LemonTrades
TL;DR
- Yes. About 450 new bitcoin are mined every day, at 3.125 per block since the April 2024 halving.
- A modern 200 TH/s machine would earn about 0.000086 BTC a day, worth the live amount below, before pool fees.
- It uses about 84 kWh a day. At the US average home price of about 18¢ per kWh, that’s about $15, more than it earns unless bitcoin is near $178,000.
- LemonTrades tells you what moved bitcoin, and why, as it happens, with alerts on sharp moves.
Mining pays whoever adds each new block to bitcoin’s ledger. The catch is that you’re competing with warehouses of machines on cheap power.
How the math works
Your share of new bitcoin equals your share of the network’s computing power. A 200 TH/s machine is about 0.00002% of a network running about 1,050 EH/s, so it earns about that share of the 450 bitcoin mined each day. A machine like this draws about 3,500 watts.
| Electricity price | Power a day | Break-even bitcoin price |
|---|---|---|
| 5¢ per kWh, large mining farms | $4.20 | About $49,000 |
| 9.6¢, US industrial average | $8.10 | About $94,500 |
| 18¢, US home average | $15.25 | About $178,000 |
Before the cost of the machine itself, which runs to thousands of dollars, and before cooling. Electricity prices are from the EIA for August 2026.
Can you mine alone?
You can, but a single 200 TH/s machine would find a block on its own about once every 100 years on average. Most miners join a pool, which shares out rewards steadily. Now and then a tiny solo miner does win a whole block, which is closer to a lottery ticket than a plan.
It gets harder over time
- Every four years, the reward halves. The next halving, expected in 2028, cuts it to 1.5625 per block.
- Network difficulty rose 5.54% on October 29 to about 148 trillion, so each machine earns less.
- Miners’ income per unit of computing, called hashprice, was about $33 per PH/s per day on November 2.
Simpler ways to own bitcoin
Buying bitcoin directly, or through a spot ETF, avoids the machines, noise and power bills. See should you buy bitcoin now and why bitcoin is falling. Some coins can’t be mined at all: see can you mine XRP.
Sources
- CryptoSlate: bitcoin mining difficulty and hashprice
- Pickaxe: bitcoin hashrate holds steady
- EIA: average price of electricity by sector
- Wikipedia: Bitcoin network
Education, not financial advice. Crypto can fall sharply and you can lose all of your money. See our disclaimer.
