Bitcoin Mining: From GPU farms to ASIC & Cloud Mining

Cryptocurrency is one of the shortest ways to increase your capital drastically, though it is associated with great risks. The most popular and the first mined crypto is Bitcoin (BTC). It was the first and stays the first of all coins.  

There are more than 17 million Bitcoins already mined, out of the total sum of 21 million. Every day on this planet 144 bitcoins are generated, each costs $9,300 at the current exchange rate by the 14th of February, 2018. Each mined block rewards the miner with 12.5 BTC until the year 2020 when the block reward will be halved to 6.25 BTC.

Starting 2016, Bitcoin (BTC) solo mining is no longer profitable for regular miners. Even if you have a PC with several top GPUs or even a handmade mining rig, it’s still not enough.

 Calculation for BTC solo mining on the top configuration ASIC.
The estimation above represents profitability statistics for Nvidia GeForce 1070 Ti.

 The mining hardware arms race, as well as free market competition among manufacturers, is not an empty phrase, as Bitcoin mining demands tremendous amount of hash rate.There is already no point in measuring hashing power in hashes per second or Mhash/s, you must have at least 1+ GH/s computing power to mine Bitcoin successfully. This can be achieved by buying multiple ASICs.This comes with additional risk like changes in the hashing algorithm of Bitcoin which will make mining unavailable on previously used ASICs.So Bitcoin solo miners and small mining pools switched to mining altcoins like Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin Gold, Zcash, Monero, etc. Now it’s a job for industrial-level solutions. 

 There are several huge Bitcoin (BTC) mining pools operating independently, but they are not really effective for common users due to the difficulty they require from your hardware. 

 Just look at the Antpool’s difficulty of 4.02 terahashes.

Although Bitcoin (BTC) is a decentralized cryptocurrency, in fact, it’s more than centralized in China – about 80% of BTCs are mined on Chinese mining pools and collected on Chinese servers. 

 China dominates Bitcoin hashrate with significant breakaway

Think twice!

It’s way smoother and faster to buy Bitcoin rather than mine it – leave this work to industrial miners, who can monthly burn out thousands of dollars for electricity bills.

Bitcoin vs. Altcoins?

If you still look forward to mining Bitcoin, consider cloud mining as an alternative option. Though investors and miners are searching for alternate methods of obtaining BTC.The thing is that there are dozens of other cryptocurrencies, which are mostly exchangeable to Bitcoin on public exchanges. And most of them are profitable and demand less hashrate than Bitcoin mining does.You may spend days, weeks and months to mine zero-somewhat of BTC and gain 1/100 of its price or connect to the mining pool for Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Monero (XMR), Monero Original (XMO) or ZCash (ZEC) and by the same time make real profit on them.In short, for those of you who don’t have industrial scale ASIC farms, it’s better to buy BTC instead of mining it.

How to start mining altcoins?

There are two main ways to mine altcoins effectively: connect to a mining pool or buy cloud mining contracts. As far as cloud mining demands some additional investments (mostly in BTC, which, let’s say, we don’t have at the start), the most obvious option is joining a mining pool.Just mine whatever altcoin suits better for your mining hardware in terms of profitability and exchange it for Bitcoins. However, there are several altcoins that are profitable themselves.Let’s take the popular GPU NVIDIA GeForce 1080 Ti (with 8 GB DDR5) and compare its hashrate results relatively to mining profitability for Monero (XMR). 

 NVIDIA GeForce 1080 Ti x1

Per Pool Fee Est. Rewards Rev. BTC Rev. $ Cost Profit

Hour 0.000003 0.000283 0.000006 $0.05 $0.01 $0.04

Day 0.000069 0.006792 0.000150        $1.12 $0.18 $0.94

Week 0.000480 0.047546 0.001049 $7.81 $1.26 $6.55

Month 0.002058 0.203767 0.004496 $33.47 $5.40 $28.07

Year 0.025042 2.479171 0.054695 $407.25 $65.70 $341.55

Link to calculations

NVIDIA GeForce 1080 Ti x5

Per Pool Fee Est. Rewards Rev. BTC Rev. $ Cost Profit

Hour 0.000014 0.001415 0.000031 $0.23 $0.04 $0.20

Day 0.000343 0.033961 0.000751 $5.60 $0.90 $4.70

Week 0.002401 0.237727 0.005259 $39.18 $6.30 $32.88

Month 0.010291 1.018829 0.022536 $167.93 $27.00 $140.93

Year 0.125210 12.395749 0.274194 $2,043.16 $328.50 $1,714.66

Link to calculations

 These estimations are based on current very low price for Monero (XMR) which is $164 USD. You may perform the same calculations for any other coin and choose the most profitable altcoin to mine at any given moment.

That’s it, guys. Mine. Earn. Repeat! 

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