Hello everyone 

8 Days ago I decided to put my a-little-over-average custom built PC to the test. I wanted to see how much money I could make by mining with a regular PC for a week.
At first I thought I wouldn’t make me more than a few dollars, but in the end, I was actually kind of surprised!

Before reading this

I just want to quickly mention that by all means, I'm not an expert at mining. I just did a few hours of research and that's about it. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy my article.

Some specs:

Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
CPU: Intel Core i7 6700K
Motherboard: Asus Z170-P

I started by doing my research on mining. I downloaded various programs and tried out different pools, but I wasn’t really satisfied with a lot of the pools. Some hours later I found a great solution. I discovered a software called nicehash. At first, I was kind of skeptic, because it wasn’t really a miner, it was a service where you could “lend hashing power” and it would pay out in bitcoin.

I went ahead, downloaded it and tried it out and it rather surprised me. After mining for about 5 minutes with it I already had 137 satoshis.
It mined me a lot more than other software because it wasn’t using the SHA-256 algorithm that bitcoin uses, it was using different algorithms.
The one I used the most was Neoscrypt because it had the most estimated daily earnings.
If you would want to mine bitcoins directly, you would need professional equipment, because your PC electricity bill would cost more than you would actually mine. 

So I decided to “mine” with nicehash for a week.
While I mined for 168 hours (how many hours a week has) I wasn’t quite mining 24/7. Every 23 hours I stopped it for an hour to cool my computer down a little bit. On day 8 I mined for another 7 hours to compensate the one-a-day-cooling-break. 

The result was finally here!

Damn, 17.47 dollars, that’s a lot more than I expected! But wait. I still have to pay the electricity bills.
Because I live in Switzerland I have a really high electricity cost of about 0.12 cents per kW/h.
The total electricity cost of my computer for this week was 6.24 dollars .

So I have made 11.23 USD in total. Still not bad for my little-over-average PC.

Was it worth it?

Yes and no.
It was a cool experiment and it was fun to see my balance rising.
However making roughly 11 dollars per week isn’t really worth it, considering that the chances of the hardware breaking rises and the high prices of making a bitcoin transaction at the moment.

Now I would like to thank you for reading my post, have a nice day!