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Here’s Exactly How I Built My Crypto Mining Computer
And exactly how much it earns
When I published a piece in Debugger earlier this year about mining bitcoin using any PC, tons of people were excited to follow my instructions and grab a tiny chunk of crypto coins for themselves. But as much as readers enjoyed mining bitcoin on their existing PCs, I heard from many of you who wanted to learn more about how mining works.
Specifically, they wanted to know exactly how I built my dedicated mining computer (crypto people call mining computers “rigs”). And they wanted a breakdown of how much profit my rig actually earns, taking into account today’s bitcoin prices, the rig’s power consumption, my electric costs, and more. Here are detailed answers to those questions.
The hardware
The backbone of any mining computer is its graphics card or GPU. GPUs are uniquely suited to mining — so much so that GPU companies like Nvidia are now producing specialized GPUs just to serve the mining market.
Many professional crypto miners stuff 10 or more GPUs into their mining rig, and some rigs use as many as 78 GPUs. I’m an experimenter and journalist, not a professional miner. So I built my PC around a single GPU — the Nvidia GTX 1070.
Even that one GPU was extremely hard to find. Cryptocurrencies are booming right now, and the market for GPUs is incredibly tight. When I built my mining PC in 2018, there was a similar (though smaller) boom taking place, and I had to shop around for about two weeks to find a 1070 I could actually buy. I finally found one at my local Best Buy.
A lot of big-box electronics stores sell GPUs to gamers. Chipmaker NVIDIA reportedly directed stores like Best Buy to keep cards out of…
