79 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
79 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
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date = "2017-03-08"
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title = "Bitcoin Mining Anno 2017"
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tags = ["bitcoin"]
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description = "Bitcoin is still going strong since its introduction in 2008. Mining Bitcoin has become increasingly difficult, so how does one mine BTC in 2017?"
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slug = "bitcoin-mining-anno-2017"
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Bitcoin was introduced in 2008 and has gained much popularity since then. At
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the time of writing the exchange rate for 1 BTC is about €1100 (or $1166), quite
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an increase from when you could get 1 BTC for just a few euro.
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## The problem with mining Bitcoin
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Mining bitcoin can be quite lucrative, but it's hugely dependent on the exchange
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rate and the difficulty of mining. The difficulty is something that is only going
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to increase. In the early days a fast CPU was enough to mine new Bitcoin blocks,
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followed by GPU mining and eventually specialized <abbr title="Application Specific Integrated Circuit">ASIC</abbr>
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chips.
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Besides investing in powerful hardware to mine blocks, there's also the utilities
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bill. Calculationg millions of SHA-256 hashes per seconds is not very power
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efficient.
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If you're like me, you don't want to have a machine in your study or living room
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generating noise and heat to mine Bitcoin. There are several options, like renting
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a powerful GPU machine at Amazon AWS, but there's a huge upfront cost. For the
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past few years did not find mining bitcoin interesting or cost effective enough.
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Last week that changed.
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## Welcome to 2017
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Last week I found [Hashflare.io].
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The great thing about [Hashflare.io] is that you choose how much you want to invest
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in hardware by purchasing mining capacity in units of 10 GH/s, currently at a
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price of $1.20 per unit.
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Your mining capacity is put towards mining Bitcoin in different pools (you can
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change these), resulting in a daily payout of mined Bitcoin.
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The good part? This is a life-time purchase. You keep the mining capacity - forever.
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The only _cost_ is a fee for power and management of your hardware, which is
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substracted automatically from your daily payout.
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Purchasing capacity is easy and straightforward. Payment options include credit card
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and Bitcoin. It's also possible to _reinvest_ your earned bitcoin into purchasing more
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mining capacity.
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## Return on Investment
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Right now I'm seeing about 40% of my Bitcoin yield go to power and management costs.
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This means I'll earn back my initial investment in ± 5 months. After that it's pure
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profit.
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The current exchange rate is also of importance here, because power and management
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fees are calculated in USD. Any increase (or decrease) in exchange rate will influence
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the amount of BTC that goes towards fees.
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Since the value of Bitcoin has been steadily rising since 2008 (there have been some
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extreme fluctuations), it's very well possible that I'll break even before 5 months.
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## Let's get mining!
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There's no reason not to start mining Bitcoin today. [Hashflare.io] makes it
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rediculously easy to purchase mining capacity and start minting Bitcoin.
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Will you make your money back? Given time, probably. Is it fun to be part of
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this Bitcoin thing? Oh yeah!
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Note: Besides SHA-256 hardware, for Bitcoin, you can also purchase capacity
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for mining with Scrypt, ETHASH and X11.
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_Disclaimer: The links to Hashflare.io in the article are referral links,
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I will get 10% of any purchases you make on Hashflare.io. I understand
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if you object to using a referral link, here's a [non-referral link](https://hashflare.io) instead._
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[Hashflare.io]: https://hashflare.io/r/B91F1C3F
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