Faculty of Economic Sciences, Quantitative Finance Research Group, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
Department of Quantitative Finance, Faculty of Economic Sciences, Quantitative Finance Research Group, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
PLoS One. 2023 Mar 30;18(3):e0283687. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0283687. eCollection 2023.
The main aim of the study is to analyze BTC mining's efficiency under current market conditions (December 2021), including soaring energy prices produced from many different sources in different geographical locations. After a thorough analysis of initial assumptions concerning the (1) price of mining machine with associated components and its effective amortization period, (2) difficulty and the hash rate of the BTC network, (3) BTC transaction fees, and (4) energy costs from various sources, we have found that currently, BTC mining is not profitable, except for some rare cases. The main reason for this phenomenon is the fast and unpredictable increase of difficulty of the BTC network over time which results in decreasing participation of already purchased mining machines in the BTC network hash rate. The research is augmented with a detailed sensitivity analysis of mining efficiency to initial parameters assumptions, which allows observing that the conditions for BTC mining to be efficient and profitable are very challenging.
本研究的主要目的是分析在当前市场条件下(2021 年 12 月)BTC 挖矿的效率,包括来自不同地理位置的多种不同来源的能源价格飙升。在对以下初始假设进行彻底分析后:(1)挖矿机及其相关组件的价格和其有效的摊销期限;(2)BTC 网络的难度和哈希率;(3)BTC 交易费用;以及(4)来自不同来源的能源成本,我们发现目前除了一些罕见的情况,BTC 挖矿是不盈利的。造成这种现象的主要原因是 BTC 网络的难度随着时间的推移快速且不可预测地增加,导致已购买的挖矿机在 BTC 网络哈希率中的参与度下降。研究还对挖矿效率对初始参数假设的详细敏感性分析进行了扩充,这使得我们可以观察到 BTC 挖矿盈利的条件非常具有挑战性。