that earns 12.5BTC. ...
- 332
7
votes
Does bitcoin miner heat as much as a heater
Heat Quality
Not all heat is the same. The earth maintains a fairly constant average of 10 C near the surface, but you can't boil water with that. So the temperature of your heater makes a big ...
- 171
6
votes
How is mining profitable if a $10.000 ASIC will generate like $63.23 per month?
That particular miner is way overpriced. Nobody should buy it at that price. The seller either listed an incorrect price, or is very confused about the current market for mining hardware, or is ...
- 23k
6
votes
Can you mine your own transactions yourself?
Theoretically, if you can mine blocks then you can certainly include your own transactions in the block.
Practically, you are competing with every other miner on the planet to find the next block. If ...
- 3,431
6
votes
Can you make profit from a miner?
Yes, this is a scam.
The scammer has probably asked for your login info, so that he can 'set you up for mining'. In reality, mining does not work like this at all, the scammer simply wants access to ...
- 18k
5
votes
Accepted
What can be done with old (unprofitable) ASICs?
If your electricity costs are high, unprofitable for you may mean profitable for someone else.
Some miners may still use unprofitable ASICs either to support the network (at a smaller loss than with ...
- 292
5
votes
Javascript Bitcoin miner is it even worth it?
First off, without the visitor's consent it would be unethical.
Besides that, no it is not impossible. In the past there were sites doing that getting a fee for the service and providing the profits ...
- 2,520
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible