Bitcoin Miner Called $5.68 Cost for 50 BTC a Loss — 16 Years Later, That Reward Is Worth Millions

In a Bitcoin forum post dated Sep. 7, 2010, reposted 16 years later, BTC▲$62,630.00 mining economics in that year are described. According to the poster TTBit, a miner would take on average 338 hours to mine a block and pay 5.68 dollars for electricity, making the miner “a net loser”.

This assumes a 140-watt computer running around the clock for two weeks, which would consume approximately 47.33 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity, which at $0.12 per kWh would cost $5.68. However, while the math is correct, that does not mean that the cost of mining 50 BTC is constant.

Bitcoin mining was already probabilistic: TTBit’s time of 338 hours was an expectation based on a hash rate of 2.2 megahashes per second and the network difficulty at the time. For the miner, a block could be found a minute after them, much later, or not at all.

This does not include equipment, cooling, connectivity, and other costs. Pooling computing power in mining pools helped to reduce the variance of payouts, but not the underlying expected return economics of mining.

In 2010, things were different: The Bitcoin protocol still offered a 50 BTC subsidy as a reward for each valid block, and the market itself was less deep and standardized.