The conventional wisdom has long been that crypto mining is only for the institutions, the big boys, and you, the individual, don’t have a chance. But the conventional wisdom may be wrong. By jeffwilser for MiningWeek, presented by FoundryServices
in the summer of 2021, the “difficulty” of mining was roughly cut in half, since miners had less competition. “It became a lot easier for the smaller guys,” says Harper. There are now more ways for home miners to get the right equipment. “Before, you can’t just go to Bitmain [the largest manufacturer of miners] and say, ‘I want one’…They’re just going to tell you to pound sand.” This changed when companies like Luxor and Compass began selling miners to individuals, lowering the barrier to entry.
So how can home miners like Lili make any money from crypto mining? Enter the mining pools. It’s true that she only has a 1 in 100,000 chance of winning a block per day. But that’s not nothing. And when you add this itty-bit of horsepower to a mining pool, such as Slush Pool or Luxor, the group’s total odds increase. All of these add up. “No matter how shitty it is, it’s still increasing the pool’s chance of winning the block,” says Harper.
Screw it, we’re leaving, said Econoalchemist. By then he was so smitten with mining that he decided to move to the “intermountain West” where he had more space for rigs. The decision was aided by politics. At the time, he was fed up with his kids’ mask mandates at the Denver-area school, and his own stance on vaccine mandates got him fired from the railway job.
“For me, it’s a way of passively dollar-cost averaging,” says Melker, referring to the practice of investing a fixed amount of money in set increments, regardless of the price. And for many, home mining is also just plain fun, like an arts-and-crafts hobby. When the S9 blew her circuit-board and became too noisy, Mags ended up moving it to her parents’ basement. Now she geeks out with her dad about bitcoin. “It created this thing we can bond over,” Mags says.
And there are some less obvious concerns. Econoalchemist, Lili, Mags, Coin Heated, and the growing army of DIY-ers are finding mining to be profitable…for now. But that all hinges on a few key variables.