Is It Worth Mining Cryptocurrencies?

Should You Start Mining?

In the last few recent months the volatility of bitcoin has caught the attention of many, and obviously traders that are used to trading more conventional futures and forex start to wonder if cryptocurrencies are also an instrument they should start to trade.

Buffett: "I would buy a 5 year put on every cryptocurrency" - Jan 10 2018

Many have looked at the volatility and have run from participating in the trading aspect but want to know if it's worth "mining" bitcoin.

So how much can you earn?

Mining bitcoin is basically using your computer hardware (more specifically your graphics card) to run calculations that over time will earn you a cryptocurrency. You can use your computers hardware to mine for many types of cryptocurrencies and some will be easier or harder which is dependent upon how hard the algorithm is for each task your computer has to solve. Usually the general rule is the more popular the cryptocurrency the harder it would be to earn.

NiceHash is a popular program that can make mining really easy to get started. Your results will all be dependent on what kind of graphics card your using. The graphics card I have in my system is a GeForce 1070ti which I use for video rendering of our YouTube videos and is a pretty decent card apparently for mining - one of the higher end cards available today.

With that being said, I'm going to say that $5/day would be a good estimate. There are a few costs though, you have to buy a card like this (which would run you about $500USD) and you'll need to also pay for the electricity.

Measuring my electrical rates for my entire system - It's costing me about 0.24 cents / day. So you could say that based off this my mining is profitable $4.50 roughly from the estimated earnings of $4.74.

That would get you about $1,825/year. Don't forget this value can change as the value as the cryptocurrency changes (for better or worse). Your amount will also depend on your graphics card if it's better or worse... if you want to look at benchmark sites to compare yours, I tested this with the GeForce 1070ti.

The Ultimate Question: Is It Worth While?

When you're mining bitcoin, your computer will slow down to the point that many will find it unusable. This leaves you with a few choices. 1) Mine when your not using it, which will eat into your profits or 2) Buy a system for mining and let it run which will cost you more money at the beginning.

Let's say you only want to mine when your not using your computer and your profit drops to $3 a day or about $1000 a year - is it worth while? That's a pretty personal question but.... I'll leave that to you.