Bitcoin mining is becoming more and more difficult and expensive
Mining, as you might imagine as a layman, has not worked for a long time ... at the beginning of Bitcoin you could still "mine" your own Bitcoin with a PC or laptop, but today you need more!
The big Bitcoin miners are companies that operate many servers and thus offer a large amount of computing power to find the blocks for which you then receive Bitcoin as a reward ... with increasing Bitcoin prices, more and more large miners are added.
Private individuals only have a chance with cloud mining, but they have to share the reward with others or the network ... below are a few points that must be considered when mining Bitcoin ...
Is Bitcoin mining still worthwhile for private individuals?
When the cryptocurrency Bitcoin was introduced, you could still mine with a PC or laptop ... the higher the price of the cryptocurrency, the more difficult Bitcoin mining became as it attracted many miners and the mining difficulty continued to increase.
The mining difficulty has been increasing exponentially since 2018 and that means that you need ever higher computing power ... a CPU or GPU is no longer sufficient, you need entire server rooms with corresponding servers that are designed for mining.
That, in turn, requires enormous amounts of electricity ... the servers also need cooling during work, otherwise, they overheat ... you know that when the PC runs special graphics processes and the ventilation of the PC runs faster and blows warm air out of the housing.
With a server, it is of course much warmer and with an entire room with servers, you not only need a lot of electricity for the servers to work but also a lot of electricity for cooling the servers and the entire room.
Bitcoin mining, electricity costs are a major difficulty
Since the cost of electricity is a big factor in Bitcoin mining, the big miners have long since settled in countries that deliver cheap electricity, usually, the electricity comes from coal-fired power plants that are not exactly good for the environment!
If you want to set up a server room yourself, you should pay attention to the following points in order to be able to work efficiently ... the following should be available:
- a stream with enough cool water to generate electricity and to cool the servers
- sufficient wind at the site for electricity generation
- many hours of sunshine a year for electricity generation
- cheap electricity or cheap electricity prices for purchase
- good internet connection
If these things are given, you could buy a piece of land at such a location and build a server room ... but you can see that such a project requires a lot of investment, and as a private person you have almost no chance.
In addition, the required computing power will continue to increase and Bitcoin mining will be even more difficult and this is exactly why many private individuals are already switching to other cryptocurrencies where you can still achieve a lot with powerful graphics cards.
The question is how long will you be able to mine successfully with conventional computing power in cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Monero, Bitcoin Gold, or Ravencoin.