What is Bitcoin Mining?
Mining is the process that Bitcoin and several other cryptocurrencies use to generate new coins and verify new transactions. It involves vast, decentralized networks of computers around the world that verify and secure blockchains – the virtual ledgers that document cryptocurrency transactions. In return for contributing their processing power, computers on the network are rewarded with new coins. It’s a virtuous circle: the miners maintain and secure the blockchain, the blockchain awards the coins, the coins provide an incentive for the miners to maintain the blockchain.
Most people think of crypto mining simply as a way of creating new coins. Crypto mining, however, also involves validating cryptocurrency transactions on a blockchain network and adding them to a distributed ledger. Most importantly, crypto mining prevents the double-spending of digital currency on a distributed network.
Like physical currencies, when one member spends cryptocurrency, the digital ledger must be updatedby debiting one account and crediting the other. However, the challenge of a digital currency is that digital platforms are easily manipulated. Bitcoin’s distributed ledger, therefore, only allows verified miners to update transactions on the digital ledger. This gives miners the extra responsibility of securing the network from double-spending.
Meanwhile, new coins are generated to reward miners for their work in securing the network. Since distributed ledgers lack a centralized authority, the mining process is crucial for validating transactions. Miners are, therefore, incentivized to secure the network by participating in the transaction validation process that increases their chances of winning newly minted coins.
In order to ensure that only verified crypto miners can mine and validate transactions, a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocol has been put into place. PoW also secures the network from any external attacks.
How does mining work?
There are three primary ways of obtaining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. You can buy them on an exchange like Coinbase, receive them as payment for goods or services, or virtually “mine” them. It’s the third category that we’re explaining here, using Bitcoin as our example.
You might have considered trying bitcoin mining yourself. A decade ago, anyone with a decent home computer could participate. But as the blockchain has grown, the computational power required to maintain it has increased. (By a lot: In October 2019, it required 12 trillion times more computing power to mine one bitcoin than it did when the first first blocks were mined in January 2009.) As a result, amateur bitcoin mining is unlikely to be profitable for hobbyists these days. Virtually all mining is now done by specialized companies or groups of people who band their resources together. But it’s still good to know how it works.
Specialized computers perform the calculations required to verify and record every new bitcoin transaction and ensure that the blockchain is secure. Verifying the blockchain requires a vast amount of computing power, which is voluntarily contributed by miners.
Bitcoin mining is a lot like running a big data center. Companies purchase the mining hardware and pay for the electricity required to keep it running (and cool). For this to be profitable, the value of the earned coins has to be higher than the cost to mine those coins.
What motivates miners? The network holds a lottery. Every computer on the network races to be the first to guess a 64-digit hexadecimal number known as a “hash.” The faster a computer can spit out guesses, the more likely the miner is to earn the reward.
The winner updates the blockchain ledger with all the newly verified transactions – thereby adding a newly verified “block” containing all of those transactions to the chain – and is granted a predetermined amount of newly minted bitcoin. (On average, this happens every ten minutes.) As of late 2020, the reward was 6.25 bitcoin – but it will be reduced by half in 2024, and every four years after. In fact, as the difficulty of mining increases, the reward will keep decreasing until there are no more bitcoin left to be mined.
There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. The final block should theoretically be mined in 2140. From that point forward, miners will no longer rely on newly issued bitcoin as reward, but instead will rely on the fees they charge for making transactions.
Why is Mining Important?
Beyond releasing new coins into circulation, mining is central to Bitcoin’s (and many other cryptocurrencies’) security. It verifies and secures the blockchain, which allows cryptocurrencies to function as a peer-to-peer decentralized network without any need for oversight from a third party. And it creates the incentive for miners to contribute their computing power to the network.
How are Bitcoin Miners Paid?
The network recognizes the work conducted by Bitcoin miners in the form of providing rewards for generating new blocks. There are two types of rewards: new Bitcoin created with each block, and fees paid by users to transact on the network.
The block reward of newly minted Bitcoin, amounting to 6.25 BTC as of May 2020, is the majority of the miners’ revenue. This value is programmed to halve at fixed intervals of approximately four years so that eventually, no more Bitcoin is mined and only transaction fees will guarantee the security of the network.
By 2040, the block reward will have decreased to less than 0.2 BTC and only 80,000 Bitcoin out of 21 million will be left up for grabs. Only after 2140 will mining effectively end as the final BTC is slowly mined.
Even though the block reward decreases over time, past halvings have been amply compensated by increases in the Bitcoin price. While this is no guarantee of future results, Bitcoin miners enjoy a relative degree of certainty about their prospects. The community is very supportive of the current mining arrangement and has no plans to phase it out like Ethereum, another major mineable coin. With the right conditions, individual Bitcoin miners can be confident that the venture will turn a profit.
Although mining is a competitive business, starting is still relatively easy. In the early years of Bitcoin, hobbyists could simply boot up some software on their computer and get started right away. Those days are long gone, but setting up a dedicated Bitcoin miner is not as hard as it may seem at first.
How to Choose Hardware for Bitcoin Mining?
If you are curious how you would go about mining Bitcoin, the first thing to note is that for mining BTC, your only option is to buy a Bitcoin mining machine, i.e., an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit device, commonly referred to as an ASIC.
These devices can only mine Bitcoin, but they are highly efficient in doing so. They are so efficient that their introduction around 2013 made all other types of calculating mining devices obsolete almost overnight.
If you are looking to mine with common CPUs, GPUs or more advanced FPGAs, you will need to look into other coins. Although these devices can mine Bitcoin, they do so at such a slow pace that it’s just a waste of time and electricity.
For reference, the best graphics card available just before the rise of ASICs, the AMD 7970, produced 800 million hashes per second. Now, an average ASIC produces 100 trillion hashes per second — a 125,000-fold difference.
The number of hashes produced in a second is commonly referred to as the “hash rate” and it is an important performance measurement for mining devices.
Two other factors should be considered when purchasing a Bitcoin mining device. One is the electricity consumption, measured in watts. Between two devices that produce the same number of hashes, the one that uses the least electricity will be more profitable.
The third measure is the unit cost for each device. It is pointless to have the most energy-efficient ASIC in the world if it takes 10 years to pay itself back through mining.
Bitcoin has a fairly vibrant ecosystem of ASIC manufacturers, which often differ on these three parameters. Some may produce more efficient but also more expensive ASICs, while others make lower-performing hardware that comes at a cheaper price. Before analyzing which device is best suited for your needs, it is important to understand the other factors influencing profits from Bitcoin mining.
Buying and Setting up the Hardware
Several shops sell ASICs to retail customers, while some manufacturers also allow direct purchases. Though they are more difficult to source than common graphics cards, it is still possible for anyone to buy an ASIC at an acceptable price. It is worth noting that buying mining equipment from shops or manufacturers shipping from foreign countries may result in hefty import dues.
Depending on the manufacturer or the shop, ASICs may be offered without a power supply unit, which will then need to be purchased separately. Some ASIC manufacturers sell their own units, but it is also possible to use PSUs built for servers or gaming computers, though they are likely to require special modifications.
ASICs need to be connected to the internet via an ethernet cable, and they can only be configured through a web browser by connecting to the local IP address, similar to a home router.
Before carrying on, it is necessary to set up an account with a mining pool of choice, which will then provide detailed information on how to connect to its servers. From the ASIC’s web panel, you need to insert the pool’s connection endpoints and account information. The miner will then begin working and generating Bitcoin.
Mining through an established pool is strongly advised, as you will be able to generate constant returns by pooling your hardware with others. While your device may not always find the correct hash to create a block, your mining contribution will still be rewarded.
Considerations and Risks of Bitcoin Mining
In addition to the financial risk of not turning a profit, there are technical risks involved in managing high-power devices such as ASICs.
Proper ventilation is required to avoid the mining equipment burning out components due to overheating. The entirety of the miner’s electricity consumption is dissipated into its environment as heat, and one ASIC is likely to be the single-most powerful appliance in your home or office.
That also means you need to carefully consider the limits of your electrical grid when Bitcoin mining. Your home’s electricity network is rated up to a maximum level of power, and each socket has its own rating too. Exceeding those limits could easily result in either frequent outages or electrical fires. Consult an expert to determine whether your electrical setup is safe for mining.
Regular maintenance against dust and other environmental factors is also required to keep the mining devices healthy. While failures are relatively rare, ASICs can go out of commission earlier than expected without proper maintenance.
While single ASICs may fail, the largest threat to their profitability is the prospect that they may become obsolete. More efficient miners will eventually crowd out older devices.
Historic generations of miners like the Bitmain S9, released around 2016, lasted approximately four years before becoming unprofitable under any electricity price configuration (except zero). However, the speed of advances in computing technology is largely unpredictable.
Bitcoin mining is no exception to any other venture. There is potential for rewards as well as risks. Hopefully, this guide provided a decent starting point to further evaluate both.
Different Methods of Mining Cryptocurrencies
Different methods of mining cryptocurrencies require different amounts of time. In the technology’s early days, for example, CPU mining was the go-to option for most miners. However, many find CPU mining to be too slow and impractical today because it takes months to accrue even a small amount of profit, given the high electrical and cooling costs and increased difficulty across the board.
GPU mining is another method of mining cryptocurrencies. It maximizes computational power by bringing together a set of GPUs under one mining rig. For GPU mining, a motherboard and cooling system is required for the rig.
Similarly, ASIC mining is yet another method of mining cryptocurrencies. Unlike GPU miners, ASIC miners are specifically designed to mine cryptocurrencies, so they produce more cryptocurrency units than GPUs. However, they are expensive, meaning that, as mining difficulty increases, they quickly become obsolete.
Given the ever-increasing costs of GPU and ASIC mining, cloud mining is becoming increasingly popular. Cloud mining allows individual miners to leverage the power of major corporations and dedicated crypto mining facilities.
Individual crypto miners can identify both free and paid cloud mining hosts online and rent a mining rig for a specific amount of time. This method is the most hands-free way to mine cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin Mining Pools
Mining pools allow miners to combine their computational resources in order to increase their chances of finding and mining blocks on a blockchain. If a mining pool succeeds, the reward is distributed across the mining pool, in proportion to the amount of resources that each miner contributed to the pool.
Most crypto mining applications come with a mining pool; however, crypto enthusiasts now also join together online to create their own mining pools. Because some pools earn more rewards than others, miners are free to change pools whenever they need to.
Miners consider official crypto mining pools more reliable since they receive frequent upgrades by their host companies, as well as regular technical support. The best place to find mining pools is CryptoCompare, where miners can compare different mining pools based on their reliability, profitability, and the coin that they want to mine.
Is Crypto Mining Worth It?
Determining whether crypto mining is worthwhile depends on several factors. Whether a prospective miner chooses a CPU, GPU, ASIC miner, or cloud mining, the most important factors to consider are the mining rig’s hash rate, electric power consumption, and overall costs. Generally, crypto mining machines consume a considerable amount of electricity and emit significant heat.
For instance, the average ASIC miner will use about 72 terawatts of power to create a bitcoin in about ten minutes. These figures continue to change as technology advances and mining difficulty increases.
Even though the price of the machine matters, it is just as important to consider electricity consumption, electricity costs in the area, and cooling costs, especially with GPU and ASIC mining rigs.
It is also important to consider the level of difficulty for the cryptocurrency that an individual wants to mine, in order determine whether the operation would even be profitable.
The Tax Implications of Crypto Mining
The taxation of crypto mining remains an important consideration.
Crypto miners will generally face tax consequences (1) when they are rewarded with cryptocurrency for performing mining activities, and (2) when they sell or exchange the reward tokens. With respect to (1), the IRS has issued Notice 2014-21 which directly addresses the tax implications of crypto mining. Under the Notice, a miner will recognize gross income upon receipt of the reward tokens in an amount equal to the fair market value of the coins at the time of receipt. Additionally, if a taxpayer’s mining activities constitute a trade or business or the taxpayer undertakes such activities as an independent contractor, the reward tokens/virtual currency payments are deemed to be self-employment income and accordingly, subject to self-employment taxes. Similarly, if a taxpayer performs mining activities as an employee, payments made in cryptocurrency are treated as wages subject to federal income tax withholding of Social Security/Medicare and unemployment taxes.
For a more detailed analysis of crypto mining tax implications, see Taxation of Crypto Mining. For crypto tax planning resources, see Charitable Remainder Unit Trusts (“CRUTs”) and Cryptocurrencies, Taxation of Crypto Margin Trading, and Estate Planning and Cryptocurrency. And for the latest on IRS Voluntary Disclosures for previously unreported cryptocurrency gains, see The IRS’s Voluntary Disclosure Practice.
Is Crypto Mining Legal?
Most jurisdictions and authorities have yet to enact laws governing cryptocurrencies, meaning that, for most countries, the legality of crypto mining remains unclear.
Under the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), crypto miners are considered money transmitters, so they may be subject to the laws that govern that activity. In Israel, for instance, crypto mining is treated as a business and is subject to corporate income tax. In India and elsewhere, regulatory uncertainty persists, although Canada and the United States appear friendly to crypto mining.
However, apart from jurisdictions that have specifically banned cryptocurrency-related activities, very few countries prohibit crypto mining.
Our Freeman Law Cryptocurrency Law Resource page provides a summary of the legal status of cryptocurrency for each country across the globe with statutory or regulatory provisions governing cryptocurrency.
The Sustainability of Crypto Mining
For aspiring crypto miners, curiosity and a strong desire to learn are simply a must. The crypto mining space is constantly changing as new technologies emerge. The professional miners who receive the best rewards are constantly studying the space and optimizing their mining strategies to improve their performance.
On the other hand, climate change advocates have become increasingly concerned, as more and more fossil fuels are burned to fuel the mining process.
Such concerns have pushed cryptocurrency communities like Ethereum to consider switching from PoW frameworks to more sustainable frameworks, such as proof-of-stake frameworks.
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