Bitcoin Mining Profitability

Bitcoin/United States Dollar exchange rate

Mining rewards are in bitcoin, not dollars. So the BTC/USD price determines how many dollars any miner will get daily. However, bitcoin price is very volatile. Its exchange rate rides a roller coaster every week at the charts. We don't even know its price for the future, so how can we calculate long-term returns in dollars if bitcoin price changes every hour? The answer is: forget any dollars for the near future and focus on the situation you come in mining and what are a costs at the moment.

It’s always better to buy when the price is low, because mining equipment price correlated with BTC rate. Due to the fact, that bitcoin is increasing in a long term as it used to, there should be more dollars than invested anyway, even when it seems like it’s not with all these red candlesticks in the short term. Is $16,000 for Bitcoin a disaster? 3 years ago it was $3,000 and also felt like a disaster.

The network difficulty

This is a second mining profitability factor. As we already know, the emission of bitcoin takes place through mining. There is no other way to produce it. But when supply exceeds demand, the price drops – that’s the economy basics. To avoid uncontrolled printing of new bitcoins and prevent the price from falling, the bitcoin network has a built-in difficulty parameter. The difficulty makes it harder to find the block of each miner in such a way that each ASIC miner or GPU has less chance of earning a reward of brand new bitcoins. Only 6.25 new bitcoins should be created every 10 minutes in the whole world.

The more quantity and more powerful devices are decrypting blocks, the more difficult it is for each individual miner to get bitcoin. As soon as the price of bitcoin falls too low, it becomes unprofitable to mine in most places across the Earth, because they begin to consume more electrical energy than they produce profits in dollars. Then many people are forced to disconnect their equipment and the difficulty of the entire bitcoin network drops. Those who remain in mining start earning more funds – they get a bigger piece of the pie. This is called the surrender of the miners. We at SurgeGains always have some of the lowest power consumption fees on the market because our hotels are energy optimized so we are ready to survive instead of surrender.

Power consumption

That’s easy: ASIC equipment is just a metal box with chips and cooler fans. All it does is mine bitcoin, performing endless and very difficult computer calculations by the only one algorithm. This work requires a huge amount of power, so miner consumes energy no less than vacuum cleaner. They also sound the same, by the way.

That’s why a right place is important, because different countries have a different electricity taxes. In every country, electricity costs its money. Traditionally, in Europe, the US and most places on Earth, electricity is too expensive for mining to be profitable. United States miners remain the first, because they constantly get out with cooling and efficient consumption of more expensive electricity. However, mining in USA is a closed market not for everyone. This is a niche that has long been divided among major players. SurgeGains is open for everyone and we have mining hotels in Russia, so the service has a way less energy fees than the most of the cloud mining market.

Pool fees

In order to mine efficiently, miners combine their mining hash power into pools. Then all machines find blocks with a higher probability and receive more income from the total computing power than if you simply connect your miner directly to the network. For this pools take their percentage of bitcoin income. Usually it's 1-2% – for miners it's worth it, but the pools get huge funds from it. However, in meticulous calculations of profitability, they should also be taken into account. SurgeGains also uses the services of the largest pools, connecting equipment to them. This way we can achieve the best return for our users.