(Photo : Nick Chong on Unsplash)
Bitcoin mining created a lot of millionaires, but this year miners have been struggling as the bear market coincided with an energy crisis. We will reveal the 5 best ways to make money from BTC mining more efficiently – even during the crypto winter.
How did Bitcoin miners’ income change in 2022?
The profitability of cryptocurrency mining depends on several factors: crypto prices, mining difficulty, initial hardware investment, efficiency of the utilized solutions, and the cost of electricity. In particular, mining difficulty is directly correlated with the network’s overall hashrate (computing power). As more and more miners join, difficulty increases in order to keep the average time needed to mine a Bitcoin block at 10 minutes.
Total Bitcoin hashrate has been growing steadily for the past 10 years. Back when the hashrate was lower, it was easier to make money with crypto mining: even though the prices were lower, the block reward was larger, and finding new blocks was easier.
In 2022, we witnessed a surprising phenomenon: as the price of Bitcoin dropped by 70% and the cost of production soared, the overall hashrate continued to grow, reaching a new ATH on October 5.
Here’s what an expert from BiXBiT Dev Team (a company producing ASIC firmware for overclocking with remote monitoring and immersion cooling systems) has to say:
‘A likely reason is that miners expect the price of Bitcoin to rise in the near future. They are prepared to keep mining with minimal profits or at a loss and accumulate bitcoins, waiting for the next rally. It may not seem likely right now with all the geopolitical uncertainty and the ongoing market crash, but the biggest pumps in crypto always come out of nowhere.’
However, in order to maximize the profits during the next rally, miners should focus on sustainably boosting performance and cutting costs while the bear market lasts.
Mining equipment overclocking
Every mining device has certain limits on power consumption and the so-called memory clock. This, in turn, limits the maximum hashrate – and one’s earnings. One can override these limits by installing custom firmware. Popular firmware brands include:
BiXBiT: increases hashrate by up to 50% and enables downvolting; shipped with an automatic status monitor (for remote control over mining conditions), overheat protection, frequency auto-tuning, and an antivirus. This firmware is designed primarily for mining farms that use immersion cooling but works equally well with fan-cooled farms. Available for Antminer and WhatsMiner with development being done for Avalon and Innosilicon
Mining Software Solution: available for select Antminer models and includes both control settings for stock fans and fan deactivation for immersion cooling systems. For large farms, it has a special batch automation patch that changes the settings of multiple workers.
BiXBiT DEV: Highly qualified team of professional developers focused on creating custom-made firmware solutions based on specific needs and configurations for start-up and scaled farms.
Increasing ASICs’ lifespan
Even the most reliable ASICs, such as Antiminer and WhatsMiner, often break down. According to the statistics collected by the BiXBiT service center, the most common issues include connectors burning out Antminer S9, overly sensitive power blocks for individual equipment models such as WhatsMiner M3X ( PSU don’t like voltage fluctuations). , poor soldering (Antminer S17 and T17), and power stabilization modules (Antminer L3+).
The best solution for these and many other problems is to use a sustainable combination of immersion cooling and a custom software. This can allow an ASIC to keep working and yielding revenues for 100% longer.
Another important benefit that immersion cooling brings is complete elimination of vibration and unequal cooling, which might have a negative effect on the ASIC’s conditions. Let’s see whether such solutions will squeeze out the legacy fans-based architectures.
Replacing fans with immersion cooling systems
All mining devices come with stock fans, which work well enough in top-of-the-range models. However, such fans may cause various problems, generating unwanted vibration and noise, accumulating dust, and, overall, ineffectively cooling the machines as compared to the immersion liquids.
At this year’s Scott’s Mining Conference in Texas, the leading experts agreed that the future of the mining industry lies in this form of cooling. It uses special liquid, which is 1,000+ times more efficient at removing heat than air. This way miners can spend less while maintaining a constant temperature around the equipment, radically increasing their lifespan.
These aren’t the only advantages, however. For example, immersion-cooled containers by BiXBiT increase the hashrate by around 50%. All resulting heat can be recycled – for example, used for heating. Reusing the produced heat allows to cut electricity costs by up to 30% and reduce other cooling-related expenses. In addition, immersion cooling systems help to ensure that the machines operate in a stable manner.
Of course, installing immersion cooling carries a certain cost, but it’s more than compensated by increased profits – especially for bigger mining rigs. As shown in the diagram below, a facility with 240 ASICs makes $130 more in daily profits when using the new technology in comparison with regular air cooling.
What’s next for Bitcoin mining?
The above-mentioned BiXBiT expert has offered this forecast:
‘Like any market, crypto mining moves in cycles – and we may well see a new uptrend much before the crisis in the traditional markets is over. Given the high inflation that quickly devalues stocks, ETFs, and bonds, investors will turn to Bitcoin as a way to preserve their wealth.’
With legacy financial markets going through highly unpredictable times, the outlook for Bitcoin mining is bright. Institutional investors increasingly find mining appealing. Miners are incentivized to invest heavily into highly qualified specialists, charged with developing and maintaining the sustainable mining infrastructure.
A good example of the major changes is the events that took place in 2022 in Texas. The miners that used immersive cooling and other innovative solutions were able to respond to changes in the network difficulty and optimized their operations ahead of time. There was no need to disrupt their work, and operators enjoyed the windfall profits. Other miners faced massive failures of their machines caused by extraordinarily high temperatures.