GUIDE
Mining profitability: the only four numbers that actually matter
Hashrate, efficiency, electricity price and network difficulty decide whether a miner pays. Everything else is noise. Here is how the four interact, with worked figures.
Quick answer
Mining profit is your share of the network multiplied by daily block rewards and coin price, minus electricity. Only four inputs move it: hashrate, efficiency in joules per terahash, your delivered electricity price, and network difficulty.
Almost every mining question people send us reduces to the same calculation, and it has four inputs. Once you can do it in your head you can dismiss most hardware marketing on sight.
The calculation
Your share of a network is your hashrate divided by total network hashrate. Multiply by the number of blocks found per day and the block reward, and that is your expected coin production. Multiply by price, subtract the pool fee, subtract electricity. What remains is profit.
Worked through for a machine doing 100 TH/s on a network at 620 EH/s: your share is roughly 0.000016%. Bitcoin produces 144 blocks a day at 3.125 BTC each, so the network mints 450 BTC daily. Your slice is about 0.0000726 BTC. At $64,000 that is around $4.65 gross, less a 1% pool fee.
Now the other side. That machine draws 3,250 watts. At $0.10 per kWh it costs 3.25 × 24 × $0.10 = $7.80 a day to run.
You are losing roughly three dollars a day. This is not a contrived example — it is a real configuration that plenty of people are still running.
Why efficiency beats hashrate
The machine above is doing 32.5 joules per terahash. A current-generation unit does closer to 17. At the same 100 TH/s the modern machine draws 1,700 watts, costs $4.08 a day in power, and turns that three-dollar loss into a small profit — on identical revenue.
Revenue depends on hashrate. Cost depends on efficiency. When price falls, revenue falls and your power bill does not, so the efficient machine is the one still running. Every capitulation event in mining is efficient miners outlasting inefficient ones.
The electricity number people get wrong
Use your delivered rate: generation plus transmission plus riders plus tax. On many US residential tariffs the delivered cost is close to double the advertised generation rate. At $0.10 the machine above loses $3.15 a day; at the $0.18 many households actually pay, it loses $10.40. Same hardware, same coin price.
Difficulty, and why break-even is optimistic
Our calculator, like every other one, holds difficulty constant. Difficulty is not constant. It adjusts roughly every two weeks and has trended upward over almost every multi-year window, which means your share of the network shrinks even though your machine has not slowed down.
So a 400-day break-even is a best case that assumes the network stops growing on the day you plug in. Treat any break-even estimate as a floor.
The halving
The block reward halves on a fixed schedule. When it does, the revenue side of this calculation halves overnight. Your power bill does not move. Any machine sitting near break-even before a halving is deeply unprofitable the day after, unless price roughly doubles to compensate.
Run your own numbers
Put your figures into the profitability calculator. Measure the wattage at the wall rather than trusting the spec sheet, and use your real electricity rate. If the answer is negative, the calculator will say so plainly rather than showing a break-even date that will never arrive.
Key takeaways
- Efficiency (J/TH), not raw hashrate, decides whether a machine survives a downturn.
- Use your delivered electricity rate including transmission and taxes, not the generation rate.
- Network difficulty has historically trended upward, so flat break-even estimates are a best case.
- A halving cuts revenue in half overnight with no change to your power bill.
Risk notice
Mining returns depend on coin price, network difficulty, block reward and electricity cost, all of which change continuously. Figures here are a snapshot under stated assumptions, not a forecast, and hardware can become unprofitable well before it fails. This is not financial advice.
Frequently asked questions
Is Bitcoin mining still profitable at home?
It depends almost entirely on your electricity rate and machine efficiency. Below roughly $0.07 per kWh a current-generation machine can work. Above $0.12 on residential rates, most home setups lose money at typical prices.
What is a good J/TH figure?
Current-generation hardware sits around 15 to 20 joules per terahash. Anything above 30 is a previous generation and will be first to go offline in a downturn.
Should I include hardware cost in profitability?
Include it for the break-even and ROI question, exclude it when deciding whether to keep running hardware you already own. Sunk cost should not drive the run-or-stop decision; only whether revenue beats electricity should.
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