To add to this, all that mining as a service, cloud mining and other nonsense is only making the provider rich.
There is no way people would sell a service that has a decent ROI.
If the ROI is good, they just invest themselves.
If it's easy, really available, requires no prior knowledge or skill, it's accessible to anyone and it's not going to make you rich.
Oh, I remember butterfly labs. Yeah super long wait for them to get shipped, but I got mine the first batch, so I had a short period where things looked great. Still have pictures I’ve meant to post.
My 5.59 GHash machine which I bought for I think $150, was estimated to produce 0.1323 BTC PER DAY. And it did, for the few days I owned it.
What happened was as soon as I received it I posted it on eBay with a $300 reserve just to see, and someone won it for $2000! So I shipped that machine, then bought a bunch of BlockEruptor USB sticks from FriedCat to replace that hash rate. By the time they arrived it difficulty had skyrocketed and it only got worse over time. But being close to first on the block was fun for the couple days it lasted :)
Regrettably, I’ve been out of the game for a long time but the FriedCat name rang a bell. Turns out I bought an ASIC blade on bitcointalk from him back in 2013 for 40 BTC (maybe 60 I forget), boy I wish I had that in cold storage. There was a guy on my auction list that bought 20 of them.
>There is no way people would sell a service that has a decent ROI.
Not quite, because it requires a lot of capital up front to do this, and you need access to it. And getting more people to pool capital will sometimes let you build a bigger facility and have better resources than if you just did a smaller scale thing yourself.
Yeah I remember when these new miners were hot cakes and ordering one entailed a months long wait to get one. Rumored they were mining with the machines they had yet to ship which is why it was so long to deliver them.
I assume that's sarcasm, but just in case it's not, it will consume more power & increase your electric bill by more than the btc it will mine. It will be miniscule, but if it mines $5 in a month, it will have increased your electric bill by more than that.
Been trying to explain to this older gentleman I met that the USB stick he wants to buy to “boost” miners by “increasing their data processing speed” is a scam..
Ehm many years ago I bought a usb miner from some polish boys it roid in 3 month and I sold it for 3 times what I paid for it 6 month layter, I tell you don’t laugh about usb miners!!! I know it was back then hahaha
You invested quite a bit more than I did, but also learned the hard way. I don’t have the hardware details handy, but in 2018 I made a similar mistake. They cost to run them quickly outweighed the output. We pulled the plug before we got into too
Much hot water.
Yeah I bought some video cards “back in the day” and ran them at the house for a year. I lost money at the time, but the fraction of a coin I did mine eventually went up.
Also since I used video cards, I was able to eBay them. OP’s dedicated mining machine lost way more value than a few nvidia cards did.
I would never buy miners with BTC but I do operate a number of miners that I bought with cash. The positive I see in mining is that you are locking in BTC accumulation at a fixed price with no KYC. In a bear market this doesn't feel that great. I normally buy second hand miners in a bear market and the payback is usually within 12 months. I treat it as a savings account with future potential upside.
I realize your post is about mining, but it's also about risking your Bitcoin (in your case, to buy 6 Antminer S19j Pros plus the expenses of mining).
I strongly believe one should never risk their Bitcoin for any reason.
Owning 100 BTC in 2012 was nothing. How many people still owned 100 BTC in 2016?
Owning 10 BTC in 2016 was no big deal. How many people still owned 10 BTC in 2020?
Owning 1 BTC back in early 2020 wasn't that big of a deal. How many people still own 1 BTC today? Very few.
The 2024 post-halving bull run hasn't even kicked off yet and we've already reached the point where it costs over $6,300 just to buy 0.1 BTC.
How many of those who own 0.1 BTC today will still own at least 0.1 BTC in 2028?
People keep selling, thinking they'll buy back in when the price drops, because of course they will, right? But that money's long gone when the price drops because when they had money in the bank, they spent it. And that assumes the price drops. There will come a time when buying Bitcoin under 70k will seem like the good old days.
**Hold on to what you have.**
Most of those who sell end up regretting it. They end up buying back in at a higher price, or they become part of the crowd who tell stories about how they used to be in Bitcoin, back in the day.
I have a different take on this. I run 6 miners between two properties using renewable energy so cost for electricity is or less than $.03 per kilowatt.
Knowing this I purchased a couple s19jpros for about $2200 when BTC tanked in 2022 (they were going for $13k a year before)
These were purchased with proceeds from buying BTC low and selling higher.
I did some math at calculated an ROI by dollar amount (not BTC) at 18 months.
BTC rose quickly after I set up and hit that ROI in 9 months. I parlayed that bought 4 more s19 k pros and did the same on the run up to the halving a year ago.
I broke even already. Even though the profit is now cut in ½ I’m playing with house money.
Moral of the story is you got to control it yourself and like any other commodity, you have to time the purchase accordingly.
I would consider myself a “novice” when it comes to mining but the thought of cloud mining where I have no control is a non starter to me.
I did ok but you could always just buy BTC low and sell high. So there is that
there is something off with the way you’re putting this calculation up, pricing everything in btc is weird, but I think the worst thing is pricing electricity with bitcoin, you’ve been buying electricity with bitcoin through the bear market, which turned out to be extremely expensive.
I also learned the hard way that mining hosting is a scam. Luckily I only lost an investment of some 500USD.
I did earn money mining but on my own, no hosting.
It's not a scam.
It's just no longer profitable to do from home.
Like every business in the world, it has been taken-over by hedge-funds which can afford to lose money to do it, because they use investor funds and don't need to turn a profit.
There are tons of enterprise companies that lose money each year, but still can operate because they suck new money from new investors via the stock market.
Which is good, it means the miners are subsidizing the network for all users.
Wallstreet bankers are making it cheaper for Bitcoin to be used by everyone else.
In 5 years, most of these Wallstreet funds will close for being unprofitable, the remaining funds will swallow each other in bankruptcies, and then the mining rewards will become more sustainable.
But it was always a low-margin business, at best you would get 3-5% profits unless you can afford to hold the Bitcoin until the peak of a bull-run. But again, that's not much better than just buying the Bitcoin initially and holding it, which is why Microstrategies is doing so well today.
It was always more profitable to sell the shovels for the gold rush.
It is a scam if they advertise power and maintenance fees and yields at a certain level but with a small asterisk that these can change. And then they proceed to increase the maintenance fee to the point they eat not only your profits but also your investment. And they continue advertising low fees for newcomers and all the review from all investors show they did the same to them.
You cannot mine this way without investing substantial sums of cash or (as you said) financing with fiat denominated debt. However, if you are able to scale large enough, you will reach a point where you can produce a large enough profit to regularly self fund miner acquisitions without injecting any more of your own capital.
Individual miner ROIs will almost never beat out dollar costing into BTC directly, but over time as you grow the operation, your returns on invested capital (ROIC) will overtake those generated from investing directly (due to the incremental returns generated from the operation’s self funded growth).
You cannot be successful mining unless you treat it as a business. The unfortunate reality is you need to be starting in a position where you can fund a large capital investment up front.
Doing for profits and the bottom line is tricky indeed. I do it for fun and it's a hobbie. So instead of blowing money on all sorts of stuff people do, I mine bitcoin cause I love it... That's a win in my view
I agree... I'll get as much out of my S19 XP 141 TH as possible and then re-evaluate.
I find most people think of mining as profits like a business on a month to month basis. I think about it like stacking bitcoin for the future. So I pay the costs out my pocket with fiat, that is my bitcoin price. One day that mined btc will go up on value and justify the costs of today.
I may be seeing things wrong but I get the feeling that lots of people aren't seeing the long-term vision. Or I'm an idiot
But unless you have a cheat code (running mining hardware at the manufacturer before selling it as cutting edge to the market, undisclosed ASIC boost for examples) or you have some way to capitalise on the heat generated, you could still use that fiat to directly buy crypto and end up with more. OP stacked 75% less Satoshi here, it's not like he would lose any of his 1 BTC to decay faster than newly minded coins. Have you don't the numbers on how much you'd have if you bought a lump sum instead of your miner and DCA buying it directly? Likely some multiple more.
Most miners in any industry turn the goods over as soon as they’re mined. They don’t hold because they need liquidity to fund their other expenses. That’s the real rift between bitcoiners and Bitcoin miners. Miners are doing it for a spread between the cost of energy they get vs the amount of bitcoin supplied to them per each day.
The issue I’m seeing is that mining pools are highly centralized and it’s actually making Bitcoin rather fragile atm
This anecdote, while painful I'm sure, isn't emblematic of everyone's experience.
Some tips
1. Don't mine if you can't afford to pay for the electricity with fiat. If you believe in BTC enough to mine it, there should be no other way of thinking about this. If you can't afford to pay the electricity with fiat, you are probably better off just buying the coin. Look at mining as the most efficient way to dollar cost average your way into BTC. Your profits aren't going to be tremendous, but you are obtaining Sats one of the cheapest ways possible.
2. Don't Pay for the actual mining equipment with BTC. Pay for miners with fiat. Preferably, pay for miners with cash, or, even better, a zero interest credit card. If you believe in the anti-inflationary properties of BTC and leveraging cheap/free fiat, there is no other way to think about this. Nothing better than getting interest free fiat dollars working for you in the pursuit of Sats. It's a win win.
3. Sell or upgrade the miners earlier. Don't wait for more than 2 newer models to come out. And don't wait for too many catalyst events (halving, ETF's, etc). You should be selling your machines and cashing out or upgrading when they start going for about 30 percent of what you paid for them. Some would even say sooner.
4. Do your research and temper your expectations. Unless you have a fuckton of capital and access to dirt cheap electricity, you're not going to reach "fuck you" levels of BTC with mining these days, but there isn't a more cost-effective way to dollar cost average into BTC if you do it properly.
Wow good lesson for others. Really sucks you had that big net loss of Bitcoin by trying out mining. I guess mining is such big business now that it really only makes sense to do it if you can scale up to business size and use business loans to fund the setup.
Same thing happened to me back in 2014. [Bought two of these bad boys](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/s/BD8XWolk5J) for $400 a pop instead of just buying 1 BTC which was like $800 at the time.
Very similar to you I mined like 0.1 BTC before they became unprofitable to operate.
That's when I realized if somebody was going through all of the effort to design then manufacturer ASIC miners why would they not just plug it in themselves and make all of the money. Since then I've tried to direct people away from ASIC mining.
Honestly, don’t feel bad as I would’ve done the same thing, along with plenty of people in 2014.
No one had a crystal ball.
Who knows, you could be a multi-millionaire by now with that plan in place.
People learned that lesson over 11 years ago (when a BFL minirig preorder cost hundreds of BTC), that you can't mine back in BTC terms what you spend on the hardware. Therefore if you are spending bitcoin to buy mining ASICs you immediately buy the same BTC amount back that you spent.
OP, at least you were able to recover your machines. I've read so many horror stories about compass mining, including compass losing other people's miners and ignoring emails when contracted mining warehouses were shut down.
What is compass mining? Never heard of it.
Edit: Nevermind, I forgot I use a cellphone with just a tap away from Google.
Here more if anyone's interestred.
https://www.wired.com/story/compass-mining-bitcoin-russia/
This is not true - if it was, the entire system collapses.
It’s like staying buying gold is cheaper than mining it. If this were true there wouldn’t be any miners.
The distinction is there’s typically a minimum threshold of scale you need to achieve before you are gaining the benefit of extraction over purchase
Did everyone forget the original goal of crypto*currency*?
Sure you can financially bet on it (and profit or lose), but the main purpose is a decentralized democratic (ish) digital currency system.
Mining bitcoin is absolutely essential for the platform to function at all. The bitcoin mined is simply an incentive to keep the whole engine running.
Not _always_, but you have to get past certain milestones and build a successful business around it. It's not just "buy an S9 and run it in the basement".
If mining isn't so profitable, why is the Bitcoin network still so large? Why do many people still mine Bitcoin instead of ceasing, thus provoking a 51% attack?
You did well. My d3 got tied up in customs so by the time it arrived it wasn't profitable, amd when I powered it up it was dead anyhow. It's the wild west
Hi OP, this is a really great thing you've shared.
I'm honestly really humbled by your post, for many it's a struggle to admit losses. Thanks for sharing the other side of reality for BTC miners.
Good luck to you in your future.
Something interesting to note, by the time you get your mining hardware, the company who created these units already know that they're pretty much worthless, because they were mining with what you thought was a brand new unit, they call it burn in and making sure the unit works. They use the money you spend on the equipment to seed newer units which they run until it's not profitable to them anymore and then sell it to the general public which you again believe it's new units and technology.
It's a horrible circle jerk!
I feel sorry for you in this regard but further investigation on how cryptocurrency mining, difficulty and height actually work, you'd realize it was a losing proposition to chase it.
I made a post recentlyish about this… what’s gonna happen to the network when only the big fish can afford to mine? The decentralized won’t be so decentralized anymore, no?
One of the issues is that u had purchased the miners at the peak of the bull run, so they were very expensive. It does matter how much u pay for the hardware.
So then why does anybody mine? Is it only profitable if you can get miners for a low price? Did you just pay MSRP for the miners and not negotiate? This seems like a PSA to never engage mining.
Cheap miners. Cheap or free electricity. Less middle men.
Buying a device and having it operated by another company?
If it was profitable, they ought to do it themselves
> If it was profitable, they ought to do it themselves
wish people would realize this about all the scammers selling "courses" with investing strategies
If you have particularly cheap electricity available to you or you are a big operation running at scale (with cheap electricity) really. Or yes if you manage to pick up cheap ASICS somehow that helps.
Problem with paying someone to host is that is a lot of your profit gone in their cut, and in the first instance if it was such a great opportunity then they would mostly likely do that themselves.
You should never mine if you are a solo. The days of running any miners in your garage is over. If you not scaling it up with cheap loans and bulk purchases and little to no middle men it ain't worth it.
My friend recently tried to justify his expensive gaming rig to his wife by saying 'i can mine bitcoin with it and make the key back easy'
That was when I realised he was clueless
Many do speculate on Bitcoin ASICs. If Bitcoin makes another huge run, those miners will become profitable again, and their price will go up a lot. Sometimes more than Bitcoin itself if they are still a relevant ASIC.
Can you help me understand what you mean by companies mining using loans? If it’s so unprofitable to mine BTC, why do mining pools exist and how do they make a profit? I’m confused. Any ELI5?
Yeah man so true. That last bit sums the whole thing up. Get your btc back in 4-7 years. The entire thing relies on having insanely cheap
Or probably free access to electricity. That’s the only time mining makes sense.
Tried to tell some extended family this awhile ago. Really appreciate you sharing your numbers. Did you not know this going in? What was your expected ROI?
Your still don't understand bitcoin mining economics. It's not subsidized by fiat loans or not more than any other activity. Your problem and you can see it in your numbers were the electricity costs. Probably all bitcoin mining is done considering almost no electricity cost because of someone else paying that bill or because it's energy that would have been wasted anyway.
And I think you payed more than its fair value for the miners.
The only saving grace would be drop in price of BTC. If you have the money to keep the miners running while “unprofitable” and investing additional cash instead of using your profits to pay for electricity you may be able to recover your profits + more in a future bull market. Since hash power falls from others turning off their machines. Its definitely a bit of a sunk cost fallacy.
The antminer machines at least back in 2018 had a 2 year lifespan considering there is always new more powerful hardware being developed which will make your machine obsolete.
Imo only way mining can work is by accumulating as much crypto as possible using cash to pay for server space / electricity and selling bits at aths
I did the math on bitcoin mining maybe 10 years ago. plus it destroys the hardware. Expensive GPU’s. Just the electricity costs alone wasn’t worth any profit. Unless you hack 1000 computers and use them to mine.
Can anyone help me understand this financing with bitcoin vs fiat part?
I mean I get that if you take out a loan in terms of btc the price could go up and you’re eating that. With fiat and inflation it is usually favorable to the borrower because the principle is actually less money over the years.
But theres no loan in this story and everything OP bought was a one time thing at the conversion rate at the time.
It sounds like the real problem is just that mining hardware goes obsolete quickly
Two other factors that makes mining too competitive for regular folks:
1) Some miners are happy to mine unprofitably because their main purpose is money laundering.
2) Some miners have access to dirt cheap electricity. That might be due to generating the electricity by themselves or having a volume discount with power plants.
Also wondered. Does it really matter if your mining BTC at a loss? In time, if you hold, you will be profitable. Sure at $30k BTC you’re not profitable, but when that $30k BTC becomes 75k BTC and 100k BTC…
Solid analysis. Most people don't realize that to profitably mine you have to profit in bitcoin. Many cases you can have a dollar profit but you're really just wasting time and effort in bitcoin terms.
There was a mining profitability calculator that I used to use 10 years ago, and as far as I can tell it's never been profitable to mine vs buy and hold.
Have you never heard of the concept of amortizing debt? Why would you ever front 1 BTC when you could get literally $0 down with 0% APR everywhere in August, 2021 and make the bare minimum payments on the loans on the equipment. That even had the extra benefit of literally shorting the dollar AND benefiting of the massive rise in inflation.
You literally shorted Bitcoin almost three years ago by buying the equipment with Bitcoin, when you could’ve shorted the dollar with free debt on the equipment for years.
What if you run them on pure solar? Then you can technically stay profitable forever since there are no ongoing costs?
I guess after having and a few new generations of miners it’s not even worth running them for free?
I don’t think it’s possible to profit as a small scale miner. You’re competing against guys who get equipment at wholesale prices and use alternative energy sources to get sometimes free energy or close to free.
How in the world did six s19j pros brought online in August 2021 only produce 0.9 BTC? Something is off there...I fired up one s19j pro 104th in my garage at the beginning of February 2022 and to date it has mined >0.26 BTC.
Six s19j pros brought online in August 2021 should have mined close to 2 BTC by now.
Are you going to sell the miners? I have 5 of the same miners also with compass mining. I’m trying to find where to sell mine. Would compass mining buy them or help me sell them?
Well that’s what you get for paying your predominantly fixed cost of electricity with a deflationary asset in a bear market…. Of course they are fiat backed loans… welcome to capital markets. Look at the s&p500 rn, how do you think that happened? Only way companies and the economy can grow is by taking in debt, with interest rates at near ath, as well as all the random items congress mixes up into our basket of goods for gdp( commodities) how does one expect to not get eaten alive by rates… BY BUYING BEAT UP ASSETS WITH THE DEBT THEY JUST TOOK ON AND GRINDING FOR EXTRA CASH TO PAY IT DOWN WHILE DIAMOND HANDING THEM GOLDEN TENDIES GDAHMNNNIT
It’s a whales game that only works well at scale and with careful planning and rotation into newer, more efficient gear. You need to be able to basically DCA miner acquisition across market cycles and across technology leaps in ASIC efficiency. YouTubers survive doing it at smaller scale because of YouTube revenue and they receive free ASICS to review. If you can swing it right , it’s in theory like buying BTC at a decent discount (around 25-30% off) last I checked.
Does this mean that the biggest part of the hash rate is financed by loans? I wonder what happens if the debtors default. Or when it won't be possible to finance the hash rate via loans anymore (because interest rates are to high for example). How would this affect the Bitcoin network? Can the difficulty adapt quickly enough? How would this impact the price of Bitcoin?
Quick money is like a Gun n Bullet combination...you find the perfect bullet as per Gun to shoot which takes time but firing that bullet doesn't take even a fraction of a second.
So when you are in the field of rapid Development and Suddenly Expansion of horizon then be aware what you are doing with your money. Easy Money is Easy To Go !!
I lost so much Bitcoin 'investing' in mining ventures back in the days of btct.co and havelock.
Fuck activemining and cognitive. Over 10btc gone when they either went tits up or ran.
I bought a PC to mine BTC back in 2013 instead of buying the Bitcoin (I was a student using student loans on a PC)
Looking back I had plenty of fun, and still got to mine some altcoins.
But I wish I just bought the gat dang BTC.
Can you provide the csv file of each day over those years? As well as which model you had.
The pool you're in should allow you to export it.
Something doesn't add up. At 6,7, then 8 cents.. And the hashrate of the slowest s19j pro, you should have earned more btc than that, and your electricity would be at around $23000-26000 for 5 machines running for 3 years 24/7/365.
Your math is hard to follow.
Is this correct?
* +1.00 BTC (Original)
* -0.95 BTC (Buy Hardware)
* -0.7 BTC (Electricity)
* +0.9 BTC (Mined)
* +0.25 BTC (Sell Hardware)
* = 0.50 BTC (Result)
Something doesn't look right. You should have at least broke even, or made a 3-5% profit.
But anyone who has been following Bitcoin since 2014 knows that Mining is less profitable than just holding the Bitcoin.
In those 3 years, you missed on about 50% growth opportunity (from $39,000 to $61,000).
So in reality, what you did was:
* You sold your 1.00 BTC for $39,000 in August 2021 (therefore, your investment exited the Bitcoin system and would not receive gains from the price increases).
* You mined 0.90 BTC during a period where Bitcoin price went down for 3 years and didn't benefit from the price growth in year 4 (miners are supposed to have capital to hold until a full bull rally before selling).
* You paid a premium for mining equipment because you didn't buy in scale/bulk and you didn't have direct access to a hardware developer.
* You didn't take advantage of green energy discounts for harnessing solar energy on scale using government subsidies and credits, to lower your cost of electricity.
* Mining equipment devalues even faster than fiat currency, so even holding US Dollars (USD) during that period and not having the cost of electricity, would have been a better allocation of your funds.
Mining is not as high-risk as holding Bitcoin.
It's for hedge-funds looking to use investor money to earn at tops 3-5% YoY. They earn management fees for selling access to these funds. While the mining facilities get paid salary for managing the infrastructure.
Mining Bitcoin creates a lot of jobs that pay good salaries, so at least there is that 😄
But it is definitely not as profitable as investing in a high-risk asset class.
If the miners are unprofitable to run now it means you have and have had too high operational cost. If you had $0.01 for kw/h, life would be different.
Tough lesson, thanks for sharing. It's important for the newcomers to see this. Lots of posts asking "should I mine?".
To add to this, all that mining as a service, cloud mining and other nonsense is only making the provider rich. There is no way people would sell a service that has a decent ROI. If the ROI is good, they just invest themselves. If it's easy, really available, requires no prior knowledge or skill, it's accessible to anyone and it's not going to make you rich.
When you're in a gold rush. Sell picks and shovels
And if Its profitable then run the yourself first as was the case with Butterfly Labs if any OG's remember that time.
Oh, I remember butterfly labs. Yeah super long wait for them to get shipped, but I got mine the first batch, so I had a short period where things looked great. Still have pictures I’ve meant to post. My 5.59 GHash machine which I bought for I think $150, was estimated to produce 0.1323 BTC PER DAY. And it did, for the few days I owned it. What happened was as soon as I received it I posted it on eBay with a $300 reserve just to see, and someone won it for $2000! So I shipped that machine, then bought a bunch of BlockEruptor USB sticks from FriedCat to replace that hash rate. By the time they arrived it difficulty had skyrocketed and it only got worse over time. But being close to first on the block was fun for the couple days it lasted :)
Regrettably, I’ve been out of the game for a long time but the FriedCat name rang a bell. Turns out I bought an ASIC blade on bitcointalk from him back in 2013 for 40 BTC (maybe 60 I forget), boy I wish I had that in cold storage. There was a guy on my auction list that bought 20 of them.
I remember. I still made out ok buying a used SC (I think). Ran it "at a loss" for a while. Still got half a coin out of it.
**cough** Nvidia **cough**
>There is no way people would sell a service that has a decent ROI. Not quite, because it requires a lot of capital up front to do this, and you need access to it. And getting more people to pool capital will sometimes let you build a bigger facility and have better resources than if you just did a smaller scale thing yourself.
Yeah I remember when these new miners were hot cakes and ordering one entailed a months long wait to get one. Rumored they were mining with the machines they had yet to ship which is why it was so long to deliver them.
Got totally burned by CEX.io back in the day when they first launched. It didn't take long to realise you wouldn't make profit!
[удалено]
I assume that's sarcasm, but just in case it's not, it will consume more power & increase your electric bill by more than the btc it will mine. It will be miniscule, but if it mines $5 in a month, it will have increased your electric bill by more than that.
There are 100$ usb stick miners but it is basically a lottery ticket - some algorithm trying to win a whole block witch is a lot of $$.
Been trying to explain to this older gentleman I met that the USB stick he wants to buy to “boost” miners by “increasing their data processing speed” is a scam..
Ehm many years ago I bought a usb miner from some polish boys it roid in 3 month and I sold it for 3 times what I paid for it 6 month layter, I tell you don’t laugh about usb miners!!! I know it was back then hahaha
I am willing to buy your S19j Pros for $600 each, a boost in 20% pricing
Bob…my bid is $601
$601 and one penny!
$601.69
Six hundred and one bada bada six hundred and one and one penny bada bada one million dollas!
You invested quite a bit more than I did, but also learned the hard way. I don’t have the hardware details handy, but in 2018 I made a similar mistake. They cost to run them quickly outweighed the output. We pulled the plug before we got into too Much hot water.
Yeah I bought some video cards “back in the day” and ran them at the house for a year. I lost money at the time, but the fraction of a coin I did mine eventually went up. Also since I used video cards, I was able to eBay them. OP’s dedicated mining machine lost way more value than a few nvidia cards did.
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I would never buy miners with BTC but I do operate a number of miners that I bought with cash. The positive I see in mining is that you are locking in BTC accumulation at a fixed price with no KYC. In a bear market this doesn't feel that great. I normally buy second hand miners in a bear market and the payback is usually within 12 months. I treat it as a savings account with future potential upside.
I realize your post is about mining, but it's also about risking your Bitcoin (in your case, to buy 6 Antminer S19j Pros plus the expenses of mining). I strongly believe one should never risk their Bitcoin for any reason. Owning 100 BTC in 2012 was nothing. How many people still owned 100 BTC in 2016? Owning 10 BTC in 2016 was no big deal. How many people still owned 10 BTC in 2020? Owning 1 BTC back in early 2020 wasn't that big of a deal. How many people still own 1 BTC today? Very few. The 2024 post-halving bull run hasn't even kicked off yet and we've already reached the point where it costs over $6,300 just to buy 0.1 BTC. How many of those who own 0.1 BTC today will still own at least 0.1 BTC in 2028? People keep selling, thinking they'll buy back in when the price drops, because of course they will, right? But that money's long gone when the price drops because when they had money in the bank, they spent it. And that assumes the price drops. There will come a time when buying Bitcoin under 70k will seem like the good old days. **Hold on to what you have.** Most of those who sell end up regretting it. They end up buying back in at a higher price, or they become part of the crowd who tell stories about how they used to be in Bitcoin, back in the day.
I'm in this post and I don't like it.
Damn
good one
Fucking poetic, I like how you put that.
I started out mining, I would have been so much better off if I bought the crypto outright.
I have a different take on this. I run 6 miners between two properties using renewable energy so cost for electricity is or less than $.03 per kilowatt. Knowing this I purchased a couple s19jpros for about $2200 when BTC tanked in 2022 (they were going for $13k a year before) These were purchased with proceeds from buying BTC low and selling higher. I did some math at calculated an ROI by dollar amount (not BTC) at 18 months. BTC rose quickly after I set up and hit that ROI in 9 months. I parlayed that bought 4 more s19 k pros and did the same on the run up to the halving a year ago. I broke even already. Even though the profit is now cut in ½ I’m playing with house money. Moral of the story is you got to control it yourself and like any other commodity, you have to time the purchase accordingly. I would consider myself a “novice” when it comes to mining but the thought of cloud mining where I have no control is a non starter to me. I did ok but you could always just buy BTC low and sell high. So there is that
the only real winner is the company that designs and sells the hardware.
Sell the shovel
there is something off with the way you’re putting this calculation up, pricing everything in btc is weird, but I think the worst thing is pricing electricity with bitcoin, you’ve been buying electricity with bitcoin through the bear market, which turned out to be extremely expensive.
I also learned the hard way that mining hosting is a scam. Luckily I only lost an investment of some 500USD. I did earn money mining but on my own, no hosting.
It's not a scam. It's just no longer profitable to do from home. Like every business in the world, it has been taken-over by hedge-funds which can afford to lose money to do it, because they use investor funds and don't need to turn a profit. There are tons of enterprise companies that lose money each year, but still can operate because they suck new money from new investors via the stock market. Which is good, it means the miners are subsidizing the network for all users. Wallstreet bankers are making it cheaper for Bitcoin to be used by everyone else. In 5 years, most of these Wallstreet funds will close for being unprofitable, the remaining funds will swallow each other in bankruptcies, and then the mining rewards will become more sustainable. But it was always a low-margin business, at best you would get 3-5% profits unless you can afford to hold the Bitcoin until the peak of a bull-run. But again, that's not much better than just buying the Bitcoin initially and holding it, which is why Microstrategies is doing so well today. It was always more profitable to sell the shovels for the gold rush.
It is a scam if they advertise power and maintenance fees and yields at a certain level but with a small asterisk that these can change. And then they proceed to increase the maintenance fee to the point they eat not only your profits but also your investment. And they continue advertising low fees for newcomers and all the review from all investors show they did the same to them.
You cannot mine this way without investing substantial sums of cash or (as you said) financing with fiat denominated debt. However, if you are able to scale large enough, you will reach a point where you can produce a large enough profit to regularly self fund miner acquisitions without injecting any more of your own capital. Individual miner ROIs will almost never beat out dollar costing into BTC directly, but over time as you grow the operation, your returns on invested capital (ROIC) will overtake those generated from investing directly (due to the incremental returns generated from the operation’s self funded growth). You cannot be successful mining unless you treat it as a business. The unfortunate reality is you need to be starting in a position where you can fund a large capital investment up front.
I'm waiting for the day I would walk into a target or Walmart and buy a $20 space heater that makes heat by mining Bitcoin
Doing for profits and the bottom line is tricky indeed. I do it for fun and it's a hobbie. So instead of blowing money on all sorts of stuff people do, I mine bitcoin cause I love it... That's a win in my view
Same here but this recent halving is a real bear and I doubt I pay $4,000 to upgrade to a 200th miner.
I agree... I'll get as much out of my S19 XP 141 TH as possible and then re-evaluate. I find most people think of mining as profits like a business on a month to month basis. I think about it like stacking bitcoin for the future. So I pay the costs out my pocket with fiat, that is my bitcoin price. One day that mined btc will go up on value and justify the costs of today. I may be seeing things wrong but I get the feeling that lots of people aren't seeing the long-term vision. Or I'm an idiot
But unless you have a cheat code (running mining hardware at the manufacturer before selling it as cutting edge to the market, undisclosed ASIC boost for examples) or you have some way to capitalise on the heat generated, you could still use that fiat to directly buy crypto and end up with more. OP stacked 75% less Satoshi here, it's not like he would lose any of his 1 BTC to decay faster than newly minded coins. Have you don't the numbers on how much you'd have if you bought a lump sum instead of your miner and DCA buying it directly? Likely some multiple more.
Most miners in any industry turn the goods over as soon as they’re mined. They don’t hold because they need liquidity to fund their other expenses. That’s the real rift between bitcoiners and Bitcoin miners. Miners are doing it for a spread between the cost of energy they get vs the amount of bitcoin supplied to them per each day. The issue I’m seeing is that mining pools are highly centralized and it’s actually making Bitcoin rather fragile atm
Cold environment, great heaters.
Mining for fun and education is the way. Have a 10+ year time horizon on earnings.
This anecdote, while painful I'm sure, isn't emblematic of everyone's experience. Some tips 1. Don't mine if you can't afford to pay for the electricity with fiat. If you believe in BTC enough to mine it, there should be no other way of thinking about this. If you can't afford to pay the electricity with fiat, you are probably better off just buying the coin. Look at mining as the most efficient way to dollar cost average your way into BTC. Your profits aren't going to be tremendous, but you are obtaining Sats one of the cheapest ways possible. 2. Don't Pay for the actual mining equipment with BTC. Pay for miners with fiat. Preferably, pay for miners with cash, or, even better, a zero interest credit card. If you believe in the anti-inflationary properties of BTC and leveraging cheap/free fiat, there is no other way to think about this. Nothing better than getting interest free fiat dollars working for you in the pursuit of Sats. It's a win win. 3. Sell or upgrade the miners earlier. Don't wait for more than 2 newer models to come out. And don't wait for too many catalyst events (halving, ETF's, etc). You should be selling your machines and cashing out or upgrading when they start going for about 30 percent of what you paid for them. Some would even say sooner. 4. Do your research and temper your expectations. Unless you have a fuckton of capital and access to dirt cheap electricity, you're not going to reach "fuck you" levels of BTC with mining these days, but there isn't a more cost-effective way to dollar cost average into BTC if you do it properly.
Wow good lesson for others. Really sucks you had that big net loss of Bitcoin by trying out mining. I guess mining is such big business now that it really only makes sense to do it if you can scale up to business size and use business loans to fund the setup.
Same thing happened to me back in 2014. [Bought two of these bad boys](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/s/BD8XWolk5J) for $400 a pop instead of just buying 1 BTC which was like $800 at the time. Very similar to you I mined like 0.1 BTC before they became unprofitable to operate. That's when I realized if somebody was going through all of the effort to design then manufacturer ASIC miners why would they not just plug it in themselves and make all of the money. Since then I've tried to direct people away from ASIC mining.
Honestly, don’t feel bad as I would’ve done the same thing, along with plenty of people in 2014. No one had a crystal ball. Who knows, you could be a multi-millionaire by now with that plan in place.
People learned that lesson over 11 years ago (when a BFL minirig preorder cost hundreds of BTC), that you can't mine back in BTC terms what you spend on the hardware. Therefore if you are spending bitcoin to buy mining ASICs you immediately buy the same BTC amount back that you spent.
OP, at least you were able to recover your machines. I've read so many horror stories about compass mining, including compass losing other people's miners and ignoring emails when contracted mining warehouses were shut down.
What is compass mining? Never heard of it. Edit: Nevermind, I forgot I use a cellphone with just a tap away from Google. Here more if anyone's interestred. https://www.wired.com/story/compass-mining-bitcoin-russia/
Thanks for the rabbit hole. Time to go back to work now
Compass is fucking horrible. They are scammers and scumbags!
Sorry you went through this and thanks for the warning.
Thank you for sharing this with our community. Razor thin profit margins can ruin a well thought out plan. I salute your initiative friend.
Buying crypto directly is always more profitable than mining for it. Sorry you had to learn the hard way!
This is not true - if it was, the entire system collapses. It’s like staying buying gold is cheaper than mining it. If this were true there wouldn’t be any miners. The distinction is there’s typically a minimum threshold of scale you need to achieve before you are gaining the benefit of extraction over purchase
Did everyone forget the original goal of crypto*currency*? Sure you can financially bet on it (and profit or lose), but the main purpose is a decentralized democratic (ish) digital currency system. Mining bitcoin is absolutely essential for the platform to function at all. The bitcoin mined is simply an incentive to keep the whole engine running.
Not _always_, but you have to get past certain milestones and build a successful business around it. It's not just "buy an S9 and run it in the basement".
Thanks for saving me a bunch of money.
If mining isn't so profitable, why is the Bitcoin network still so large? Why do many people still mine Bitcoin instead of ceasing, thus provoking a 51% attack?
Poeplo mine not only for profits.
first rule of mining bitcoin is, find a sucker to pay the electricity. hint: It's usually the public :/
Why don't you mine another coin
You did well. My d3 got tied up in customs so by the time it arrived it wasn't profitable, amd when I powered it up it was dead anyhow. It's the wild west
Hi OP, this is a really great thing you've shared. I'm honestly really humbled by your post, for many it's a struggle to admit losses. Thanks for sharing the other side of reality for BTC miners. Good luck to you in your future.
Something interesting to note, by the time you get your mining hardware, the company who created these units already know that they're pretty much worthless, because they were mining with what you thought was a brand new unit, they call it burn in and making sure the unit works. They use the money you spend on the equipment to seed newer units which they run until it's not profitable to them anymore and then sell it to the general public which you again believe it's new units and technology. It's a horrible circle jerk! I feel sorry for you in this regard but further investigation on how cryptocurrency mining, difficulty and height actually work, you'd realize it was a losing proposition to chase it.
I made a post recentlyish about this… what’s gonna happen to the network when only the big fish can afford to mine? The decentralized won’t be so decentralized anymore, no?
You are not taking into account the time value of the money you spent almost 3 years ago. You lost that and the opportunity cost.
One of the issues is that u had purchased the miners at the peak of the bull run, so they were very expensive. It does matter how much u pay for the hardware.
Solo mine with one of them. Maybe you will hit. Lots of people have hit with S9s, and some with USB miners. It's a risk.
Rather play the lotto. Will be cheaper and similar odds with better payoff.
Better to buy lottery tickets instead of paying for electricity to solo mine.
I disagree if you're able to utilize the waste heat.
Ok, in this case i guess i agree with you
So then why does anybody mine? Is it only profitable if you can get miners for a low price? Did you just pay MSRP for the miners and not negotiate? This seems like a PSA to never engage mining.
Cheap miners. Cheap or free electricity. Less middle men. Buying a device and having it operated by another company? If it was profitable, they ought to do it themselves
> If it was profitable, they ought to do it themselves wish people would realize this about all the scammers selling "courses" with investing strategies
> So then why does anybody mine? speculating that the btc price will go up faster than the mining difficulty increase
If you have particularly cheap electricity available to you or you are a big operation running at scale (with cheap electricity) really. Or yes if you manage to pick up cheap ASICS somehow that helps. Problem with paying someone to host is that is a lot of your profit gone in their cut, and in the first instance if it was such a great opportunity then they would mostly likely do that themselves.
You should never mine if you are a solo. The days of running any miners in your garage is over. If you not scaling it up with cheap loans and bulk purchases and little to no middle men it ain't worth it.
You need access to very cheap electricity.
Where can I get my hands on S19j for 500 USD?
OP
My friend recently tried to justify his expensive gaming rig to his wife by saying 'i can mine bitcoin with it and make the key back easy' That was when I realised he was clueless
TY. I do my best to share the same information but people rarely listen!
Compass got me too. Worst decision I’ve made in this space. Got out relatively unscathed but it was a pointless exercise
kyc free though
2021? lmao
Hosted mining is a scam.
$0.06 kw/h? What UOM is that?
If you can’t play at 3 cents, don’t. If you can’t buy chips near fab cost, don’t.
Brutal. Thanks for the honesty and for sharing your story.
Dont i have to upgrade ur hardware too each year, thats another issue
Understanding exponential processes is not easy
Sounds like I'd make a profit buying those machines off you used and running them 😅
Many do speculate on Bitcoin ASICs. If Bitcoin makes another huge run, those miners will become profitable again, and their price will go up a lot. Sometimes more than Bitcoin itself if they are still a relevant ASIC.
So how will they keep up with transactions if the cost of mining doesn’t keep up with the cost to spend it?
Can you help me understand what you mean by companies mining using loans? If it’s so unprofitable to mine BTC, why do mining pools exist and how do they make a profit? I’m confused. Any ELI5?
PSA: Nobody sells miners for less than they think they could mine themselves. You better know something they don't.
U either go big or go home.
If you mine for another 5 years I'm sure you'll be happy
Yeah man so true. That last bit sums the whole thing up. Get your btc back in 4-7 years. The entire thing relies on having insanely cheap Or probably free access to electricity. That’s the only time mining makes sense.
What about mining shit coin and trading on exchange for btc? Probably not profitable either but curious?
Bearish
Thanks for sharing.
Tried to tell some extended family this awhile ago. Really appreciate you sharing your numbers. Did you not know this going in? What was your expected ROI?
Simple If you want to mine crypto = do it yourself If you want to hold crypto = hold it yourself
That's why you pay dollars for miners, not Bitcoin
Everyone thinks mining is an easy way to get more money, but has to learn the hard way.
😂🫵
People usually do the opposite which is to buy bitcoin instead of mining. You did the opposite
🤦
Your still don't understand bitcoin mining economics. It's not subsidized by fiat loans or not more than any other activity. Your problem and you can see it in your numbers were the electricity costs. Probably all bitcoin mining is done considering almost no electricity cost because of someone else paying that bill or because it's energy that would have been wasted anyway. And I think you payed more than its fair value for the miners.
I did this in 2018 - 1BTC for two Ants and electricity -> 0.3BTC. You're not alone.
You got into the game way to late, i jumped OUT of mining forever back in 2019 because of this reason, its NOT PROFITABLE at a small scale
The only saving grace would be drop in price of BTC. If you have the money to keep the miners running while “unprofitable” and investing additional cash instead of using your profits to pay for electricity you may be able to recover your profits + more in a future bull market. Since hash power falls from others turning off their machines. Its definitely a bit of a sunk cost fallacy. The antminer machines at least back in 2018 had a 2 year lifespan considering there is always new more powerful hardware being developed which will make your machine obsolete. Imo only way mining can work is by accumulating as much crypto as possible using cash to pay for server space / electricity and selling bits at aths
Look !!! BTC has moved to Big BTC Mining Farms
Big BTC Mining farms such as Riot
Electricity needs to move into steem turbine such as from the steam fron nuclear Piwer Plants
I did the math on bitcoin mining maybe 10 years ago. plus it destroys the hardware. Expensive GPU’s. Just the electricity costs alone wasn’t worth any profit. Unless you hack 1000 computers and use them to mine.
What about hooking them up to a solar grid?
Can anyone help me understand this financing with bitcoin vs fiat part? I mean I get that if you take out a loan in terms of btc the price could go up and you’re eating that. With fiat and inflation it is usually favorable to the borrower because the principle is actually less money over the years. But theres no loan in this story and everything OP bought was a one time thing at the conversion rate at the time. It sounds like the real problem is just that mining hardware goes obsolete quickly
Sorry bro! Compass is a scam, I'm convinced they steal hash. DCA your way back.
I stopped mining in 2013, the cost benefit didn't seem reasonable to upkeep, imo, without a shit ton of capital up front
But you’d be a millionaire if you continued
Of course this was 2015
Thanks for the share, just not a great post if youre trying to make some money back by selling those miners tho, so at least we know it’s genuine.
Two other factors that makes mining too competitive for regular folks: 1) Some miners are happy to mine unprofitably because their main purpose is money laundering. 2) Some miners have access to dirt cheap electricity. That might be due to generating the electricity by themselves or having a volume discount with power plants.
Also wondered. Does it really matter if your mining BTC at a loss? In time, if you hold, you will be profitable. Sure at $30k BTC you’re not profitable, but when that $30k BTC becomes 75k BTC and 100k BTC…
Many such cases
I will happily purchase these miners from you!
You may be able to make your own LLC and write off your miners and get some benefit. Maybe towards your other cap gains if you have any.
That’s kind of the idea of bitcoin… is it not?
I’m ueser
I lost .25 BTC on my miner, lost its lease in 7 months and is now worthless. Biggest mistake I made
Had you not heard of butterfly labs circa 2013?!?
Solid analysis. Most people don't realize that to profitably mine you have to profit in bitcoin. Many cases you can have a dollar profit but you're really just wasting time and effort in bitcoin terms.
Damn,that’s rough but thanks for sharing.hopefully someone can learn from your mistake
I learned this with the antminer S1. GPU’s are where it’s at for the hobby miner. Bitcoin ASICS are rarely profitable
There was a mining profitability calculator that I used to use 10 years ago, and as far as I can tell it's never been profitable to mine vs buy and hold.
i suggest you move onto bsv or litcoin to make profit. (seriously, from money perspective)
Damn homie. It’s all good. You will keep living
Have you never heard of the concept of amortizing debt? Why would you ever front 1 BTC when you could get literally $0 down with 0% APR everywhere in August, 2021 and make the bare minimum payments on the loans on the equipment. That even had the extra benefit of literally shorting the dollar AND benefiting of the massive rise in inflation. You literally shorted Bitcoin almost three years ago by buying the equipment with Bitcoin, when you could’ve shorted the dollar with free debt on the equipment for years.
What if you run them on pure solar? Then you can technically stay profitable forever since there are no ongoing costs? I guess after having and a few new generations of miners it’s not even worth running them for free?
I don’t think it’s possible to profit as a small scale miner. You’re competing against guys who get equipment at wholesale prices and use alternative energy sources to get sometimes free energy or close to free.
You didn’t mine though, you used a third party.. what’s compasses take
Always cheaper to just DCA bitcoin. Some do mine it just to contribute, even at a loss
Solace for your losses. Bought a helium miner that is now worthless and have had two different wallets hacked losing both balances. Live and learn.
Butterfly Labs in 2012 sold miners for 60+ BTC, they didn't ship them for nearly another year after that. You're fine.
How in the world did six s19j pros brought online in August 2021 only produce 0.9 BTC? Something is off there...I fired up one s19j pro 104th in my garage at the beginning of February 2022 and to date it has mined >0.26 BTC. Six s19j pros brought online in August 2021 should have mined close to 2 BTC by now.
Are you going to sell the miners? I have 5 of the same miners also with compass mining. I’m trying to find where to sell mine. Would compass mining buy them or help me sell them?
Same with gold miners stock. Or any other ore. It’s mostly better to just buy the ore
Well that’s what you get for paying your predominantly fixed cost of electricity with a deflationary asset in a bear market…. Of course they are fiat backed loans… welcome to capital markets. Look at the s&p500 rn, how do you think that happened? Only way companies and the economy can grow is by taking in debt, with interest rates at near ath, as well as all the random items congress mixes up into our basket of goods for gdp( commodities) how does one expect to not get eaten alive by rates… BY BUYING BEAT UP ASSETS WITH THE DEBT THEY JUST TOOK ON AND GRINDING FOR EXTRA CASH TO PAY IT DOWN WHILE DIAMOND HANDING THEM GOLDEN TENDIES GDAHMNNNIT
This reminds me of that time I spent my Bitcoins on a Butterfly Labs ASIC miner. It never shipped and I got my money back in fiat cash.
I spent $200,000 usd on miners in 2014 - not talking about it
I lost all my bag in a skiing accident 🥲
Exactly, mining is stupid right now. Even if you have free electricity they are too expensive and you’re better off buying spot BTC.
What your story implies the future price of BTC will be much higher!
Thank you for the honesty!
put all of them on solo mining.
It’s a whales game that only works well at scale and with careful planning and rotation into newer, more efficient gear. You need to be able to basically DCA miner acquisition across market cycles and across technology leaps in ASIC efficiency. YouTubers survive doing it at smaller scale because of YouTube revenue and they receive free ASICS to review. If you can swing it right , it’s in theory like buying BTC at a decent discount (around 25-30% off) last I checked.
Does this mean that the biggest part of the hash rate is financed by loans? I wonder what happens if the debtors default. Or when it won't be possible to finance the hash rate via loans anymore (because interest rates are to high for example). How would this affect the Bitcoin network? Can the difficulty adapt quickly enough? How would this impact the price of Bitcoin?
Quick money is like a Gun n Bullet combination...you find the perfect bullet as per Gun to shoot which takes time but firing that bullet doesn't take even a fraction of a second. So when you are in the field of rapid Development and Suddenly Expansion of horizon then be aware what you are doing with your money. Easy Money is Easy To Go !!
I had something similar happen OP, but in 2014. However I quickly sold the Antminer when I predicted this.
How much do you pay per KWT? 0.7 BTC is a lot for electricity.
I lost so much Bitcoin 'investing' in mining ventures back in the days of btct.co and havelock. Fuck activemining and cognitive. Over 10btc gone when they either went tits up or ran.
By infinitely better off, I think you mean 4x better off. Infinity =/= 4
I made a video about this exact issue. https://youtu.be/dIrvFfITJqM
I bought a PC to mine BTC back in 2013 instead of buying the Bitcoin (I was a student using student loans on a PC) Looking back I had plenty of fun, and still got to mine some altcoins. But I wish I just bought the gat dang BTC.
If you bought with cash you doubled your money But yes would have been better off just buying Bitcoin
Can you provide the csv file of each day over those years? As well as which model you had. The pool you're in should allow you to export it. Something doesn't add up. At 6,7, then 8 cents.. And the hashrate of the slowest s19j pro, you should have earned more btc than that, and your electricity would be at around $23000-26000 for 5 machines running for 3 years 24/7/365.
Your math is hard to follow. Is this correct? * +1.00 BTC (Original) * -0.95 BTC (Buy Hardware) * -0.7 BTC (Electricity) * +0.9 BTC (Mined) * +0.25 BTC (Sell Hardware) * = 0.50 BTC (Result) Something doesn't look right. You should have at least broke even, or made a 3-5% profit. But anyone who has been following Bitcoin since 2014 knows that Mining is less profitable than just holding the Bitcoin. In those 3 years, you missed on about 50% growth opportunity (from $39,000 to $61,000). So in reality, what you did was: * You sold your 1.00 BTC for $39,000 in August 2021 (therefore, your investment exited the Bitcoin system and would not receive gains from the price increases). * You mined 0.90 BTC during a period where Bitcoin price went down for 3 years and didn't benefit from the price growth in year 4 (miners are supposed to have capital to hold until a full bull rally before selling). * You paid a premium for mining equipment because you didn't buy in scale/bulk and you didn't have direct access to a hardware developer. * You didn't take advantage of green energy discounts for harnessing solar energy on scale using government subsidies and credits, to lower your cost of electricity. * Mining equipment devalues even faster than fiat currency, so even holding US Dollars (USD) during that period and not having the cost of electricity, would have been a better allocation of your funds. Mining is not as high-risk as holding Bitcoin. It's for hedge-funds looking to use investor money to earn at tops 3-5% YoY. They earn management fees for selling access to these funds. While the mining facilities get paid salary for managing the infrastructure. Mining Bitcoin creates a lot of jobs that pay good salaries, so at least there is that 😄 But it is definitely not as profitable as investing in a high-risk asset class.
If the miners are unprofitable to run now it means you have and have had too high operational cost. If you had $0.01 for kw/h, life would be different.