Mining Profit Estimate Tool
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At Poolin we leverage our insight as the number one mining pool to build open-access tools for the mining community. Bitcoin & cryptocurrency mining requires constant vigilance to adjust operations in order to maximize profits and remain competitive in a highly dynamic system. With an increasing variety of new ASICs having different properties, it’s critical to understand how each piece of hardware responds under changing circumstances. The constant dance between price fluctuation, energy/hardware costs, network difficulty and block rewards, keeps everyone on their toes. Mining operators need accurate information on each ASIC’s performance to calculate profit margins and manage energy bills effectively.
We built our Mining Profit Estimate tool to give miners a compass that takes in their local variables and points towards better configurations by comparing different hardware. Our tool leverages our position as a leading mining pool by drawing real data — updated daily — from our broad user base to give the most reliable indicators of each ASIC’s relevant attributes.
The tool is divided into three sections: the header, the cryptocurrency toolbar, and the ASIC comparison display. At the top of the calculator, next to the header, there is a search bar to display a specific ASIC model or manufacturer. In the top right corner is a toggle for electricity cost measured in kilowatt hours (KWh), the standard is preset to $0.03 USD, i.e. three dollar cents. Use the plus and minus buttons to adjust the price by a fifth of a cent ($0.002) given the local cost of electricity.
Below the header is the different cryptocurrency toolbar. The toolbar is preset to list the most popular ASICs being used in our pool, and one can also choose to see “ALL” available ASICs by their profitability. Then there is the option to select among the different coins that are available to mine in our pool: Bitcoin, Zcash, Litecoin, Ravencoin, Ethereum, Decred, Dash, Nervos, Bitcoin Cash, and Bitcoin SV.
Upon selecting a coin, a sub-menu appears giving an adjustable price field, a maintenance cost option, and that network’s hashrate. The “Correct Miner Data” button pulls up a new window to submit revisions using actual mining data that is inconsistent with the data listed in the tool’s results. This option allows users the ability to provide direct feedback on their hardware’s hashrate and power consumption, which is then reviewed by our team.
Under the Bitcoin sub-menu for the cryptocurrency toolbar there is also an extra option to factor in the upcoming change in the bitcoin block reward. The halving of the block reward is a major epochal event in bitcoin, also called the “halvening”, which underscores bitcoin’s value-proposition as a deflationary money supply. For miners this is particularly important because the revenue will be cut in half, rendering older, less energy-efficient equipment unprofitable. This change will take place at block number 630,000, which is estimated to occur around mid-May of this year.
The main part of the tool displays the comparison of different ASICs’ attributes divided into eight columns. The y-axis of the table, on the left, lists the ASIC manufacturers and models.
- Average hashrate of each machine, measured in hashes per second.
- Power consumed per day, which is measured in watts (W).
- Unit Power measures the number of watts consumed per basic hashing unit; in the case of Bitcoin’s SHA256 algorithm, a terahash (T) = 1 trillion hashes.
- Gross revenue per day, i.e. the dollar value of how much cryptocurrency that machine mines in twenty-four hours.
- Energy cost per day given by the cost of electricity and how much energy that machine consumes.
- Ratio between the miner’s daily profit and their electricity costs, i.e. what percent of profit is eaten by the electricity bill.
- Break-even gives the minimum price of the cryptocurrency necessary to keep mining at a profit.
- Net profit estimate per day given a particular electricity cost and currency price.
Break-Even Price
The break-even or “shutdown price” is perhaps the most important metric because it incorporates all of the other data points. Over the years mining hardware manufacturers have created increasingly efficient ASICs that have increased the hash rate and therefore the mining difficulty. Miners have to sell part of their bitcoin or other cryptocurrency earnings to cover electricity costs. Each model of mining equipment has a different threshold because of their unit power (the watts consumed per terahash), but all are bound by the ratio between the price of electricity and the price of cryptocurrency. The lower the price of electricity the less cryptocurrency the miner has to sell, but if the price of the cryptocurrency goes down, the miner has to sell a greater percentage of their earnings to cover their electricity bills.
Because there are constantly new miners released to the market, older machines run until reaching this threshold, at which point the ASIC is no longer profitable and is shut down. Therefore, the break-even or shutdown price is the balance between the network’s difficulty, the miner’s efficiency, the cost of electricity, and the selling price of cryptocurrency, which together establish the price of creating bitcoin.
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