Mining Profitability: Power Cost, Efficiency, and Downtime
Start with electricity
Ask the first question every operator asks:
What is my all-in cost per kWh?
Retail home rates, industrial tariffs, and stranded-energy deals produce completely different businesses at the same ASIC.
Efficiency: J/TH
Manufacturers quote joules per terahash (J/TH). Lower is better.
Two machines with similar sticker hashrate can have very different monthly power bills. Over a year, that gap often exceeds the difference in purchase price.
Uptime is a multiplier
A machine rated 100 TH/s that runs 80% of the month delivers ~80 TH/s of effective work. Causes of downtime:
- Power events
- Thermal throttling
- Network outages
- Firmware / pool disconnects
- Maintenance queues
Monitoring beats guessing.
Difficulty and price
Even perfect ops face two external dials:
- Network difficulty — competition for the same reward
- BTC price — converts BTC revenue into local currency
Operators stress-test both; they do not assume today’s chart lasts forever.
A simple operator checklist
- Lock in realistic $/kWh (including demand charges)
- Prefer efficient J/TH for your climate
- Instrument uptime and board temps
- Model revenue at lower BTC prices and higher difficulty
- Keep spare PSUs and a maintenance cadence
Bottom line
Mining profitability is less about hype cycles and more about disciplined energy engineering.