Is It Worth Mining Bitcoin? Yes or No?

We'd primarily recommend this post to those readers who have sufficient capital or savings to invest in a device capable of quasi "creating money." This money creation is not an entirely accurate expression since mining has numerous characteristics we wouldn't like to detail now, but one thing is certain... With these devices, you really can "create money."

In many places you can read the simple answer to this question: NO. But nobody really details why not. The most common positions are usually the following:

• these specialized devices quickly become obsolete (which we can't really use for anything else), meaning the Bitcoin Miner(s),
• they consume too much electricity, essentially for unnecessary calculations,
• acquiring them is simply so expensive that the machine we can afford from our pocket money is good for nothing,
• if you try on a small scale with a few machines, you get nowhere, and so on...

Responding to the above four fundamental concerns:

• if we consider that the Bitmain AntMiner S5 device appeared at the end of 2014, then the Bitmain AntMiner S7 sometime around mid-to-late 2015, development can be considered quite fast. However, we shouldn't forget that with the right mindset, alongside the S9 representing the current peak of Bitmain's offerings, there are still many people mining digital currencies with the S5 that don't yet require as much computing capacity as Bitcoin. So? Device development indeed proceeds at a fast pace, but new digital currencies keep multiplying too, and just as the AntMiner S5 was sufficient for Bitcoin in the beginning, it's still adequate for those now. We shouldn't forget, however, that currently the Bitmain AntMiner S9 can be obtained domestically for over 1 million HUF and abroad the prices aren't much better either. In contrast, the S5 and S7 devices are still considered obtainable at acceptable prices now at the beginning of 2018.
• We'd rather not get into the question of wastefully squandered energy. But why? For example, think of a school or city library where visitors arrive with different interests, yet they don't keep saying "I'm only interested in cooking, why are there so many literary books here, why did they even need to print these, wasting energy on them?!" Or similarly, one could say that if we didn't need to turn on lights or watch TV, there'd be no need for electricity. Yes, but let's finally get to the point that this is today's world – like it or not, as long as everything runs on electricity and not rainwater, whatever we do, we consume enormous energy. It's a different question whether we achieve this with cryptocurrencies or with endless Facebook browsing.
• We essentially covered this in the first answer, but I'd add that alongside the big "purpose-built machines," many people still experiment with USB miners for the purpose of learning about the technology, so it's not at all a question of how stuffed with money we are, but rather whether we're open to new things or not. If not, they could give us a USB Miner for 1 HUF and we still wouldn't buy it, but sometimes we don't mind spending one and a half million forints on an AntMiner S9. So then?
• As in most cases, it's both true and not true here too... The question is whether we want to get rich from all this, or just supplement our monthly salary a little, or participate in the birth of something new and hope that if it takes off someday, we'll get something from it too... That's why it matters, because someone whose plan is to collect a few coins in a given cryptocurrency might find even a USB Miner sufficient, but someone who wants to collect tens of thousands of coins daily, even in the more challenging Bitcoin, needs serious financial backing. In Russia, it's not uncommon for someone to buy a complete power plant so they can mine Bitcoin with countless devices in the complex built next to it.

In summary: If we can clarify what we want to achieve in this crypto world and what we want to motivate ourselves with toward reaching our goal, then YES, it's worth jumping in even now in 2018! But if the whole picture doesn't come together in our heads, then it's really better not to start because it will only appear as an unnecessary expense in the end-of-month summary, and that truly makes no sense.

Personally, I'd suggest that anyone interested in the topic can start mining with a tiny USB device or even their own computer – if we trust that someday the cryptocurrency we've backed will "take off," then even if we only have a few units, it will be worth a lot if we want to exchange it for something else. But that should be a continuation of another article.