How much can I make Mining Bitcoins???

I’ve got my 13.2Gh/sec mining setup churning away.  I’ve pulled down some stats from BTC Guild, my mining pool, and did some calculating.  Here are the interesting numbers:

If you have a 1Gh/sec setup, you can earn:

  • 0.000292 BTC or  0.25 USD per Day
  • 0.002043 BTC or 1.75 USD per Week
  • 0.008616 BTC or 7.39 USD per Month
  • 0.103394 BTC or 88.71 USD per Year

Note: You can purchase three 333Mh/sec USB stick miners for roughly $90.00.  That means you would’t see anything over your investment for at least  a year.  You probably will need to buy a USB Hub and a cooling fan and that will be $30-$40.  This setup would have to up and mining 24hrs a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year.  And you will need a computer always running to drive it.  I personally would invest/use a RaspberryPi setup but that would be about $130 to purchase so your break even point would be more like three years.  This is not profitable.  This is a hobby setup.

Now if you invested in a 1.6Gh/sec USB AntMiner it would only be $75.00, plus the $130 for the RaspberryPi and you could skip the USB Hub stuff.  The yearly return in USD would be about $142.  That means your be about one year and 5 months.  That cuts the cost in half.  Even though you break even, you will never be rolling in dough.

I purchased a used Butterfly Labs 10Gh/sec miner plus two 1.6Gh/sec AntMiners for about $550.00.  Add to that the USB Hub setup for $40 and a RaspberryPi setup for $150 and I’m in it for almost $750.  So what do my return numbers look like for this?

  • 0.003851 BTC or  3.30 USD per Day
  • 0.026960 BTC or 23.13 USD per Week
  • 0.113734 BTC or 97.58 USD per Month
  • 1.364810 BTC or 1170.91 USD per Year

So my break even point is around eight month mark and my profit for the year would be $400.  That’s nothing to sneeze at and my hobby has paid for itself.  Rather than taking the money in year one, I would re-invest that $400 profit and purchase five more 1.6Gh/sec AntMiners so my break so come the end of the year I will have spent ZERO dollars and now have a mining rig with an additional 8Gh/sec power.  This would bring my total processing power up to 21.2Gh/sec and in year two, mind you with no money out of my pocket, I would make the following:

  • 0.006186 BTC or  5.31 USD per Day
  • 0.043400 BTC or 37.15 USD per Week
  • 0.182664 BTC or 156.71 USD per Month
  • 2.191968 BTC or 1880.55 USD per Year

Since I cleared my costs in year one, all of these numbers reflect my year two profits.  That means at the end of the 2nd year I will have $1880.55 in profit in my hands.  That’s a pretty good return on a fun little hobby.  Mind you, all of this is predicated on the current value of the Bitcoin.  Today it’s average value is $857.93 USD.  If it goes up, my profit will go up.  If it goes down well my profit goes down.  If it goes down after eight months I don’t even care because I would have re-cooped my investment.