Here’s how much Bitcoin I “mined” in my living room in about 3 days…
Yep, a whole £4.25.
Which works out at about £1.40 per day.
But I didn’t have to wait for that huge lump sum… it appeared in one sweet 40p-ish payload at a time…
By my calculations, I only need to mine Bitcoin for another 105,882 days… or 290 years… to be able to buy this lovely yellow lamborghini, worth £150,000…
Actually, I forgot to include my electricity costs in that calculation, whoops! So, maybe add a few more decades…
You see, I haven’t been pulling Bitcoin out of thin air, I’ve been using my gaming computer to “mine” it…
(Yes, I am a nerd… and it probably needs a good dusting!)
Well, I wasn’t mining exactly…
Instead, I used a program called NiceHash to lend out the power of the graphics card in my computer to people who are mining Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
I don’t know exactly how it works, but it’s something to do with “hashing” (no, not the kind you put in brownies)… basically a load of screens come up on my PC like this…
(That’s not from my computer, but you get the idea.)
And then… money appears in my NiceHash “wallet”.
For me, this was just a fun little experiment to see how it works.
I already had a decent PC for gaming and it only took about 20 minutes to set up the NiceHash software.
But for others cryptocurrency mining is a serious second income, or even full-time profession!
If you head over to the GpuMining part of Reddit, you can see hundreds of photos like this…
That mess of wires and PC parts is someone’s “mining rig”… and it has 44 graphics cards – a bit more than my single one!
Apparently each of those cards can make about £2 ($3) per day…
Which is £88 per day, and around £2,640 per month.
Here’s another one, which looks a bit neater…
Apparently it’s making £2,000+ ($3,000) per week.
So, £8,000 per month?!
In… sane!
But before you quit your job to rush out and start buying up parts to make your own mining rig, there’s a catch…
That rig in the last photo cost £5,000, so the owner had to stump up a significant amount of money upfront… and the “buy in” is only getting more expensive…
You see, due to COVID-19 manufacturer shortages and this new crypto mining boom, graphics cards are in short supply and high demand… and the prices have been going through the roof…
For example, this brand new RTX 3080 graphics card, which released last year, should be selling for about £500… but instead it’s selling at £1,600…
That’s more than triple the price!
And even older cards like the RX 580, which was released in 2017, have more than doubled in price…
If you own a modern graphics card and aren’t interested in crypto mining, now might be a good time to sell it!
So, what’s the take away from all this?
Well, for me it was just a bit of fun… but if I had to give one piece of advice it’d be this…
Buying and holding cryptocurrency to make a profit is a lot cheaper and easier than mining it!
Which is why you should keep an eye out for what Bet Chat’s resident crypto expert, Khashayar Abbasi, has in store for you in the coming weeks.
