Bitcoin mining isn’t what it used to be. We remember the time when people would mine from their laptops in their college dorms. Those days are long gone. Now, if you want to mine profitably, you have got to do your homework and crunch some serious numbers before dropping thousands on equipment.
We have seen way too many people at Keep Hashing jump into mining without understanding the actual costs. Some get lucky with timing. Most end up with expensive paperweights humming away in their garage, costing more in electricity than they will ever make back.
The difference between success and failure? Running the numbers first. Really running them, not just plugging figures into some sketchy online calculator and hoping for the best.
Why Those Free Online Calculators Are Lying to You
Look, we are not saying every mining calculator is garbage. But most of them, They are giving you fantasy numbers.
They assume Bitcoin’s price will stay exactly where it is today. It will not. They pretend network difficulty is frozen in time. It isn’t adjusted every couple of week. And they treat your electricity bill like its simple math. Trust us, once you factor in cooling, voltage fluctuations, and peak rate charges, it gets complicated fast.
What you need is a calculation that expects things to change. Because they will. Constantly.
The Five Things That Actually Determine If You will Make Money
Let’s talk about what really matters.
Hash rate is basically how much computational muscle your miner has. More hash rate means better odds of earning Bitcoin, but it also means you are paying more upfront and burning more power. The newest ASIC miners in 2026 can push over 400 TH/s, while older models might only do 100 TH/s. There is a reason the old ones are cheaper.
Power consumption is the silent killer. Your miner does not sleep. It does not take breaks. It’s running full throttle every single second of every day. A typical setup pulling 3,500 watts will chew through 84 kilowatt-hours daily. In most places, that’s $200-300 a month just keeping the lights on, except it’s not lights, it’s one extremely hot, extremely loud box.
Electricity cost is everything. I mean it. You can be in Texas paying $0.05 per kilowatt-hour, or you can be in California paying $0.30. That’s a 6x difference. Entire mining operations live or die on this number alone. If you’re paying residential rates above twelve cents per kWh, you should probably stop reading right now and just buy Bitcoin instead.
Network difficulty goes up almost every adjustment period. More miners join, better equipment hits the market, and suddenly your slice of the pie gets smaller. We are at all-time highs in 2026, which means competition has never been fiercer.
Bitcoin’s price is the variable you cannot control but desperately wish you could. Mining looks brilliant when Bitcoin hits $95,000. It looks catastrophic when it drops to $40,000. You need to be ready for both scenarios, and everything in between.
Let’s Actually Calculate What You Would Make Daily
We use real numbers from a real miner people are buying right now.
The Antminer S21 Pro does about 234 TH/s while eating 3,510 watts. Bitcoin’s sitting around $95,000 as we write this, and network difficulty is somewhere near 115 trillion.
Here is the formula everyone should know:
Daily BTC = (Your Hash Rate / Network Hash Rate) × Daily BTC Mined
The whole network is running at roughly 800 EH/s, mining about 450 Bitcoin total per day. Your 234 TH/s? That’s a tiny fraction—about 0.00003% of the network. Works out to maybe 0.00013 BTC per day. At today’s prices, that’s around $12.35.
Sounds okay, right? Hold on.
Now Let’s Talk About What It Actually Costs to Run This Thing
Your miner runs 24/7/365. The electricity meter never stops spinning.
Daily Power Cost = (Watts × 24 hours) / 1000 × Electricity Rate
So that S21 Pro at 3,510 watts with electricity at $0.10/kWh costs you: (3,510 × 24) / 1000 × $0.10 = $8.42 per day
Gross profit? About $3.93 daily. That’s before we get realistic about other costs.
And here is what nobody tells you upfront: cooling costs are brutal. Depending on where you live and how you’ve set things up, you’re adding another 15-30% to your power bill just keeping the miner from melting. Mining pools take their 1-3% cut. Equipment goes down sometimes.
When you add it all up—20% for cooling, 2% pool fees—your actual daily cost is closer to $10.37. Real daily profit? About $1.98.
Yeah. Less than two bucks a day.
Breaking Even Takes Forever
Those S21 Pro costs around $4,500. At $1.98 profit per day, you’re looking at 2,273 days to break even. That is over six years. And that is assuming absolutely nothing changes, which is completely unrealistic.
Bitcoin’s price swings wildly. Difficulty keeps climbing. Your electricity company might raise rates. The hardware itself degrades.
Smart miners run three scenarios minimum:
Best case: Bitcoin pumps 50%, difficulty somehow stays flat. Maybe you break-even in three years.
Realistic case: Bitcoin goes up a bit; difficulty increases 20% over the year. You are probably looking at seven or eight years to break even.
Worst case: Bitcoin crashes 30%, difficulty keeps rising. You might never get your money back. The miner becomes a very expensive space heater.
The Stuff Spreadsheets Don’t Tell You
We have been around mining operations long enough to know that formulas only tell half the story.
Hardware does not last forever at peak performance. These machines run hot and hard. Hash rate typically drops 5-10% each year as components wear out. Some units just die completely before you hit three years. We have seen it happen.
Then there is opportunity cost. That $4,500 could’ve just bought Bitcoin directly. No electricity bills. No maintenance. There is no risk of hardware failure. In plenty of market conditions, you would actually end up with more Bitcoin by just buying and holding instead of mining.
And taxes? Yeah, those are real. In most places, mining income gets taxed as ordinary income at whatever Bitcoin was worth when you mined it. Then if you sell for more later, there’s capital gains on top. It adds up fast and eats into your already-thin margins.
Our Calculator Actually Handles Messy Reality
We built the Keep Hashing calculator because the free ones online are useless for real decision-making.
Ours lets you model what happens when difficulty rises over time. When electricity costs change seasonally. When your hardware starts degrading in year two. When Bitcoin’s price swings 40% in either direction.
You can play with different scenarios and see what’s actually likely to happen instead of what some algorithm thinks might happen in a perfect world that does not exist.
It includes difficulty projections, variable electricity modeling, hardware degradation curves, multiple price scenarios, pool fees, cooling estimates, and break-even analysis that actually makes sense.
Download it. Plug in your real numbers. Be honest with yourself about electricity costs. You will get a picture that is way more accurate than any five-minute online calculator.
When You Should Actually Consider Mining
Mining is not for everyone. Math only works in specific situations.
You need electricity below $0.08/kWh, ideally closer to five cents. You need access to modern, efficient hardware that you can buy at reasonable prices, not inflated pandemic-era rates. You need scale, because running one miner is different from running ten or fifty. And you need patience, because quick paybacks just aren’t happening in 2026.
If you are paying normal residential electricity rates above twelve cents per kWh? Don’t mind. If you cannot afford to tie up capital for years? Don’t mind. If you need profits within twelve months? Definitely don’t mind.
Just buy Bitcoin instead. Seriously.
If the Numbers Work, Here’s How to Win
Say you have run the calculator and somehow the math actually pencils out. Great. Now focus on the details that separate profitable operations from money pits.
Get better electricity rates. Talk to your utility about commercial or industrial contracts. Look into locations with power surplus. Buy hardware when the market dips, ASIC prices crash hard during bear markets. Join pools that balance low fees with actual reliability and good up time. Optimize your cooling setup because wasted electricity on fans and AC units kills your margins. Stay informed about what is happening with difficulty adjustments and halving schedules.
The miners making actual money treat this like a business, not a hobby. They track every expense. They model different scenarios constantly. They adjust when conditions change. They don’t get emotional about Bitcoin’s price.
The Reality of Mining in 2026
Mining Bitcoin has gotten harder every year, and 2026 is no exception. Difficulty keeps climbing. The halving already cut block rewards. Competition for the remaining Bitcoin is fierce.
But it’s not impossible to profit. It just requires you to be smarter about it than 99% of people who jump in blind.
Calculate everything. Model the bad scenarios along with the good ones. Be brutally honest about what electricity actually costs you. Understand that Bitcoin’s price will fluctuate and your equipment will degrade.
Mining can work. But only if your numbers are bulletproof.
Grab the free Keep Hashing Mining Profitability Calculator and run your actual numbers. Takes about five minutes and might save you from an expensive mistake, or help you find a real opportunity everyone else is missing.
The Bitcoin you mine is only valuable if you actually come out ahead after paying for everything. Make absolutely sure the math works before you buy anything.