What’s causing my miner to generate fewer sats daily?

I’ve got a Futurebit Apollo miner that runs at around 3TH. I picked it up about a year and a half back. At first, it was pulling in roughly 1,000 sats a day. But lately, I've noticed the numbers dropping. Now, it's down to about 600 sats daily. What’s the deal with this drop? The halving hasn’t happened yet or anything. Also, I’ve been using Braiins pool the whole time. Does that matter?

The halving hasn't happened yet but there are other factors in play that can affect the mining revenue such as the Bitcoin total hashrate which has been on the rise over time. It's definitely higher than it was a half a year a go. Look at this chart for example - https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#3y

It has nothing to do with the halving. The more miners mine, the less shares you'll get. Let's say the total hashrate for mining bitcoin is 1000 th/s in the world and yours is 10 th/s. You get 1% of the total block prize on average. When the total hash rate doubles (2000 th/s) and yours stay at 10 th/s, you'll get 0.5% of the block rewards on average in the long term. Since there are more and more miners start mining every day, unless you increase your mining power too, you'll always get less satoshis... For this exact reason mining don't make sense for home miners. You have limited space, you have limited budget, you have high electricity costs. You cannot compete.

Learn to use a calculator https://whattomine.com/asic The more miners who mine Bitcoin, the less profit you get if your hashrate remains constant. Look at the reports of large mining companies and think about investing in this business https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5473513.0 3TH in Bitcoin mining has a very small hashrate, and I doubt that such mining is profitable.

Your question = what is mining difficulty ? You should read this: https://www.bitcoinmining.com/what-is-bitcoin-mining-difficulty/ https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty Difficulty is increasing as much as people are adding hashpower to the total network hashrate. Difficulty can decrease too, if the total hashrate is decreasing. You can look at the total hashrate for the last 3 years: As you know, more hashrate = higher difficulty in order to keep a 10 minutes block interval. So, for the same given hashrate, higher difficulty = your part of block rewards drops

Bingo!

Thank you all for the responses. I like having a miner to support the network, and get KYC free coin... Even if I am only breaking even, or taking a small loss. Pretty soon I think I will end up selling the rig. Anyone know of a miner that mines quietly similar to the futurebit Apollo, but with more hash?

Six CPU Cores. 44 ASIC Cores. 1TB NVMe Based SSD Drive. Quiet. Less than 200 Watts of Power. Made in the USA. This is what the Future of Bitcoin looks like. https://shop.futurebit.io/products/pre-order-apollo-btc-a-bitcoin-asic-miner-and-desktop-class-computer-running-a-full-node-and-much-more-batch-1-ships-in-late-april-to-may This is a bad device for mining bitcoins. Better buy a good video card for $700 and mine bitcoins on NiceHash. With a graphics card, you will always have more options.

Yeah the new apollo is very costly for its hash rate and its power efficiency. A two card gpu rig costs less and earns more.

With the Ethereum mining which was so profitable with GPUs long gone. How do those Nice hash folks break even? I have never thought about platforms like Nicehash before.

Have you checked Heatbit? It claim to offer 8-10 TH/s speed with <40 db noise. But since it's multipurpose device, don't expect much. Based on https://www.whattomine.com/, it should be possible for break even. But it heavily depends on few coins which have low market cap.

Doesn't Nicehash only pay with Bitcoin? From their profitability page, it seems like even RTX 4090 is only earning less than $2 a day. Maybe they run other things to make their device profitable, or their energy cost is low, to begin with? It is really hard to understand why anyone would provide their device for such low profitability if they can't offset the cost.

Yes. Aside from low electricity cost, i'd speculate it's dominated by exiting miner (who used to mine ETH) who aim to either, 1. Squeeze all money they could get from their GPU. 2. Hoping those unpopular PoW coin might be enough to make break even. Although on those case, selling their GPU is probably more sensible option. I also hear people who works on AI sometimes looks for used Nvidia GPU.

Interesting experience with your Futurebit Apollo miner. The decrease in daily Satoshi earnings could be due to increased Bitcoin network difficulty and potential wear and tear on your mining hardware over time. Also, mining with the Braiins pool could impact your earnings due to different reward structures and fees. Exploring alternative pools or mining settings might help improve your mining performance.

I see. So some of them probably hold the belief that getting crypto is still better compared to cashing out their GPU right now. I heard the same thing regarding Nvidia GPU. IIRC, the US government even told them to stop selling their GPUs to China due to its AI capabilities. Looks like companies are buying them to take part in the AI race. If I had an Nvidia GPU, selling to them would look like a better deal compared to renting my computing power to Nicehash. On the other hand, companies can also save money if they just use the cloud to get their computing power. Easier to manage to, since they don't need to build a dedicated space for that. CMIIW.

If you look at the profit of the NVIDIA RTX 4090 video card, which has recently been in the range of 2.5-5 dollars, then this is a good indicator if the problem with cooling these video cards is solved. And on good days, the profit reached 15 dollars per day. But unlike ASIC, such a video card is a very liquid product on the market.

Not profitable for those who mine using GPU but for ASIC if you already have an ASIC unit and have a cheap Electricity rate it should be profitable plus they get incentives these days due to high transaction fees. Here's the list of ASIC units and daily profit below. - https://whattomine.com/miners

I don't know much but what I would say is your miner is out of date technology gets better all the time. What I would do is update your machine.

To update ASICs, you first need to pay off your old equipment. And the payback will very much depend on the cost of electricity, otherwise you will constantly invest all your profits in mining equipment.Therefore, Bitcoin mining will not always be profitable for a small novice miner.