The idea of ​​​​making crypto mining productive came to me when I looked at how much each miner earned. In some cases these are amounts that do not justify the purchase, let alone the effort.
For a paltry €2 a day, you can’t put a $13k specialized computer in your room and then have it consume 90 kWh in 24 hours.
Firstly, you then have to pay too much additional money from your trusted electricity provider.
Secondly, the acquisition fees are beyond all realistic expectations. In addition to customs and import fees, you can also pay the scalpers‘ outrageous prices.
Example: If you compare the pricing of the individual products, there are differences of sometimes $6,000 per device.
A retailer in Germany, of all places, is calling for such a difference. With the justification that customs duties are also covered.
Even if customs were to charge 20% on the goods, the above-mentioned device would still result in a bill of $13,000 + 20% duty = $13,260.
The dealer from Germany charges $19,000 for it. That’s $5740 profit. By device!
With this bill, the electricity costs have not yet been incurred.
At the current price (I pay €0.40 per kWh), we would already be at €36 per device per day just for the electricity used.
If the miner delivers a daily profit of less than $40 in the extremely fluctuating market, then it is actually only a $2 profit. Spread over the month it’s $60. Taxes not yet included.
Financially this is a complete failure!

What can you do instead?

Outsource mining abroad? Electricity there sometimes costs $0.10 or less?
Yes, but you no longer have access to your own device and you still have to deal with maintenance costs and electricity costs in advance.
What happens if you stop mining completely because the miner has become unprofitable? Who will send the device back to you? Can you even get it back? And what about your own firmware because you want to work with HiveOS, for example?
Unfortunately, very few companies allow you to run your miner with the operating system of your choice. As a rule, the owner of the miner is only guaranteed guest access, so that you can see which wallet is being mined on and what the current hash value is. But who can guarantee that the hosting provider or the retailer doesn’t siphon off a few percent of the service?
Without admin access, anyone can claim that they have set up the miner and prepared it for the customer to the best of their knowledge and belief. If you can’t check it, you have to trust the dealer.
And trusting a German dealer who puts almost $6,000 in profit on every miner sold – has a certain taste. Especially with a 45% profit margin.

What would be the alternative now?

How about a completely self-sufficient system?
The electricity required for the miner is generated via solar, stored in batteries and then used in 24 hours. Non-stop. And all for $0 in electricity costs.

Does it really cost $0? Does it mean I have a net profit of $38 per day?

Does it really cost $0? Does it mean I have a net profit of $38 per day?
Yes and no.
Yes, because the electricity is generated by the sun. No, because sunlight costs nothing, but the material costs should not be underestimated. Battery storage alone accounts for almost 58% of the cost of the materials.
And you need strong batteries if you want to use the electricity produced at night. After all, in no country on earth does the sun shine at night.
Except maybe at the Poles – but who would come up with the idea of ​​building a mining farm there?
So let’s assume you build a solar farm for $75,000. Then you can let a (sic!) ASIC miner run 24 hours non-stop. That would be $38 in 24 hours. It’s $1,140 a month and $13,680 a year. Without taxes, of course.
The solar farm would then take around 5.5 years to pay for itself. Of course, if the price of the crypto currency and the hash value remain the same.

But solar powered mining should be for everyone!

Yes, but not for Crypto King Tyler and Crypto Bo$$ Kevin in a rented apartment in Berlin or in a semi-detached house in Cologne. You won’t get very far with balcony power plants.
In order for a solar farm to be profitable, certain requirements must be met.
And one prerequisite is enough space.
In Germany, for example, you need at least 1400 square meters of space for the solar cells so that 1 ASIC miner can be operated 24 hours a day. In winter.
In summer you could run up to 4 miners, but only as long as the sun shines. Only one miner can still operate at night.
And you don’t usually have this space if you live in the middle of the city or in a rented apartment.
The idea of ​​making money with solar energy is nothing new in Germany either. While previously you could feed electricity into the public grid for €0.20 per kilowatt hour, today it is only €0.06. So not even worth the effort.
If you use solar energy primarily for mining cryptocurrencies, because the space is there and so is the investment capital, you can set up a nice, purely passive additional income.