Bitcoin mining in Pakistan: updated December 2013

I published an article on this topic in 2013. I just wanted to provide you with latest updates. I felt this because most people would have been tempted by the news that the price of 1 bitcoin just soared to 1000 dollars last few days ago, and anybody having just 1 bitcoin would have earned 1000 dollars by selling it. The price is around 700 dollars at the time of writing this article, so is bitcoin mining profitable in Pakistan?

There are few factors to consider and understand before we start further:

  1. Mhash/sec or Ghash/sec is the speed of the device
  2. Difficulty level is a factor which increases all the time and it factors in the calcuations for generating bitcoins
  3. Hardware Break even: Its the time when the cost of device is covered by the bitcoins it generates.
  4. Exchange Rate: This is the price of 1 bitcoin in market and its very volatile.

Basically higher the speed more bitcoins are generated and more profit but how much?


The products available so far have following speed ranges:

1. 333 Mhash/sec
2. 2-5 Ghash/sec
3. Upto 10 Ghash/sec
4. Upto 50 Ghash/sec

These devices come in simple to use USB miners as shown below. Just plug them in your compuer USB port and you are mining bitcoins!


Furthermore they also come in racks which can be run by power supplies of computers, like shown below:




Now there are few scanarios i want to discuss:

Say you get 333 Mhash/sec USB device and put it in laptop and forget about it, you will earn 3 dollars per month! But wait there is more to it. The cost of device will be around 40-90 dollars and considering you got a 40 dollar device excluding shipping you will earn 38 dollars per year and still the device will not have covered its cost!

Lets say you get a 30 Ghash/sec rack device which runs off power outlet. The lowest price i could find for such device is 950 dollars. Now lets see it will earn you 282 dollars per month and 3440 dollars per year. The cost is covered in 100 days. This looks sweat but the power here in our country is not constant, bitcoin calculates your earnings every 10 minutes, so if you get a power outage than you lose all the 9 minutes worth of bitcoins, further there is average of 5 hours of loadshedding so will it be feasible?

Furthermore i have not yet added any electricity costs to it. The USB devices are ok, they can run on Laptop during load-shedding. But the devices which produce highest hash rates use power supply and consume 100s of watts and and the profit after adjustment would not be 3440, it would be less than half than that. This means that nearly 200 days would be required in Pakistan to break even provided that the device does not physically malfunctions or worst stops working.

Delivery to Pakistan

Amazon does not ship to Pakistan any electronic device, ebay works with paypal only, both give the best price. If you buy using third party they will charge extra. You may have to buy from other sites which accept orders from Pakistan, but price on those sites is way too high. The delivery charges are also a matter of concern, the price is atleast 25 dollars. The most respected name in bitcoin mining hardware is Butterfly labs, but they only accept bitcoins as payment and bank transfer. We in Pakistan can only send a band transfer if we have a foreign currency account in our name.

Conclusion:

The bitcoin currency is too volatile, the exchange rate keeps changing all the time, while the difficulty keeps increasing all the time as well. Also no one knows what is actually done during bitcoin mining, it could be our enemy running a calculation to destroy us, it could be a human genomic calculation who knows!

External Link: Bitcoin generation calculator used in this post.



1 comment:

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