Bitcoin mining is the backbone of the Bitcoin network. Miners use powerful computers to solve complex mathematical problems, validate transactions, and secure the blockchain. In return, they are rewarded with newly minted bitcoins. But in an increasingly competitive mining landscape, how long does it actually take to mine one whole bitcoin (BTC)?
The Basics of Bitcoin Mining
At its core, Bitcoin mining is a race between miners to be the first to correctly guess a 64-digit hexadecimal number (a "hash") that is less than or equal to a target hash set by the Bitcoin network. The miner who wins this race gets to add the next "block" of verified transactions to the blockchain and is rewarded with brand new bitcoins.
As defined in the original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto, this process is designed so that new blocks will be added to the blockchain approximately every 10 minutes. The Bitcoin protocol automatically adjusts the mining difficulty about every two weeks (or every 2,016 blocks) to maintain this consistent 10-minute block time.
Key Bitcoin mining terms to know include:
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Hash rate: The speed at which a miner‘s computer can produce hashes, measured in hashes per second (H/s). The higher the hash rate, the more guesses a miner can make per second to find the target hash.
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Mining difficulty: A measure of how difficult it is to mine a Bitcoin block, or in more technical terms, the amount of computing power required to solve the hash algorithm each block. A higher difficulty means more computing power is needed to mine the same amount of blocks.
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Block reward: The amount of new bitcoins generated and awarded to a miner for successfully adding a new block to the blockchain. The current BTC block reward is 6.25 BTC per block as of 2022.
Bitcoin Mining Hardware Evolution
The mining hardware landscape has evolved rapidly over the years as hash rates have exploded:
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CPU mining (2009-2010): In Bitcoin‘s early days, mining with a standard PC central processing unit (CPU) was the only way to mine bitcoins. The first bitcoin miners used the CPUs in their desktop computers to hash blocks.
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GPU mining (2010-2013): Miners soon discovered that graphics processing units (GPUs) used for gaming were much more efficient at bitcoin mining. GPUs could execute 50-100x more hashes per second than CPUs and consumed much less power per unit of work.
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FPGA mining (2011-2013): Field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices were briefly used by some miners. FPGAs are chips that can be programmed to run specific tasks, allowing for even greater mining efficiency than GPUs. However, they had a relatively short lifespan as they were quickly outpaced by…
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ASIC mining (2013-present): Application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are chips designed solely for the purpose of mining bitcoins. They can mine BTC 100x faster than the best GPUs and consume significantly less power. Today, all serious Bitcoin mining is done with ASIC rigs.
The evolution of more advanced hardware has greatly increased the speed and efficiency of bitcoin mining over time, but it has also driven substantial increases in network hash rate and mining difficulty.
Increasing Network Difficulty
The total hash rate of the Bitcoin network has increased exponentially over the years as more miners have come online with increasingly powerful hardware:
| Year | Avg. Hash Rate (TH/s) |
|---|---|
| 2013 | 0.19 |
| 2014 | 5.73 |
| 2015 | 11.71 |
| 2016 | 18.26 |
| 2017 | 73.85 |
| 2018 | 257.13 |
| 2019 | 613.41 |
| 2020 | 1156.90 |
| 2021 | 1800.17 |
| 2022 | 2310.52 |
Data from blockchain.info
As hash rate has accelerated, so too has mining difficulty. Difficulty is programmatically adjusted by the Bitcoin protocol every 2,016 blocks to target a 10-minute average block time.
The difficulty hit an all-time high of over 37 trillion in October 2022, meaning it is over 37 trillion times harder to mine a block now than it was when Bitcoin first launched in 2009. Difficulty increases in proportion to hash rate to ensure the average block time remains consistent regardless of fluctuations or advancements in computing power.
Bitcoin mining difficulty since 2009 (Image source: blockchain.info)
Nick Carter, a general partner at Castle Island Ventures, explained in a CoinDesk research report that these difficulty adjustments are critical for maintaining Bitcoin‘s stable supply issuance:
"The difficulty adjustment is a key component in the game theory that ensures bitcoin will have a stable issuance schedule for the next 120 years. As more miners join the network, the mining difficulty increases proportionally to ensure new bitcoins are minted roughly every 10 minutes."
In other words, high difficulty secures the integrity and immutability of the Bitcoin blockchain by making it prohibitively expensive to amass enough hash rate to control 51% of the network.
Time to Mine One Bitcoin
With exponentially higher difficulty and hardware costs, how long does it take to mine one bitcoin now compared to the early days when BTC could be minted with a laptop CPU?
Let‘s break it down with some hypothetical examples and profitability calculations using estimated specs for different bitcoin mining hardware classes over the years:
| Hardware | Hash Rate | Watts | $/kWh | BTC/Day | Days to 1 BTC | Profit % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel CPU | 10 MH/s | 100 W | $0.10 | 0.00126 | 793 | -90.4% |
| ATI GPU | 800 MH/s | 400 W | $0.10 | 0.1008 | 10 | -36.8% |
| ASIC 2013 | 5 TH/s | 500 W | $0.10 | 0.6300 | 2 | +26.0% |
| ASIC 2019 | 55 TH/s | 2.7kW | $0.06 | 0.00324 | 309 | -73.1% |
| ASIC 2022 | 110 TH/s | 3.4kW | $0.05 | 0.00047 | 2,128 | -90.5% |
Assumptions: BTC price of $19,000, block reward of 6.25 BTC, pool fee of 2%. MH/s is megahashes per second, TH/s is terahashes per second, kWh is kilowatt-hour.
Key insights from these rough estimates:
- In 2010, you could have CPU mined 1 BTC in about 800 days. Although slow, difficulty was so low it was still profitable.
- By 2013, the introduction of ASICs had sped up the time to mine 1 BTC to just 2 days and increased profits to 26%. Mining quickly became an industrial-scale enterprise.
- In 2022, even using a powerful 110 TH/s ASIC rig, it would take over 5 years on average to mine one bitcoin, and hardware/electricity costs would result in a 90% net loss.
So at today‘s network difficulty levels, mining one bitcoin as a solo miner would be a long and unprofitable endeavor for the vast majority of miners. Practically speaking, the only way for miners to turn a profit today is to leverage large economies of scale with many mining rigs and ultra-low-cost power.
"Bitcoin mining economics only work at scale with access to cheap power," said Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital, a leading publicly-traded bitcoin mining company. In the company‘s August 2022 earnings call, Thiel explained their focus on increasing hash rate and driving down electricity costs:
"Our primary focus remains on energizing our miners and optimizing their performance. We believe our operational efficiency, combined with low power cost and large hashrate capacity, gives us a competitive edge and positions us to be among the leading bitcoin miners in the industry."
As competition remains fierce among large-scale miners, most individual bitcoin miners join a mining pool where they combine their hash rate with thousands of other miners to proportionally share block rewards based on each miner‘s individual hash rate contributed.
Mining Pools and Potential BTC Earnings
The largest global mining pools like F2Pool, Poolin, AntPool, and Slush Pool command sizable percentages of the total Bitcoin network hash rate. Miners can earn steadier bitcoin payouts through pools but sacrifice some independence and typically pay a small pool fee (0-3%).
Slush Pool, for example, currently commands about 5% of the total Bitcoin network hash rate. A miner would contribute their own ASIC hash rate to the Slush Pool and earn rewards based on what percent their hash rate makes up of the total pool.
According to Slush Pool‘s bitcoin mining calculator, one Antminer S19 Pro+ Hyd. with 198 TH/s would currently earn about 0.000852 BTC (~$16) per day at current difficulty, or about $5,840 per year (not including power costs). At that rate, it would take 3.2 years to accumulate 1 BTC.
However, the calculations don‘t account for increasing mining difficulty over time and future BTC price changes. In reality, it would likely take most individual miners 5+ years of consistent pool mining to accumulate 1 BTC worth roughly $19,000 at today‘s prices.
In comparison, it would take about 4 years of continuous pool mining with that same hardware to mine 1 ETH (worth about $1,600 currently), due to Ethereum‘s lower difficulty and quicker 12-second block times.
So does this make bitcoin mining a bad investment compared to directly buying 1 BTC? "Not at all," argued Zack Voell, a bitcoin mining and market research expert, in a recent Twitter thread:
"Mining is a multi-year investment in future bitcoin, which has a decade+ long track record of exponential growth and increasing scarcity over time. Modeling out hash price with reasonable estimates for hash rate growth and price growth shows incredible ROI potential, despite bear markets. Buying bitcoin and mining bitcoin are both bets on Number Go Up."
Securing Bitcoin
Once you‘ve successfully mined any amount of bitcoin, it‘s equally important to have a plan for secure long-term storage. Bitcoin is only as safe as the wallet you keep it in.
It‘s recommended to withdraw your BTC earnings to an address you control with your own private keys, rather than leaving them on an exchange. Hardware wallets like Ledger or Trezor offer the highest level of security by keeping your BTC offline in "cold storage."
If you‘re accumulating substantial BTC mining rewards, consider implementing a multisignature (multisig) wallet with multiple hardware devices to eliminate single points of failure. Casa is a popular provider of multisig security solutions.
"How you store your bitcoin is just as important as how you mine it," stressed Will Foxley of Compass Mining in their Ultimate Guide to Bitcoin Storage. "Proper bitcoin storage is what allows you to have complete, sovereign control over your money in a way that‘s resistant to confiscation, censorship, and devaluation."
Conclusion
The time it takes to mine one whole bitcoin depends on factors like hardware type, hash rate contributed, and total network difficulty. For most individual miners, it can take 5+ years to successfully mine 1 BTC through consistent pool mining – a far cry from the early days when 1 BTC could be CPU-mined at home in less than a year.
Key stats and concepts covered:
- The total hash rate of the Bitcoin network has increased exponentially over the years, driving proportional increases in mining difficulty to maintain a consistent 10-min. block time
- Bitcoin mining hardware has evolved rapidly from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs to ASICs, greatly increasing mining speeds and efficiency but also costs and competition
- At current BTC prices and difficulty, most ASIC mining rigs would take 1-5 years to mine 1 BTC, not accounting for hefty power costs
- To maximize odds of success, bitcoin miners should carefully select hardware with optimal price/performance, join a reputable mining pool, secure low electricity rates, and have a long-term plan for secure BTC storage
Despite the lengthy timeline to mine 1 BTC, there are still good arguments for individual hobby miners to get into mining, learn about Bitcoin, and slowly grow their BTC stack over years. The network depends on a diversity of miners, large and small, to remain robust and decentralized.
And when your mining rewards finally accumulate to that first full bitcoin mined, there‘s an undeniable sense of pride and accomplishment in knowing that your hashes helped secure the world‘s first scarce, digital money that you and you alone control. Happy hashing!
