Should You Mine?

The obvious question for most when deciding whether or not to utilise computing power for cryptocurrency mining will be a simple cost versus reward calculation, which we’ll get to, but there are other considerations you might want to take account of.

For most people reading this, the key issue will be to do with the impact that mining has undoubtedly had on the hardware market. The increased demand for graphics cards in particular has pushed up end-user costs, leaving those who just want to game struggling to find stock of new cards and paying over the odds when they do. There’s even an argument that it’s affected other areas by pushing up the costs of associated manufacturing materials within the supply chain like PCBs, memory and capacitors. Buying multiple cards specifically to mine clearly contributes to this, but if you are already buying or already own a graphics card primarily for gaming, it’s less of a factor.

Other ethical issues relate to the fact that cryptocurrency mining is very energy intensive; it has impacted energy consumption on a global scale. Furthermore, cryptocurrencies are often used to facilitate illicit activities like money laundering, drug dealing, and worse. Your personal contribution to either of these will be essentially irrelevant, of course, and regarding the latter point it’s not as if regular currency isn’t also used for all manner of bad things, but there’s still a “guilty by association” element you might want to be aware of.

Assuming you’re comfortable with mining cryptocurrencies, the decision then becomes a balancing decision that takes into account the cost of the hardware and energy consumption versus the expected value in “real” currency terms. Remember, though, that the value of cryptocurrencies is highly volatile and subject to huge swings both upwards and downwards, which will impact any calculations you’ve made.

For upfront costs, the primary investment is going to be the graphics card or cards, but you will naturally need a system capable of running them. Most people will be able to just use their existing systems, but you can certainly go the route of building mining-specific machines thanks to motherboards built to handle numerous graphics cards via multiple PCIe x1 connectors and riser cables, which then saves on costs for multiple instances of CPU and RAM.

With potential upfront costs established, you also need to look at the cost of mining in terms of energy consumption and trade this off with what you can expect to be making. For this, we will need to look at the power consumption and hash rate for mining a variety of coins.