Bitcoin's hash rate hits 380 million TH, leaving small miners in the dust

I saw an S19 pro with 110TH on ebay for around $1975. I’ve got the cash for some budget mining gear, but honestly, this news about hash rates is a real bummer. It seems like I won’t get rich mining crypto, so it’s probably not worth jumping in. To even get to 1% of Bitcoin's total hash, I'd need 34,500 of these S19 Pro's. That would cost me about $51M if each one is $1500. These big mining operations are running huge farms, cranking out insane amounts of hash power. Who’s actually running these places? How do they make money? It feels kinda unfair that they’re hoarding so much Bitcoin for themselves, but hey, it’s a free market. It's just business.

The solution is to join a mining pool. In a mining pool, a group of miners work together with sharing their power over a network and in this way, they increase the chance of finding blocks. The block reward that is earned by a mining pool is shared among the miners according to the power owned by each of them.

I mean, they do spend way more than individual miners, that's just the nature of how the market works. It happens in PoS blockchain, masternodes, and so on. It is inevitable that those with a lot of money can spend and earn more than retail users. If big spending doesn't equal more profit, I don't think mining would be as interesting for them. CMIIW. Fortunately, there is a solution as mentioned above.

For me personally, it's more profitable to just buy Bitcoin and HODL, than to spend on mining it.

What's really important isn't owning "1% of the total hashrate" or more, what's important is that your mining reward is greater than your infrastructure and electricity costs (once your ASICs are paid off). It's indeed a complex calculation, bearing in mind that in around 300 days we'll be heading for a new halving. However, if your electricity is dirty cheap, and you have access to good prices for your ASICs, you can do as suggested above and join a mining pool. As long as you're profitable, no matter what scale you organize your mining operation at, you're profitable. And that's all that matters. If owning 1% of the total hashrate were a simple thing, we'd know about it, and it's long been out of anyone's reach (especially private individuals who mine at home).

When Bitcoin was still so low in price and mining rewards were huge in Bitcoin terms (50 BTC, 25 BTC), some people who mined back in the day still thought it was not worth it but today after the rise of Bitcoin price over the years. 50 BTC is huge! The same applies in the current situation, what you feel might be small mining rewards from your rig could be a big thing in the next decade but this only benefits those who HODL. Not everyone gets to keep the Bitcoins they have earned for many years. When investing in mining, one shouldn't think about being a millionaire in a year or two. It's just a business venture like any other. Sometimes you win after a long time of patience, sometimes you lose, etc.

If you have keep power. A good gear supply. A good repair guy. Mining makes money. Or crypto. It is active income involving work. Buy and hold is higher risk with higher reward or loss. It is truly passive income.

The Bitcoin reward remains constant, but as more miners join and contribute computing power, mining difficulty increases. This adjustment happens every two weeks to maintain a 10-minute block generation time. Miners with larger investments have an advantage due to more powerful hardware, making it harder for smaller investors to compete for rewards in proportion to their investment.

You're making it sound like it's a waste of time for everyone in the world to grow food because Cargill Meat has 10 million cattle and General Mills has god knows how many acres of farmland, so just give up! It doesn't work like this, if you have dirt cheap electricity you can easily compete with the large companies because you don't need to pay employees, you don't need to pay rent or security, and most importantly you have no shareholders that need to have a return on top of that. Also, the price of that miner means also nothing, it's the return that counts, if it were 100$ and it would have earned you 10 cents a day it would have been better? No! And you would be making $307704 a day, which in most industries you will not even come close.

You still need to have access to 112 megawatts per hour. You don't plug all those ASICs into your home outlet If you post investments to build the necessary infrastructure for mining, then you don't want to do it. But if you can start mining, then the profit will be already on the 2nd day of work.

Why do you think it's not fair? The big guys are probably mining veterans and spent years mining, they have invested huge money and facing enormous risk due to Bitcoin price volatility, mining gear depreciation, hash rate fluctuations etc. So it's pretty fair: the more you invest, the more risk you take, the more you can possibly earn.

That's fair enough for mining hardware owners. A good solution. It's an idea for people who've funds at their disposal. I can't be alone as one of the people who doesn't have large amounts of money. Earning mining reward shares while competition's tough irrespective of 1% you're right. I can't be alone wishing I'd entered mining years ago. If the clouds open pouring money on me it won't be easy deciding buying bitcoins or mining hardware to join pools.

It is nothing new, small miners died long time ago. If you have any thoughts of mining bitcoin, just forget it. Buy bitcoin instead and you will have far greater returns and the best part is, you won't have the headache of maintaining miners. Mining didn't make sense back in the day when the hashrate was a lot lower than this and now it is complete non-sense. Leave mining to the big boys and buy bitcoin if you want to make any money from crypto.

Of course, many people would have liked to start mining earlier. If you look at what the block reward will be in 5 or 10 BTC halvings, you can still come to the conclusion that in the future, people will still be having this argument and would have started mining today if they could. It's endless reasoning. It would be up to you to make the calculations, depending on the price of the ASICs you have at your disposal, the price of your electricity, and your ability to take some risks or not. It's a debate we regularly see here or elsewhere (on Reddit for example), the famous 'buying vs mining'. There is no general answer to this question, as each person has a different situation, a different approach to risk, and a different ability to organize a profitable mining operation.

I'd be a prince in my country if earned that a day. You're typing numbers that someone like me shouldn't dare dream about. My home can't handle any ASICs. If I had a few miners the infrastructure expense wouldn't allow a farm to exist so it isn't going to happen. Regrettably the expenses required aren't available they won't ever be. I don't have any thoughts of mining bitcoin now but it wasn't bad to read opinions. I'll leave mining to the big boys because they've invested big so buying's the best advice given today thanks. I've got a small amount of btc but it isn't enough to be considered as investment. I'll create my services thread to offer web development for BTC payments. I'm having 97 merits so I'll apply for campaigns when I collect 100. Over time I'll increase my bitcoins I'm looking to a crypto future.

Yeah, but you would be a price in the first place by having $50 mils to invest. But again, as I said, you don't need 1% you could be happy with 0.01%, and you can be making a profit even with 1 single gear after all that's what mining is all about, you need to ROI as fast as you can, not the amount of hashrate you have, the % in returns counts. It's the same for every single business out there, if you don't have the money you will not be able to make more money, except if your plan is winning the lottery or hitting 80000:1 gamble on horses at Ascot. No they didn't, they have gone way lower in numbers and in the percentage of hashrate owned by it's not like they've gone all of them extinct and this board is the proof of it.

I'll admit I won't have financial strength to buy mining hardware that's going to make me wealthy. My income won't allow me to buy them that's my situation so I'll try joining signature campaigns & offer web dev services. Existing mining farms will happy they've got a foot in the field because they've done the ground work but new entries to farm mining will face technical issues before they're established. Thanks for comments. I'll lock the thread.