Minting money from Megawatts
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network for exchanging digital tokens, Bitcoins. Launched in early 2009, there are now 14M of projected 21M Bitcoins in circulation worth $4B in market cap, the annual transaction turnover is $20B.
The Bitcoin network relies on a computationally intensive “hashing” process to clear transactions into the shared transaction ledger, the blockchain, in a process known as mining.
We define a profit function for mining as function of the total network hashrate, miner revenues and technology parameters. Using the profit function, we find the breakeven points, the maximum profitability point, the maximum hashrate and the shortest profitable payback period of the Bitcoin mining network. Finally, we evaluate mining profitability for three generations of Bitcoin mining processors and deployment environments, and predict the future evolution of the mining network.