Episode notes
Bitesize Bitcoin (Cost to Mine & Efficiency)
Greetings Ungovernable Misifts, one of the most looked forward to events of the week for a miner is reaching your threshold on the payout of your mining rewards. Aside from the excitement a solo-miner may feel if they discover a block on their own, the steady payout from your pool is as simple pleasure. Generally, there are no surprises, your pools or in some cases a variety of pools will pay out about what you think they will unless of course there's a spike or drought and pool luck or the difficulty adjustment is drastic, but in general you have an idea as to how many sats give or take, you're going to receive. Now juxtapose that amount of stats versus the cost to run your machines for that time and you have a simple profitability calculation. In this episode of Bitesize Bitcoin, we will explain how to factor the cost to mine and the variables that go into profitability predictions.
You'll notice in the intro of this episode that I said profitability predictions just like Bitcoin price predictions, mining profitability predictions are speculative. It's because of this that I don't personally attempt to answer inquiries about mining profitability. Just like future Bitcoin price, I don't know I just keep hashing. But calculate cost to mine and compare it to what you've received in payouts (assuming you sold the second you received them and honestly what Pleb Miner is doing that) is simple math and simple math is my kind of proof of work and in doing so we can derive a profitability snapshot. Cost to mine is easy to calculate, first we need to figure out the wattage of the device we're going to run (now most Bitcoin mining servers’ power usage specs are rated at plus or minus some percentage. Bitmain rates their machines power usage at ± 5% and Micro BT rates their machines at ± 10%. In this instance we will calculate a generic ASIC miner with the power usage of 3200 watts. Now that we know the wattage and since we know from our previous Bitesize Bitcoin on electricity, that power is the rate at which a certain quantity of work can be done over a period of time, we multiply the wattage by time, since we want to run the machine with a maximum uptime (the halving is always upon us) we will multiply by 24 hours. This gives us a power usage of 76.8 kilowatt hours per day. For novelty’s sake that machine made approximately 2 quadrillion 400 trillion sha 256 hashes in one day. Now we can take that 24 hour usage number and multiply it by your power rate, generally a good rate in the US is $0.10 a kWh 76.8 kilowatt hours times 5 cents comes to $7.68 a day to run our generic miner at 100 TH.
The US average is currently somewhere around $0.14 (.13%) a kW/hr an 10% increase over last year that ends up to almost $10.75 a day to mine. To bring some perspective on cost to mine your locale in Japan it would cost ¥3105 a day or $22.50. The UK at 34 (22) pence a kWh is 26 of the King’s (cus that old bat is dead) of the KING’s slave notes a day. Speaking of countries that still maintain the lunacy of monarchy, in Norway it would cost 141 (107) kroner or $14 a day to run our Bitcoin mining server. South Africa clocks in at about the same as the norse, 200 South African rands a day or 12 cuckbucks. That’s if the power is on mind you, have a listen to Tensai Bankai's Pleb Miner Month edition of Bitesize Bitcoin and see what I mean. And last on our list, THE Rockstar of European energy policy, Germany. At a whopping $0.38 per kWh running a machine on Fiat dictated solar panels and windmills mixed with the coal-fired power plants you had to turn back on will cost you €29 a day to run. The market price of Bitcoin would have to be over $50,000 for a German minor to break even if he sold regularly how's that phasing out your nuclear power plants going for you? There you have it, cost of mine is simple, power usage in watts times 24 hours times electricity rate. Before we move on let's consider the source of variety in our variables. Mostly regulated electricity, priced in state issued Fiat currency, neither of which adhere to any semblance of laws of economics and or physics. That's why stranded gas miners, miners who seek the source of cheap power, and those that pioneer new ways to generate electricity or capture the waste heat and reuse it, are the unsung heroes of mining. They break the chains of energy market manipulation. The chain created by corrupt governments and NGO grifters and transcend the controls of greedy globalist bankers. They can help usher in a new era of energy sovereignty by rewarding efficiency and innovation.
Now to factor in how much Bitcoin you can earn while mining over a time period. in a previous bite sized Bitcoin we explained the difficulty epoch and the 2016 block adjustment period. So, let's take a recent payout average. For the purposes of our discussion, over a one year span some difficulty epochs will be better than others but in this epoch of somewhere around 36T-37T we will assume two weeks of 100 TH Bitcoin mining generates 477,000 sats worth of mining rewards. At the time I’m recording this, we are about 76% from ATH. We can value those sats at an optimistic $80 for 2 weeks. at $7.68 a day with our .10 cent rate it costs about $107.50 over a two-week period to run. Putting us in the hole $27. But that's if we sell the moment we're paid out and if we ignore several other factors like variable power rates heat capture, different difficulties, equipment costs, depreciation or sometimes appreciation. Transaction fees, pool fees, dev fees, price fluctuation, the value of your infrastructure and so on. It's for these very reasons why when I'm asked about profitability, I shrug my shoulders and point to a profitability calculator or similar tool or I say I can tell you the cost of mining but profitability and especially future profitability, DYOR. Go ahead you can plug in numbers and scenarios to your hearts content, the calculators will do the work for you. As for me I'm gonna hash, I'm gonna hodl. For a lot of pleb miners it's not just diamond hands but diamond plugs we're not unplugging (or should I say we’re hesitant to, it’s physical painful to turn them off, as if our heart stops beating. Difficulty be dammed, Bitcoin priced in fiat pfft 1 bitcoin is = 1 bitcoin. you’re not taking this away from us, we will hash, we will defend the network, we will find a way. As the great Charlton Heston once said, “I want to say those fighting words for everyone in the sound of my voice to hear and to heed, FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!”
