No it doesn’t, assuming the mining tech improves via FPGA and ASIC, leading to more hashes per KWh. It’s very hard to predict the future ratio between hash rates and mining rewards.
I don't think it would, actually. Enough people are willing to mine for a loss and the difficulty rises with availability of cheap hardware that it never becomes profitable. OP only made a (slight) profit because they could temporarily make renting a miner cheaper than the payout. This was temporary and now the market is back to status quo.
Maybe OP could automatically run his miners when such situations arrive, but I think it's unlikely to net anything like $17k/yr.
Edit: sliverstorm described this way better than I could.
Not true at all. If enough hardware is available, pool only expands until reward covers electricity cost plus small margin. I.e. bitcoin mining electricity-cost bound for the long time now.
i really doubt it. in a mining rig all power spent on components other than the GPU is essentially pure overhead that cuts into the thin margin of a consumer setup. you need several discrete GPUs before it starts to be worthwhile at all.
> Hardware for mining cryptocurrency is self-financing in a relatively short period of time when the electricity is "free"
No it isn't. I know because I looked into it.
Assuming the price of bitcoin doesn't rise or fall, a cutting edge bit of dedicated bitcoin mining hardware will pay for itself in 3 years if operated continuously on free electricity, and will be effectively obsolete in 5 years, as difficulty increases and rewards drop.
So if you only operate the hardware 50% of the time it'll be obsolete before it's paid for itself.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? Any amount of mining will be profitable since your electricity is free. You could dig out a used Thinkpad from the closet and even though the hashrate would be miserable, you would still be making money since your electricity cost is zero. Of course you would probably want to use more efficient hardware to mine, and that's in terms of $/kWh.
I've got a GPU mining ethereum right now at about $0.75/kWh. Even in my apartment where electricity is $0.10/kWh I'm still turning a profit.
Likely not profitable. If you already have some surplus free electricity and free hardware, then yes by all means, you should be mining with it.
But even when electricity is free the economics on new mining hardware are often uncertain. I don't know what the long-term price of cryptocurrencies will be, but I strongly suspect that right now is a bit of a bubble. I'm pretty sure the return will not be like $5 a day on a standard gaming GPU a year from now.
And Ethereum in particular is moving away from proof-of-work consensus entirely, so the long-term future of mining is questionable really.
Yes. If you have a setup where the extra cost of power and cooling is negligible, then you would be able to mine effectively for free.
But then you still have the issue of buying the mining gear. And you'll probably never mine enough Bitcoins to ever pay back the initial purchase price. You'd be better served to just buy some coins from an exchange.
I have a 330Mhash/sec USB ASIC miner running right now on an old netbook, but I'm just doing it for fun. It's been running now for the past 2 weeks, and I've made less than $2. I spent only $20 for my ASIC though, so it's not too bad. A similar miner today would cost $35-$40 on ebay.
Putting the cost of the machine aside, would a computer like this be able to mine coins at high speeds using relatively little electricity. Seems like it could crush the market with inflation.
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