Bitcoin mining calculator, built for Texas power

How is Bitcoin mining profitability calculated?

In one formula: your share of the network, times the daily issuance, valued at the price, minus your costs. A machine's hashrate share is its terahashes per second divided by the whole network's — currently around 1,070 EH/s.^[2] The network mints a fixed daily issuance of the 3.125-BTC block subsidy across about 144 blocks, so a miner earns that issuance in proportion to its share. Multiply the Bitcoin mined by the BTC price for gross revenue, subtract the pool fee and the cost of the electricity drawn (watts, converted to kWh per day, times your rate), and what remains is net operating profit. The calculator above runs exactly that math, live, from the numbers you enter.

Why does the electricity rate matter more than the machine?

Because every competitive miner buys roughly the same ASICs, but the power bill is where Texas is won or lost. Hold the Bitmain Antminer S21 XP fixed and change only the rate: at an industrial 4.5¢/kWh contract it nets about $4.67 a day; drag the rate up to the residential meter and the same rig runs at a loss. That is the whole reason the industry migrated to West Texas: the ERCOT energy-only market produces some of the cheapest around-the-clock power in America, and a miner that can power down in seconds buys it at the bottom.^[6] The break-even power price the calculator reports — near 10¢/kWh in the worked example — is the number to negotiate your contract against.

What does the Texas calculator leave out?

Deliberately, the things that are site-specific and the things that flatter the result. It leaves out transaction-fee revenue (small in most blocks, but real), and it leaves out the costs that turn a spreadsheet profit into a thinner real one: cooling and immersion overhead, hosting or colocation margin, repairs, hardware depreciation, financing, and taxes. Most important for Texas, it leaves out demand-response and curtailment credits — the payments ERCOT and power contracts make to miners for shutting off when the grid is stressed. Those credits are the other half of a real Texas miner's income, and they are specific to each site's contract, so no general calculator can model them. In August 2023, Riot Platforms earned $31.7 million in power and demand-response credits — more than triple the value of the 333 Bitcoin it mined that month.^[7] Read how that market works on Bitcoin mining and ERCOT.

How should I read the payback number?

As the most optimistic figure on the page, and the one to trust least. Hardware payback divides the machine's purchase price by today's daily profit — but today's profit will not hold, because network difficulty rises. As hashrate comes online, Bitcoin retargets difficulty every 2,016 blocks to keep blocks ten minutes apart, so a fixed rig wins a shrinking slice of the same issuance over time.^[1] A payback of 300 days assumes the next 300 days look like today; they rarely do. Treat payback as a ceiling on how fast capital returns, not a promise — and weigh it against buying the Bitcoin directly, which carries none of the depreciation, downtime, or difficulty risk.

The honest counterweight

Any mining calculator, this one included, is a snapshot that looks like a forecast. It freezes three things that never hold still — price, difficulty, and your power rate — and projects them in a straight line out to a year. The straight line is almost always wrong: difficulty has trended relentlessly up, price swings violently in both directions, and a spot power rate is not a signed contract. The calculator is genuinely useful for one job — comparing machines and power rates against each other under identical assumptions — and genuinely misleading for another: predicting what you will actually earn. If the output talks you into a purchase, you have used it backwards. Use it to reject setups whose break-even power price you cannot beat, and to understand why Texas miners obsess over the off switch instead of the hashrate.