Calculating Mining Profitability

So you have your eyes set on that cool new Baikal Mini Miner (ASIC ~150Mhs)… But you are wondering if you can justify the cost?

After all, you want to get your “Return on your Investment” (ROI). Right?

So, before you plop down your hard earned cash, you will want to do some homework to ensure that your mining effort will be able to pay for itself. And maybe, make a little extra cash in the process.

 Understanding DASH Difficulty

There are a lot of Profitability Calculators on the internet for Bitcoin mining. These calculators will help you to calculate and forecast your profitability, over time, from your mining efforts. In addition, anyone with a basic understanding of spreadsheets could also build out a fairly accurate forecast model of their mining profits.

To calculate profitability all you need to know are the answers to a few basic variables used in the calculation. They are;

• Your Miner Hardware Cost
• The Hash Rate of your Miner
• The Power Consumption of your Miner
• The Cost of the Power
• Pool Fee's or other Miscellaneous Costs
• Current Bitcoin Difficulty
• Projected Bitcoin Difficulty Increase
• The Block Reward (of each found block)
• Current Conversion Rate (BTC/USD)

Given the above known variables we can easily calculate our projected profitability for Bitcoin. Since Bitcoin's difficulty adjusts every 11 days, if the bitcoin difficulty adjusted today, I know what the difficulty will be for the next 11 days. In addition, it was almost certain that bitcoin's difficulty was always going to rise, it is just a matter of guessing the % increase the difficulty would rise.

By forecasting your estimated difficulty increase, along with other variables, it was fairly easy to generate a forecast over a 30 – 120 day spectrum of what your profitability might be.

Knowing your potential profitability makes your ASIC buying decision easier.

The DASH (X11) algorithm, is designed so that difficulty is adjusted after every block found!

With DASH, difficulty adjustments make forecasting future profitability almost impossible!

There are a lot of factors that go into the calculation of a block's difficulty, including total hash rate, speed at which the previous block was found, miner efficiency, and a host of other variables. Hence, calculating future profitability of DASH, over time, is nearly impossible to do.

The recent release of ASIC machines has made this even more impossible. Just look at the picture above (Network Difficulty – Past Year) of what the recent introduction of ASIC machines did to the DASH difficulty numbers.

No one could have forecasted the impacts that ASIC miners would have on DASH difficulty.

Now add to the fact of how DASH's difficulty fluctuates so wildly, based on all of the variables that go into it's calculation. And you have a mixture for a statistical nightmare!

Just in the past month alone, the difficulty range has been anywhere from ~8000 to ~21,000!

“In our opinion, trying to forecast future profitability of mining efforts with DASH is virtually impossible.”

However, there are still some good “Current” profitability calculators available on the internet for DASH. One of our favorite is the CoinWarz Dash Profitability Calculator. This calculator makes it to the top of our list because it includes the option to add your Hardware costs into the calculation.

Other good calculators, like CryptoCompare DASH Calculator, do a good job in calculating your profits, but do not include the hardware cost option in their calculation.

Summary

If you are thinking about getting into DASH mining and contemplating spending money on an ASIC machine. Only spend money that you can afford to loose or live without.
Remember, cryptocurrency mining is an investment, and like all investments, you should be prepared to win or lose!