Tom's Hardware conducted a study of the altcoins mining market on video cards after Ethereum switched to the Proof of stake algorithm. The period of time needed to break even after buying video cards has increased significantly — up to about 20-70 years. And then not everyone has video cards.
For calculations, the publication took the price of video cards with eBay, their daily profitability with WhatToMine, and the cost of electricity 10 cents per 1 kWh.
The results are disappointing. Most video cards will operate at a loss. Only the RTX 3090, Radeon RX 6800 XT, RX 6800, RX 6600 XT, and RX 6600 came out of the list as the ones able to turn a profit. Their payback period is from 20 to 70 years.
The only way to earn money according to them is to seek free electricity.
What to mine in 2022? Let's try to figure out is crypto mining worth it now and which interesting coins for mining exist.
BTC Mining
Bitcoin is the first and most popular cryptocurrency in the world. And this is just one of the reasons why it is not profitable to mine it at all. Due to the large number of people wishing to do this, there is a high level of competition between miners.
Another reason is the halving of Bitcoin, in which the reward for miners for mining a coin is halved. This is done to control the issue of the first cryptocurrency. Halving takes place once every 4 years, the last time it happened in 2020, after which the reward for adding a new block to the chain was 6.25 BTC. For comparison, when Bitcoin first appeared, it was 50 BTC.
The result of competition among miners was that it is no longer possible to extract Bitcoin alone in 2022. Bitcoins are mostly mined on mining machines with expensive equipment owned by private companies. Miners who are engaged in BTC mining on their own can unite in pools and work as a single farm.
Prices for a new crypto mining rig on the site bitmain.com start from $2 175 and above (there are $110 000 each). The option for $2 175 is the Bitcoin Miner T19 Hydro, which has not yet gone on sale. It will be possible to order it only in October 2022. According to the miner profitability calculator asicminervalue.com, at the time of writing, the profit for production from this device was estimated at $467.73 per month. Thus, it would be possible to recapture the cost of the device in about 4.5 months.
Now let's talk about Ethereum Merge. On September 15, 2022, ETH developers updated the network (this is known as the Merge). As a result of the update, it was divided into two parts and Ethereum mining became impossible, except for its previous version - Ethereum Classic.
With the transition to PoS ETH can only be received by someone who already has a certain amount of the first altcoin in their account. Transactions can be checked by those who control so-called nodes (or nodes). To become the one who controls the nodes, or the validator, there must be 32 ETH in your wallet. They will be frozen as a guarantee that you are interested in working blockchain financially. Those who have nodes under control will profit from transaction fees for Ethereum users.
32 ETH is a considerable amount, about $40 000. However, there are also pools for staking: people can join an association to collect the necessary amount and share the profits from commissions. The world's largest ether mining pool Ethermine has already introduced a new pool for staking the first altcoin. The staking service was also launched by the Swiss cryptocurrency bank SEBA.
What Else Can Be Mined in 2022
What coins can be mined except Bitcoin? What's more profitable than mining? Dogecoin mining looks promising, which grew significantly last year, including thanks to tweets from the head of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Mask. Despite the bearish market and the fact that the price of DOGE is unstable, it is still profitable to extract it.
The reward for adding a new block to the Dogecoin blockchain is 10,000 tokens. A block occurs every minute (for comparison, a bitcoin block appears once every 10 minutes).
Let's give you an example. At the time of writing, DOGE was trading at $0.05653 per coin. This means that the amount of remuneration for the new block of meme cryptocurrency was $565.3.
You can extract DOGE using a computer processor (CPU) or video card, which will cost an order of magnitude cheaper than buying BTC mining hardware.
After Ethereum switched to PoS, the Dogecoin coin became the second cryptocurrency in the world in terms of market capitalization to PoW after Bitcoin.
Which cryptocurrency is profitable to mine in 2022, except for those already mentioned, you can find out if you use the site coinwarz.com. This portal assesses the profitability of mining various digital currencies. The top ten most profitable of them (except for DOGE and BTC) include:
- Peercoin (PPC);
- Verge (XVG);
- BitcoinCash (BCH);
- Vertcoin (VTC);
- Ethereum-Classic (ETC);
- Einsteinium (EMC2);
- Monero (XMR);
- Florincoin (FLO).
Summary
After a protracted fall, any growth in the course is regarded as the end of crypto-winter, and faith in a bright future comes. In general, the exchange rate of the main coin for mining on Ethereum video cards increased from 1000 USD to 1300 USD, with periodic rollbacks.
But it should be remembered that the profitability of cryptocurrency mining in the world depends on the price of bitcoin, electricity prices, and the cost of equipment. The average breakeven price for miners from most countries of the world is now at about $10 thousand per bitcoin. At the same time, each manner has its own, since it depends on the efficiency of the equipment and the cost of electricity.
The question of whether mining is beneficial in 2022 is ambiguous. Depends on how much money you are willing to spend on special mining equipment, whether you are ready to join mining pools, and so on.
The key factor in the profitability of mining is not the price of Bitcoin itself, but the combination of the price of Bitcoin, the complexity of the network, the efficiency of the equipment, the cost of equipment, and the cost of electricity. And just a drop in the price of Bitcoin in the general case is not enough to stop the increase in the complexity of the network, experts on the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance say.
The profitability of mining is influenced by many variables, including the cost of cryptocurrencies, the hash rate of the network, and the cost of electricity consumed during mining. Recently, it was possible to observe even a drop in the price of Bitcoin, as well as an increase in the hash rate (necessary for mining computing power), which reduced the profitability of its mining.
Related posts
