Can You Still Mine Bitcoin at Home?

Your slice is a division problem

Expected earnings are one line of arithmetic: your hashrate ÷ the network's hashrate × 144 blocks/day × 3.125 BTC. The division is literally your drawers against the world's. Your machine is rated in TH/s (trillions), the network in EH/s — and one EH/s is a million TH/s. The 144 × 3.125 is the subsidy from lesson 3. 1 BTC = 100,000,000 sats. No secrets, no signup, and the denominator is public — watch it live. Worked honestly for the two ends of the home spectrum:

The three realistic home paths

A real ASIC. An S21-class machine is a serious appliance: the spec sheet says 75 dB — vacuum-cleaner loud, around the clock. It draws 84 kWh a day and exhausts ~12,000 BTU/hr of heat — a space heater that pays back some of the bill. Electrically it wants a dedicated 240 V circuit (~14.6 A; a standard US 120 V outlet can't legally feed it — have an electrician confirm yours). Real machine, real money, real logistics.

A desk miner. A Bitaxe-class open-source miner draws 18 W — light-bulb territory — runs near-silent, and earns tens of sats on an average day. Its honest pitch is education plus a lottery ticket, and the lottery is real: a single stock Bitaxe was reported to solo-mine block 889,975 in March 2025, collecting the whole prize. Your neighbors will never hear it, and everything in this school becomes hands-on.

Not your PC. A gaming computer produces effectively zero competitive SHA-256 hashrate — it would burn real watts to earn dust. No mockery; it's simply a different sport, and the next lesson shows the numbers.

Is it worth it? Two numbers — neither is on this page

“Worth it” comes down to two numbers: your power price ($/kWh — only you and your utility bill know it) times the machine's efficiency (J/TH — energy burned per trillion drawers pulled; the spec sheet knows it). We publish no verdict here — we don't know your meter, and any page that hands you one anyway is guessing. The rig pages take your power price and compute your actual number for 20 real machines, live. The industry compresses this whole question into one number, $/TH/day — that's the hashprice lesson, one module up.

Solo or pool, in one breath

Pool = lesson 3's search party: every find is split in proportion to drawers pulled, so pay arrives salary-shaped — a steady drip, minus a pool fee (how pools work). Solo = searching alone for the whole find: lottery-shaped — nothing for years, then a whole block. At today's network, one S21 solo expects a block roughly every 97 years; one Bitaxe, every 16,200 years. Those are averages — and the network historically grows, so real waits skew longer. That's the honest shape of a lottery whose jackpot is the tile above.

The part your living room finds out about

Heat and noise, not math, are what actually end most home-mining experiments. Ducting, enclosures, immersion, heating-your-house-with-it — the school's Home Ops module covers all of it when you're ready. For now: the physics receipts above are the honest preview.

FAQ

Can you still mine bitcoin at home?

Yes — any ASIC earns its exact share of the rewards, no permission needed. The share is the catch: a 200 TH/s flagship holds roughly a five-millionth of the 1,000+ EH/s network of late 2026. Small slice, real slice.

How much bitcoin can you mine at home per day?

Your TH/s ÷ network TH/s × 144 × 312.5M sats. A desk miner: tens of sats a day. A flagship ASIC: thousands. The live numbers for 20 real machines are on the rigs page.

Is it too late to mine bitcoin?

Too late on a laptop, yes — that era ended over a decade ago. Too late, period? No: every machine still earns its exact share, and a lone desk miner was reported to solo-mine block 889,975 in March 2025. The real question is your electricity price.

Is mining on a gaming PC worth the electricity?

No — effectively zero competitive terahash, real watts, dust for revenue; the economics fail before capability even matters. The next lesson has the autopsy.