I am by no means an expert, but my understanding is that a personal computer isn't energy/heat efficient enough to make a profit from mining. It costs more in energy than you would make from the bitcoin. My friends who do some mining have told me the same.

You're competing with computers that are made exclusively for bitcoin and people who are heavily investing their time into it so it makes sense.

It would probably be fine just for trying the system out and seeing how it works before you invest though.

Jeez, you're completely missing the point.

The GP was asking for a comparison the odds/cost of mining a coin with the odds/cost of winning the lottery. Not about "investing," and not about "making a profit."

Basically, which form of gambling is better from a cost/rewards perspective.

My understanding is you are always outspending on energy costs because of the energy inefficiency of personal computers for mining vs. a dedicated machine. So the chance of return would be more or less 0%. More like, "If I pay $5 for a lottery ticket where the max I can win is $4, what are my chances of profiting?"

But again, not an expert. Just the articles I've read and people I know who mine bitcoin say you can't profit that way.

> "If I pay $5 for a lottery ticket where the max I can win is $4, what are my chances of profiting?"

If you use a mining pool then you won't make a profit on a laptop. However if you were solo mining on your laptop, then there is a very small chance that you could win seriously big moola.

In my understanding, there is continuously a chance (when mining solo) that you mine a Bitcoin block. If that happens (unlikely with consumer hardware) you make a lot of money at once since you get a whole block.

Very false. You appear to not understand how mining works.

The reason people join pools is to make money even if you never personally mine a coin. In a pool you just get paid for your effort. This is why joining a pool with consumer hardware will always lose.

In this case we aren't talking about pools!

There is two things that can happen when you solo mine - you either "lose it all" (all money spent on electricity down the drain) or "hit the jackpot," (1 full Bitcoin all for you!)

At that level with a small hash rate its gambling, you're throwing some amount of money at it at the very, very tiny chance of a big payout.

Say, for example, there's a 1/10000 chance any one person will mine a coin on consumer hardware per every $100 in electricity. So you're buying a $100 lottery ticket where the payout is $17,000.

Of course you "can't make money like that," the vast majority of people will lose money, just like the majority of lottery players will lose money.

With the lottery, you are at least partially funding public education (35% of the revenue if I remember correctly). Are there any social benefits to Bitcoin mining?

I was mistaken then. What I've read about it was somewhat incomplete from what people are saying here.

That said there is absolutely no need to be such a jerk about it.

I think that the current reward for mining a block is 12.5 Bitcoin (+ transaction fees of course)

>Just the articles I've read

I strongly recommend reading the Bitcoin white paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf It is not as nearly as long and complicated as you would think, if you know the basics (what's a hash, how do public keys and digital signatures work). I found it way clearer than all the explanation articles I've seen on the internet.

Thank you, that's quite useful! I was doing some light reading on it so I just started with some simple articles, but perhaps they were over simplifying.

not very good odds on your thinkpad..

but if you set up a handful (3-5) of high end ASIC miners and mine BCH (10x more difficulty/hashrate on BTC right now) without a pool for a year, there is a realistic chance you'll get lucky and mine a block (worth about $17k).

The numbers are changing all the time, but when I last did that calculation I was surprised.

I don't think anyone mines for bitcoins by themselves anymore - they join a pool so you get a small guaranteed payout.

I have no interest in a small guaranteed payout.

I'm asking if I have $20 to buy Powerball tickets (with a chance to win $1 billion) or $20 to buy electricity for my i5-based mining machine, how do the odds compare?

I'm not sure what the exact house edge is on Powerball. But let's say it's 20%.

Due to dynamic difficulty adjustments, the profit for miners is just a bit more than the cost of electricity. However, this is only true for those who have the best specialized mining equipment and the cheapest electricity in the world. For an average person living in a typical area, even with dedicated equipment, you'd probably be far under breaking even. Most likely much less than 20%.

And that's with specialized equipment (costing thousands of dollars). With your home computer, it'll be hundreds of thousands of times less efficient per watt of electricity to mine bitcoin. Even for other cryptocurrencies that might be resistant to specialized equipment, you'd still most likely be over 10x less efficient.

Go with the powerball tickets.

You can still mine yourself and that might appeal to someone who likes buying lottery tickets. Mining yourself at least has the possibility of positive ROI as opposed to a guarantee of losing money.

I didn't say you can't do it - I said people don't really do it anymore. You can easily get a positive roi if you do it correctly, why do you think there are literal crypto factories built to mine coins?