Is mining crypto currency still profitable and how do I do it?
When calculating mining profitability, there are a lot of things you need to take into account:
Hash rate: A Hash is the mathematical problem the miner’s computer needs to solve. The hash rate refers to your miner’s performance (i.e., how many guesses your computer can make per second). Hash rate can be measured in MH/s (mega hash per second), GH/s (giga hash per second), TH/s (terra hash per second), and even PH/s (peta hash per second).
Reward per block: The number of coins generated when a miner finds the solution.
Mining difficulty: A number that represents how hard it is to mine coins at any given moment considering the amount of mining power currently active in the system.
Electricity cost: How many dollars are you paying per kilowatt? You’ll need to find out your electricity rate in order to calculate profitability. This can usually be found on your monthly electricity bill. The reason this is important is that miners consume electricity, whether for powering up the miner or for cooling it down (these machines can get really hot).
Power consumption: Each miner consumes a different amount of energy. You’ll need to find out the exact power consumption of your miner before calculating profitability. This can be found easily with a quick search online or through this list. Power consumption is measured in watts.
Pool fees: If you’re mining through a mining pool (you should), then the pool will take a certain percentage of your earnings for rendering their service. Generally, this would be somewhere around 2%.
Price: Since no one knows what a coins price will be in the future, it’s hard to predict whether mining will be profitable. If you are planning to convert your mined coins to any other fiat currency in the future, this variable will have a significant impact on profitability.
Difficulty increase per year: This is probably the most important and elusive variable of them all. The idea is that since no one can actually predict the rate of miners joining the network, neither can anyone predict how difficult it will be to mine in six weeks, six months, or six years from now.
Once you have all of these variables at hand you can insert them into a mining calculator and get an estimate of how many coins you will earn each month. If you can’t get a positive result on the calculator, it probably means you don’t have the right conditions for mining to be profitable.