Ask HN: What equipment's/setup do I need to mine Bitcoin at home?

#1

Post by ElectricMind » Fri, May 14, 2021, 2:02 PM UTC

1) What kind of tools/hardware/software/equipment I need if I want to mine A) 1 bitcoin/day B) 1 bitcoin/month C) 1 bitcoin/year in my home alone?

2) Anyone did this setup at home/ "here in my garage"?

3) Is it possible to create "smart" algorithm to reduce computing cost per bitcoin?

4) How do I locate all locations in the world who are mining right at this moment? heat signature? power surge?

5) How do I "VPN/mask" my mining so no one can know that I doing bitcoin mining "here in my garage"?

Thanks :)

Re: Ask HN: What equipment's/setup do I need to mine Bitcoin at home?

#2

Post by Nextgrid » Fri, May 14, 2021, 2:09 PM UTC

The biggest problem you'd have is energy cost. Bitcoin (and proof-of-work cryptocurrency in general) mining is very competitive which means the profit margins are super-thin and you're competing with people who get their energy very cheap, possibly even illicitly.

Re: Ask HN: What equipment's/setup do I need to mine Bitcoin at home?

#3

Post by dcminter » Fri, May 14, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

My understanding is this isn't really feasible these days. Bear in mind that the 6.25BTC block reward is currently worth about $300,000. There's a lot of competition and most of it will be investing enough to get economies of scale not obtainable for garage-scale miners.

Re: Ask HN: What equipment's/setup do I need to mine Bitcoin at home?

#4

Post by axiosgunnar » Fri, May 14, 2021, 2:20 PM UTC

To mine one Bitcoin per day, you would probably need double-digit million dollar worth of equipment and use as much energy as a 30,000 people town.

Re: Ask HN: What equipment's/setup do I need to mine Bitcoin at home?

#5

Post by aritmo » Fri, May 14, 2021, 2:20 PM UTC

Bitcoin mining has a "variable" difficulty. If many are mining, the difficulty rises a lot. Any many many are mining Bitcoin.

See https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator in order to figure out whether your investment (buy the mining equipment, pay for electricity) would be able to break even.

Re: Ask HN: What equipment's/setup do I need to mine Bitcoin at home?

#6

Post by hpkuarg » Fri, May 14, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

If you're located someplace where electric power is not close to free, you're guaranteed to lose money mining Bitcoin.

Re: Ask HN: What equipment's/setup do I need to mine Bitcoin at home?

#7

Post by rokot » Fri, May 14, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

I tried all this before, it's good for a hobby but it would of worked out better for me profit wise if I just bought a bitcoin

Re: Ask HN: What equipment's/setup do I need to mine Bitcoin at home?

#8

Post by endlessvoid94 » Fri, May 14, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

I did this in 2018. I bought an Antminer S9 and power supply. It's not worth it as an individual. In order to earn anything at all, your cost of power needs to be ludicrously low and you still need to join a mining pool.

And these things are LOUD. After a year of mining I broke even.

Re: Ask HN: What equipment's/setup do I need to mine Bitcoin at home?

#9

Post by secondcoming » Fri, May 14, 2021, 2:23 PM UTC

Interestingly, I was just looking at the requirements for mining ETH.

But I still don't know why I'd ever need a ETH coin (other than as a store of value). Why would someone buy a ETH coin from me?

I may be talking nonsense, but if for example, my employer decided to switch from paper wageslips to an ETH contract, would I need ETH to execute that contract and receive my wage?

Re: Ask HN: What equipment's/setup do I need to mine Bitcoin at home?

#10

Post by BitwiseFool » Fri, May 14, 2021, 2:24 PM UTC

Bitcoin miners use specialized hardware designed for mining. There is no special algorithm to make mining faster or more efficient and that is by design. Bitcoin is meant to take a lot of work to mine. Bitcoin also adjusts itself automatically so that each mined block takes roughly 10 minutes to find. There is no avoiding this.

The specialized mining rigs are very expensive and they have facilities with thousands of them running in parallel. It hasn't been feasible to mine bitcoin as an individual since around 2012. You can still do it though, but the odds of you finding a block are so infinitesimally slim that you're basically wasting all your time and money. You could join a pool, but with so little computing power your share of any reward will be incredibly slim. Sadly, I do not recommend trying to mine any cryptocurrencies.