As I wipe the dust from my coffin I arise to tell you all that I was there when they first started mining the cryptocurrencies from the bowls of the digital frontier. I was there early enough to look at my old rig and wonder if it was worth setting up to see if it could score a few coins over the course of a month or so. I’ve known a few people who did things like acccidentally throw away drives full of BTC. I even knew people who got in early and cashed out fast, otherwise known as ‘bastards’.
Since its early days, crypto has been, to put it politely, an absolute shitshow of cryptoglogical proportions. Even when it was somewhat viable to put your rig to work it’d still be a long haul of wait and see before you might eventually unearth yourself a coin here and there. And of course your old GPU has been worked into dust and your power bill has skyrocketed for the trouble.
For those reasons it’s been a long time since I considered mining Bitcoin as a viable investment, and it looks like the landscape is finally shifting to meet my preconceptions. Even specialists such as CoinShares (via Overclockers) are starting to doubt this business investment, despite it recently reaching an all time high price.
New data tells us that mining a single Bitcoin or one BTC costs the largest public mining companies over $82,000 USD, which is nearly double the figure it did the previous quarter. Estimates for smaller organisations say you need to spend about $137,000 to get that single BTC in return. BTC is currently only valued at $94,703 USD, which seems to be a problem in the math department.
These costs can even get worse depending on the country you’re doing your mining. Germany is typically considered to be one of the worst places to mine BTC from a profit perspective. It costs around $200,000 USD to mine a single coin there.
So why would anyone be mining BTC in this day and age? Well the main reason, other than perhaps dim hopes that they’ll strike it rich, is about technology. Currently optimising farms to mine faster on lower power has been the goal. Plus seeking out places where electricity is cheaper to try to maximise those gains.
Once you’ve got these incredibly efficient, and hopefully relatively power friendly setups in place, you’ve not only dropped your potential mining overheads but you likely have a computation setup that could complete other tasks. This makes it an attractive option for larger companies who may look to lease their mining operations for other computations when they’re unable to make money from mining. Then they can swap back if and when the market picks up once again.
For now the big takeaway is that mining crypto isn’t going to be viable for individuals, possibly ever again. With huge centres being setup in key positions you just won’t be able to beat out the larger companies acting here. Any new coin that comes up they can point their rigs to it and begin the process all over again. It’s almost like you’re better off using your sweet rigs for gaming, not crypto mining, just like the good lord intended.