> Um. Not really. At current Ethereum prices (2021-02-26), it generates $0.14 of profit per day. It’s still a profit, but very miniscule.
The real question is if it makes more money than it costs in electricity. Apple claims it uses 39 W max. That adds up to 0.936 kWh of electricity per day, which we can approximate at 1 kWh. Electricity prices range from ~4¢ to ~20¢ per kWh in the USA, which means that depending on where you live, you'll be making a profit or a loss of -6¢ to +10¢ per day.
So yeah, this thing can be profitable. But the capital cost required to buy the M1 in the first place is going to be really hard to pay off.
profit implies that costs are taken into account. If I plug 2 MH/s, 30W, $0.1/kWh into a mining calculator I get a profit of 11 cents per day against 18 cents of revenue.
There's too many different versions of the word profit and in this case it looks like gross instead of net/EBITDA.
in the assumptions they all tell you "2 ethereum per block", Ethereum has been averaging 5-7 ether per block for the past year. hit like 13 ether per block just the other day.
so just multiply by 3, or like 7, up to you
0,24 EUR is currently ~0,29 USD. That's 0,29 USD for my cheapest price against your most expensive price with 0,20 USD.
Which is a good thing because we have electric heat and it's been a very cold month. I'm expecting an about $350 bill.
https://app.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/rates-energy-use/el...
There are several states where the retail rates are lower than 10 cent/kwh.
first 300 kwh @ .25 the next 1000 kwh @ .31 above that you pay .39
1) The US has good hydro resources (in the northwest where it rains all the time and there are lots of mountains so you have both lots of water and altitude change) as well as nuclear (especially in the long-industrialized northeast) that (mostly) has long been paid for and that we just keep running for cheap. Nuclear is about 19% of our electricity, and it's cheap once it has been built for decades.
2) Lots of cheap wind, especially in the middle of the continent where all the maize and stuff grows.
3) Way better solar resource especially in the south and southwest where it's about twice as much sun as in Germany and with much, MUCH less seasonal impact. See: http://www.sunisthefuture.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Sun...
4) Like Germany (but even more so), LOTS of coal. Over a quarter of the world's recoverable coal reserves. However, we don't even use that much of it anymore. Just the cheapest kind (usually not the crappy lignite stuff that Germany often uses for power) is still used for power. We use much less than half the coal for electricity than we did even 10 years ago. Because...
5) We have a ridiculous. A RIDICULOUS amount of cheap gas right now. Fracking has opened up the spigot. Texas, Pennsylvania, Lousiana, Oklahoma, Ohio, etc, etc. (And Canada produces a bunch that we end up using because they don't have anyone else to sell it to and it's produced a long way from Canada's cities.) We make so much natural gas we export it to Mexico, and are even starting to liquefy it and export it to Europe.
So yeah. While Germany has long relied heavily on imported fossil fuels, the shutdown of nuclear plants hasn't helped. Think of how expensive it is to send natural gas all the way from wherever Russia makes it (Siberia) all the way to Germany and the markup Putin asks for. (and that's roughly a third of Germany's natural gas, IIRC)
And I think the way wind/solar subsidies work in Germany and different than in the US. In Germany, the solar subsidy is paid for by all the ratepayers. That alone is like 4.6 US cents per kWh on top of your electricity. In the US, the solar subsidy is funded as a tax credit which means the cost isn't directly borne by consumers but ends up being paid for or borrowed by the federal government. (Also, having twice as much sun means the same solar panel makes roughly twice as much electricity...) This has the effect of solar actually reducing the cost of electricity in the US while it increases the cost of electricity in Germany for the consumer... which probably is why German companies have been more reluctant to switch to electric cars than you think they would have been.
So yeah. The US has a huge amount of land, so really good solar/wind resources (and decent geothermal while we're at it), a pretty solid hydro and nuclear power situation, and massive amounts of fossil fuel. The US is now actually a net energy exporter. That's why electricity is so cheap.
You can check out good statistics for US energy production and consumption here: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Wired: silicon clams ingesting solar energy and outputting dogecoin
No, this is the number for the Mac Mini, which is the obvious choice if you wanted a machine for maxing out an M1 24/7. (The Air peaks at about 30W, which it can't sustain for long unless it's in a rather cold environment.) So it has nothing to do with the display's power consumption.
Maxing out just the GPU while the rest of the machine isn't doing much would get you well below 39W, though.
Here's a great post showing that - https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor... - GPU mining is only 10% slower than the theoretical memory-bound maximum (if compute was infinitely fast).
And
https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/issues/1991).
RandomX mining is better at the moment, but that may be because nobody's developed a GPU minter tailored to the uniqueness of apple's GPU, if that's even possible.
I made ~$100 in the past month (stopped during the cold snap/storm here) on my 3080 mining ETH. Of course, I was getting closer to 90Mh/s so slightly more viable.
But I personally wouldn't make a big investment on it if I was only getting started now.
Nodes will still verify transactions and execute smart contracts, of course. But there's no hash lottery to be won for mining blocks.
If it's that hard to make a profit on the RTX 3080 then I doubt the M1 Mac Mini was ever in the running.
To be fair EIP-1559 probably turns on in July. So that's going to cut block rewards by a lot.
Selling the cards (at above MSRP) now and putting that straight into BTC would probably turn a better profit long term, albeit, very much a gamble. The mining is definitely getting harder/less profitable and at some point soon (2021?) ETH is changing from PoW to PoS.
Edit - "quality" not "quantity"!
I’d be surprised if it was any different with the current lineup of cards.
It would be really interesting to see what the M1 draws doing this. Probably not much. But then it’s not doing a whole lot of hashing either.
Do either of those things equal better intensive mining efficiency, much over a dedicated traditional rig, where you're flat out all the time and emphasizing GPU?
