Crypto Mining At Home – My Experience December 2020
Even before Bitcoin hit the 30k+ a coin mark, I had been looking into doing some projects to test to feasibility and profitability of doing some cryptocurrency mining at the house. My thought was that bigger and bigger pockets continue to join the Bitcoin craze – there has to be some ‘more’ profitability down the line.
So – What Was The Result?
You need money and time to make money doing crypto. In many industries there are jokes ‘How do you make a million dollars a year? Start with two million’.
There is a lot of truth with this though – the bar to entry has gotten much lower with additional coins coming to market other than Bitcoin – Etherium, Monero, Comp, Celo, Dash, Filecoin, LiteCoin, Maker, Ren, Stellar, UMA – so on and so on.
Depending on the competition out there – you can mine a more profitable coin, exchange it into Bitcoin vs doing the direct mining functions for Bitcoin itself.
The two bottlenecks – or expected expenses – that you will encounter is the cost of electricity ( big deal ) and the cost of equipment ( can range widely ).
My Experience
To preface all of this, I did this off my workstation in an attempt to better understand the whole process. How the software and the exchange works, how my machine ranks against the ‘big boys’ and ultimately, can I make a few extra dollars on the side.
This test ran from December 1st to December 18th, 2020 and produced ~$20 profit.
The machine I am using is a home built workstation – pertinent specs are AMD Ryzen 7 3700 CPU and MSI RTX 2060 GPU.
Using NiceHash ‘dummy proof’ method of download, pass benchmarks and run. If you want to see a guide on that process then please email us at info@yourdigitalmind.com and let us know.
Some of the Non-Negotiables
- Above all else – Cause No Harm.
- Turn A Profit
- Learn
All three boxes were checked. We caused no damage to any piece of hardware, were able to turn a small profit ( but hey, profit is profit ) and there was an extensive amount of learning that happened.
Hopefully we can share with you some of what we learned.
The Start – Nicehash
I went to the NiceHash website and downloaded their agent. I clicked the agreements and got started. My first thought was ‘I use this computer during the day and I just want to utilize it when idle’.
First day we ran from 10pm to 6am and produced 0.00004005 btc.
At this time I had no idea what my electricity costs, conversion to dollars or anything so to say I was disappointed is an understatement.
After 6am, I was getting ready for work ( on a different machine ) and figured I would just let it run for a full day. After 24 hours of running and figuring cost of electricity, we are at $1.45 profit.
One of the more tedious things I had to learn was how to convert the money from NiceHash and turn it into cash.
You need .001 Bitcoin before you are able to transfer it out to your wallet. At the time of this writeup, that was about $23 USD.
When I signed up for CoinBase ( probably the most recommended option on the net ) they were pushing some promotions for ‘learn about Crypto and earn Crypto’.
Most of the videos were 3 minutes or less and if you have a reasonable understanding or if you have ever taken an online class – the answer comes fairly quickly in the video.
This netted an additional ~$20 associated with the original deposit.
We finally hit 0.001 BTC and are able to export it from the NiceHash miner and into a Crypto wallet.
After adding the mined crypto to the balance, I was able to add a bank account and deposit the funds.
Of course – Coinbase took their fee along with exchanging the BTC to USD.
Holy chit – we now have $44 in pure profit just waiting for us.
We initiated the transfer from USD in CoinBase to our bank account. Another nominal fee is taken and we now get $43.39 total.
It took about 20 minutes for the funds to hit our bank account which was then traded for beer.
So – What Now?
While this is not something that is going to pay off my mortgage anytime soon – it does show that there is still money to be made with mining cryptocurrency, with BTC at 23k a coin.
At the time of posting BTC is about 31K which means .001 is about $32/USD.
The system resources are well within range and temps are non-threatening.
The results were positive but the time to ‘true’ profitability is pretty steep. The $350 GPU would take almost a year to pay off but then you are making $350 a year.
Build a rig with 10 of them and things become a lot more impressive.
$3,500 down, about a year to pay for themselves and then $3,500 a year – profit.
I can absolutely see why the big wallets are joining – throw a Million dollars at a new business ( which typically has a 2 year turn around to profitability ) and in half that time, you are producing your investment – yearly.
Again – rough numbers, not taking in consideration 1000 different variables and conditions – but – it’s possible. Very possible.
Want To Try This Yourself?
Almost all of these sites provide some type of affiliate kickback and if you would be so kind – I would not say no to any kickbacks they may offer!
NiceHash – The ‘engine’ that drives the mining
Coinbase – Probably the ‘go to’ crypto wallet at the moment
Robinhood – Easy way to buy and sell crypto without actually mining
I started Your Digital Mind in 2016as a way to share my love for Education, Technology and Science in an entertaining yet rewarding format. I hope you are learning and enjoying!
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