Understanding Mining Calculators
Knowing how to use a mining calculator is one of the most important tools used to determine if mining crypto currency is profitable. Mining calculators are used to project the profitability of mining hardware at given difficulties and energy costs. Profitable crypto currency mining is achieved by understanding the relationship between your electrical costs, the mining hardware’s hash power, and the current difficulty of a network. For Bitcoin, difficulty is updated every 2 weeks (or 2,016 blocks) affecting the amount of hashpower required to mine a single block in order to keep the total block time at 10 minutes. Fortunately for us, there are many different mining calculators to choose from when we explore profitable mining, and it helps to consult multiple calculators to get the best estimation of profitability. Being able to use one calculator will give you the knowledge on how to explore other mining calculators.
What you need to know from your mining location
The first thing you need to know is your electrical costs ($/kWh) from where you will be mining. In the United States this can vary state to state along with what your current local electrical plan is. Residential electrical costs can range from $0.099/kWh up to $0.20/kWh. While those with commercial zoning can negotiate much lower power plans with their local utility company. When you start your crypto mining investment, knowing your electrical costs and negotiating to make them as cheap as possible is one of the most important key aspects to running your successful crypto mining business.
Once your power costs have been determined, you can begin to explore mining calculations to help target the best hardware for your needs.
The Most Popular Mining Calculators
The most popular mining calculator that covers the widest variety of mining algorithms is: www.whattomine.com. This calculator allows you to explore the major algorithms in both GPU mining and ASIC mining.
Other calculators such as; Nicehash is specifically in regards to the Nicehash mining pools. While they do give you stats and estimations, it is not as flexible as whattomine.com.
What To Mine GPU Mining
Let’s take the example of AMD’s 5700XT. First, you need to go to the listing of the GPU’s and click Show More. From there you will enter the number of cards you plan on mining, for the case of our bundle it’s 20. We will enter in 20, click 5700XT red, and ensure all other GPU cards are clicked off.
What to mine, will then populate the hash and wattage for the cards throughout the algorithms. Whichever algorithms are clicked blue will be whose profits will be calculated.
Below the Algorithms you will need to enter your electricity costs $/kW. From there you can sort by profitability timeframe and averages for revenue $. It is recommended that you at least look at a 7 day window. What to mine even allows you to customize what exchanges you process your coins through.
Click Calculate, and then you can see the estimated profitability below for various coins, along with their algorithm that corresponds with that coin.
What To Mine ASIC Mining
With ASIC calculations you cannot do a full sweep of all of the algorithms available due to the nature of an ASIC miner. ASIC’s can only process the specific algorithm that they are designed for. Let’s take a look at the Antminer S19XP 140th, Bitmain’s newest and most robust bitcoin ASIC miner.
To calculate the estimated profitability of the Antminer S19XP, first we must acknowledge that this is a SHA-256 miner, which means it can only mine the Sha-256 algorithm. With that the first thing we need to do is click off all other ASIC algorithms on the what to mine ASIC page. it’s hashrate and power consumption. Viewing our listing we can see the hashrate is 140th/s at a consumption of 3010W.
Below the Algorithms you will need to enter your electricity costs $/kW. From there you can sort by profitability timeframe and averages for revenue $. It is recommended that you at least look at a 7 day window. What to mine even allows you to customize what exchanges you process your coins through.
Click Calculate, and then you can see the estimated profitability below for the Sha-256 algorithm.
Conclusion
The first step to beginning your crypto mining journey is using mining calculators to look at how a specific piece of hardware performs at the current difficulty level of the blockchain. Mining calculators allow you to view mining hardware against the current difficulty of the network and in the case of GPU mining allows you to view a piece of hardware over multiple algorithms. You can use this information to extrapolate current and future profits of a miner. Which ultimately assists in making an informed decision on which crypto algorithm to target and which crypto mining hardware you want to purchase and begin your crypto mining journey.
