Why mining yields have fallen

Network complexity

To regulate the speed of block creation, blockchain developers came up with a mechanism that automatically increases the difficulty of calculations. If previously miners were faster at finding a hash, the task will become more difficult later on. This makes the network stable and predictable, and new coins appear on schedule.

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Due to the increase in complexity, home miners have long been unable to obtain Bitcoin in this way. The coin is now only available to industrialists with hangars of asics. Video cards and processors even in pools work in the minus.

Cryptocurrency rates

The cost of the coin is the most obvious reason for the fall in profitability. When the miner mines the token, the latter must still be sold to fix the income in stable fiat. At this stage, users incur a small cost due to the commission of the exchanger or exchange. However, the service fee is not the main problem.

Of greater importance is the price of the coin and in general the ability to sell it. The mining boom in 2018-2020 was due to a sharp increase in the quotes of digital assets. However, with the arrival of cryptozyme, many miners went bankrupt. Compared to the peak values of 2021 ($68 thousand), the digital currency has fallen in price by more than 2 times. Now its value is about $29.4 thousand. The costs of electricity, equipment, platform commissions remained the same, so the decline in profits significantly hit the profitability of farms.

In 2022, Core Scientific – one of the leaders in Bitcoin mining – declared bankruptcy. This came at a time when the drop in the BTC exchange rate reached a record 60%.

Electronic stuffing

The profitability of mining depends largely on the power of the farm. The higher the hash rate of the equipment, the higher the chance of the user being the first to find the hash and connect the block to the chain. However, this applies only to solo mining. If we talk about working in a pool, the user gets paid depending on the contribution to the aggregate hashrate of the community.

If one RTX 4090 graphics card brings $0.51, then 2 – a whole dollar. However, you can’t just increase capacity. You need to take into account the cost of power and additional components (power supply, motherboard, etc.), without which GPUs do not work.

Most often, the drop in revenue is due to damage to the devices. Gradually, the equipment wears out, because of which it is slower to go through the numbers or gives erroneous results. It is recommended to regularly check the state of the equipment and replace damaged GPUs, ASICs.

Also, the profitability of the farm depends on the stability of the Internet. Miners transmit hash and orbs over the network. If the ping is unstable or the speed is too low, there will be “late balls”, for which pools do not pay. That being said, the problem in the drop in revenue is usually due to latency.

What to do if the profitability of mining has decreased

In cases where profitability has dropped, you should first analyze the farm. Checklist:

1. Check internet stability and ping to the pool. If the farm goes offline, it is recommended to switch from Wi-Fi to cable. Problems are less likely to occur with it.
2. Check the temperature of video cards or ASICs. It should be within the limits set by the manufacturer. Most devices function normally at 80°C.
3. See if there are erroneous balls. They occur due to overclocking and incorrect parameters of the miner. To eliminate the failure, it is recommended to first reset the hardware settings in MSI Afterburner or a similar program, and then recheck the bat file.
4. Check the power supply. Miners often forget about it and connect too many GPUs. When the block does not have enough power, the rig starts to “malfunction” due to poor quality power supply.

If the drop in profits is due to reasons that do not depend on the miner (for example, a decrease in the price of cryptocurrency), you need to look for ways to optimize costs. One option is to move the farm to Siberia. For comparison: a kW of energy in Irkutsk costs 1.42 rubles versus 5-7 rubles in Moscow and the region.

Mismatch between profitability calculators and reality

Miners often use special services to determine the approximate profitability of the farm. Such programs allow you to find out how many dollars or coins the device with the set characteristics will extract.

Using such services, it is worth remembering that they do not give an accurate prediction. They have a margin of error, since it is impossible to take into account all parameters. Depending on the spikes in complexity and competition, the percentage of “late balls”, the movement of quotes, the income will be lower or higher than planned. The error can reach 5-15%.

Frequent questions of users