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.