In case anyone has been following, you’ll know that I’ve only been involved with cryptocurrency mining for a short period of time – 85 days to be exact. 85 days ago, I received my 1st of 5 miners. Then, within 3 weeks, I had all 5 of them. Since then, I’ve been keeping track of how much I’ve been making daily.

Like many of us out there who weren’t sure on if or when they should get into mining, this might help you figure things out. One of the main questions I see on Reddit is “Should I buy coin or mine for coin?” Well, here are my results…take from them what you will.

When I first started, I was averaging Approx $20 per miner per day in September which you may have seen from an earlier post. How has it held up? Well, it’s been pretty steady. Check out the graph below, ignore the initial jump and the middle jump. These massive spikes are because new miners came online. The blue line is the total amount of money I made per day. The red line is the average income per miner per day.

Okay, but what about how much coin we’re making? See below:

[Note: Coin is measured in BTC as the miners are pointing to NiceHash]

Remember, the initial spikes are from where I added miners. But you can see, when I had 2 miners, it made the same as when I added the next 3 (close enough). So why am I making the same with 5 as I did with 2? DIFFICULTY! This is exactly what we talked about before in a previous post. Over time, difficulty will only increase (90% of the time) which means you’ll make less and less coin. But if you notice the red line, it’s stayed pretty steady. For 85 days, my avg is $19.89 per miner. 7 days ago, my daily per miner was $17. 2 days ago, $18 per miner. Today, $21.47 per miner. Why is it going up and why is that red line not going down even though the number of coin we’re earning is going down? PRICE!

In the last 24 hours, the price of Bitcoin has jumped by more than $1000. When I started, the price was at $4600 USD. Now, (as I’m writing this), it has cleared $11,200. It’s this increase that has kept my daily earnings stable. Will this continue? Not at this rate. I can only HOPE that BTC increases by great percentages like what is shown here, but there will be dips and drops which will have an effect on my daily earnings and my BTC wallet.

Now, what would have been better? Let’s see.

After 85 days, we’ve earned back about $6,500. Our initial investment is $10k (after all parts, miners, power supplies, A/C, etc). That figure is before expenses for electricity.

Change it up. Say I did the buy and hodl route. $10k would have given me approximately 2.1613583 coin. The difference between starting and end prices is approx 243%. Now, that 2.1613583 coin would be worth $24,207.

So it’s up to the individual on which route they would like to take. The buy and hodl route is much more appealing except your amount of coin never increases like it does with mining. Sure, it’s only going up a small bit, but even 1% of $11000 is $110.

Happy mining!