Litecoin Mining
This Blog Post was originally published on adagia.org.
As promised, the post about Litecoin mining. :)
Years back (2018 or so) I bought a Bitmain Antminer L3++. Don't worry if you don't understand it, it is basically a cryptocurrency mining device based on the "scrypt" algorithm (LTC, DOGE) (BTC uses SHA-256 for comparison).
Back then I didn't pay for electricity in the old Apartment, so it was a no-brainer to set this device up as it was mining pure profits (well, besides the buy price).
Recently I was browsing Reddit and stumbled upon r/litecoinmining. Somehow I thought I should take a look if it was profitable in the new Apartment (where I now have to pay for electricity).
I did a bunch of calculations and came to the conclusion 1 kWh would cost me 0,1495€. I entered this number (and a few higher ones, for example 0,2€/kWh) into the probability calculators and it turned out, it would be indeed profitable.
After some more calculations, I ended up with a surplus of about 4€ per day. And as a nice side effect, the Apartment would be partially heated which would drive down my heating costs.
Since I didn't trust my calculations fully I did a few tests overnight. My calculations were confirmed.
The question now is, how long will it be profitable and why the hell is it even profitable?
On how long I can only estimate at least a few months (although I currently don't have the machine running as I need to build something so it isn't as loud (around 60 to 70dB).
On why I didn't find a definite answer. It looks like a bunch of mining equipment is currently on its way from China to the USA as China did ban cryptocurrencies as a whole. So it seems like there is a lack of calculation power which brings down the "difficulty" of mining. Which brings more "single" miners back into the game again.
Will it be profitable long term? Definitely not, but I should be able to mine a few extra Euros in the upcoming months. Maybe it will be enough so the initial cost of the miner would finally be mined.
Let's see how it goes.