Home bitcoin mining is arbitrage across time.

As I understand it, industrial miners pay as they go. In fact, I believe there are whole companies that are dedicated to mitigating risk to the energy providers by providing direct, real-time payment rails between the miners and providers.

This is not true for me. I pay my energy bill once a month, LONG after the bitcoin has been mined, the heat recycled, and the sn pontifications posted. What this means is that the "profitability" of home miners on any given day is actually related to the current "price" of bitcoin on the date that one has to sell it to pay the electric bill. For example:

Here's a website I like to go to when I'm too lazy to do the math on a miner's profitability myself. Whenever I've checked it, it's been basically correct. BUT, that's if I'm assuming that I have to pay my electric bill in fiat the same day that I do my mining it sats. This isn't the case though. In reality, if I have a miner that makes 250 (pic below) sats a day, I can get those sats from my pool immediately through the lightning network. According to the calculator, I'm paying 20 cents for those sats, so I'm paying 210 sats in electricity as of the time of this writing. BUT that's not really the case. I'm actually going to pay for that electricity on January 1st. So, by the time I'm paying, if the "price" of bitcoin has risen, I'm selling less sats out of my earnings.

What's the point? You should be home mining. It's not just good for the network, it's a way to be a real-life time bandit! You'll be like the Terminator, but with arbitrage. ...kind of like a Robin Hood Terminator.

Actual Picture of Home Miner in 2024 - The Robinator

Also, my Braiins Boiler Room now lets you see how many sats each of your miners are specifically contributing to your mining revenue.

Also, also, after watching this video, I've just been stuffing my s9 into my air intake after everyone goes to bed at night. I remove it in the morning to put back in the garage. It's a much cheaper alternative to the s19 he demonstrates with here and the noise doesn't disturb anyone since it's just become my after-hours furnace.

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50 sats \ 2 replies \ @denlillaapan 25 Nov

totally.

In reverse, it means a falling BTC price resulting in worse profitability.

But yeah, I take the time arbitrage point: in expectations that value-now vs cost-paid-later phenomenon should make you value the home-mined sats a little bit extra.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @jasonb OP 25 Nov

In reverse, it means a falling BTC price resulting in worse profitability. Touché

Yeah, I just think this is significant for the, "you're better off buying bitcoin," crowd. Well, they can pay the market rate today, or they can mine and pay the market rate tomorrow after getting the sats today. But yeah, for sure, it totally works the other way around when the dollar is taking back ground.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @denlillaapan 25 Nov

Yeah but in expectations we think that trade (sats today, electricity bill in a month+) should help us more and more often than it would hurt us

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @SwapMarket 25 Nov

Is this serious? Just 3k sats ($3) per day with 12 miners?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @jasonb OP 25 Nov

Is this serious?

Absolutely! Here is my journey on this topic: #629837 #735779 #767748 #776023

TLDR: the biggest existential threat to Bitcoin is mining pool centralization. I store my family's wealth in bitcoin, thus I want to see more mining pool decentralization.

If the top four mining pools possess 624Eh/s, as they do at the time of this comment, then 10 million people need to run itty-bitty operations like mine (and mine to other pools) to equal that much. HOWEVER, see below for why I think this is actually a realistic expectation.

Just 3k sats ($3) per day with 12 miners?

Not exactly. I'm mining not just to secure the network, but to recycle the heat. When you take into account that my furnace can cost me up to $36 a day, we're actually looking at $39 a day. Also, as much hassle as mining maintenance can be, it's actually at least simple enough that I can do it myself safely, which is not true of larger issues with my furnace.

However, these little guys aren't actually powerful enough to take care of business in the coldest part of the winter. I'm still at the experimental phase of all this, and haven't sunk serious money into it yet. However, with three s21s (or equivalent), hooked into an actual HVAC, we're looking at 10X the hashing, 10X the profits, and probably 100X the incentive for people to take this approach.