Asic Calculator
An ASIC is a machine built to do exactly one thing: hash for Bitcoin as fast as its chips allow. Whether a specific machine earns money is a small piece of arithmetic that marketing pages routinely fog up with live tickers and fixed assumptions. This ASIC calculator keeps every assumption visible and editable. Enter the machine’s hashrate and power draw, your electricity rate, the current network difficulty, and the bitcoin price, and it estimates the bitcoin you mine per day, the revenue, the electricity cost, the daily, monthly, and yearly profit, and, if you add the machine’s price, how many days it takes to pay for itself.
Nothing is fetched or assumed behind your back. The block reward defaults to 3.125 BTC, the subsidy in force since the April 2024 halving, and stays editable for the next one. The pool fee comes off your output before dollars are calculated, because that is how pools actually pay. Enter today’s difficulty from a block explorer and the result is an auditable snapshot you can check line by line, since the tool prints the formula with your own numbers substituted into it.
Estimate only. Network difficulty changes roughly every two weeks, the block reward halves about every four years, and actual payouts vary with pool luck and downtime.
Quick Answer
- Quick Answer
- Where the daily bitcoin figure comes from
- Worked example, checked line by line
- Electricity is the lever: a sensitivity check
- Why the block reward and difficulty are inputs, not constants
- What the estimate leaves out
- What competing calculators miss
- Frequently asked questions
- Add This Calculator to Your Website
- References
Where the daily bitcoin figure comes from
Your expected bitcoin per day is your share of the network’s work, paid out at the block reward. Difficulty defines the expected number of hashes needed to find one block: difficulty times 2^32, a relationship set out in the Bitcoin developer guide’s block chain documentation. Your machine produces hashrate times 86,400 hashes a day, so your daily share of every block, and of the roughly 144 blocks a day, follows directly.
Your daily hashes: 200 TH/s is 2 x 10^14 hashes per second. Times 86,400 seconds = 1.728 x 10^19 hashes a day.
Expected hashes per block: difficulty 1.3 x 10^14 times 2^32 (about 4.295 x 10^9) = about 5.58 x 10^23 hashes per block across the whole network.
Your share, paid in bitcoin: 1.728 x 10^19 divided by 5.58 x 10^23, times the 3.125 BTC reward = 0.00009671 BTC a day before the pool fee, and 0.000096 BTC after 1% comes off.
Dollars in, dollars out: 0.000096 BTC at $110,000 is $10.53 of revenue. Power is 3.55 kW running 24 hours at $0.08 = $6.82. The difference, $3.72, is the daily profit everything else scales from.
Worked example, checked line by line
The pre-filled inputs describe a current-generation machine at snapshot network conditions. Every output below is what the tool returns for them, verified against the code.
| Line | Value |
|---|---|
| BTC mined per day (after 1% pool fee) | 0.000096 BTC |
| Daily revenue (x $110,000) | $10.53 |
| Daily electricity (3.55 kW x 24 x $0.08) | $6.82 |
| Daily profit | $3.72 |
| Monthly profit (x 30) | $111.49 |
| Yearly profit (x 365) | $1,356.41 |
| Break-even on a $3,000 machine | 808 days |
Read the break-even line with the stat cards together: 808 days is longer than the remaining runway to the next halving is comfortable with, and difficulty will retarget roughly 58 times before the machine pays for itself at this snapshot. None of that makes the machine a bad or good buy by itself. It means the honest question is not “is it profitable today” but “does it stay profitable as difficulty climbs”, and that is a sensitivity question, which the next section answers with the tool’s own arithmetic.
Electricity is the lever: a sensitivity check
Hold every worked-example input fixed and move only the electricity rate, the variable a buyer actually controls through location and hosting choices. The swing is the whole story of home mining economics.
| Electricity rate | Daily cost | Daily profit | Break-even on $3,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| $0.04/kWh (industrial or hosted) | $3.41 | $7.12 | 422 days |
| $0.08/kWh (worked example) | $6.82 | $3.72 | 808 days |
| $0.12/kWh (typical residential) | $10.22 | $0.31 | About 26 years |
At residential rates the machine is a hobby that happens to produce bitcoin, not an investment: $0.31 a day is inside the noise of a single difficulty adjustment. At hosted rates the same hardware clears its price in under 14 months at snapshot conditions. This is why comparisons against simply buying the coin matter: the dollar cost averaging calculator prices the alternative of putting the same $3,000 into bitcoin gradually, and the machine only wins that comparison when cheap power keeps it ahead of difficulty growth. The price side matters too, since a premium market moves revenue directly; the bitcoin premium calculator tracks how far local prices sit from the global rate you would enter here.
Why the block reward and difficulty are inputs, not constants
Two fields in this calculator exist because of specific failures elsewhere. The block reward field defaults to 3.125 and stays editable because the previous generation of this tool hardcoded 6.25 BTC, and after the April 2024 halving it silently doubled every estimate until someone noticed. A subsidy that halves on a schedule should never be compiled into code; the next halving, expected around 2028, cuts the reward to 1.5625 BTC and halves revenue at a stroke for anyone whose tool does not let them model it.
Difficulty is an input for the opposite reason: it changes too often to hardcode honestly. As the Bitcoin.org glossary entry on difficulty puts it, difficulty is the measure of how hard blocks are to find, and the network retargets it every 2,016 blocks to hold block times near ten minutes. More hashrate joining the network pushes difficulty up and shrinks every existing machine’s share. A calculator wired to a live feed looks current and cannot be audited; a calculator that asks you for the number shows its working. For a purchase decision, run the tool at today’s difficulty, then again at 20% higher, and see whether the break-even survives the second run.
What the estimate leaves out
The model is deliberately narrow, and its edges should be stated as plainly as its formula. Transaction fees paid to miners are not added: the reward field is the subsidy, so fee income only appears if you raise that number yourself. Cooling, repairs, pool payout thresholds, firmware fees some hosting contracts charge, and plain downtime are not modelled. Capital tied up in the machine also has an opportunity cost; $3,000 left in a savings product instead would earn the kind of return the high yield savings calculator projects, with none of the difficulty risk.
None of this invalidates the arithmetic. It defines what the number is: the clean mining margin at stated conditions, which is the right first screen. A machine that fails this screen fails outright. A machine that passes still has to survive the messier costs, and a buyer who knows exactly which costs are missing is equipped to subtract them.
What competing calculators miss
We reviewed the mining calculators ranking for this search before rebuilding the page. The big table sites are powerful and, for a one-machine decision, oddly unhelpful.
Winning move 1: every assumption is yours to set. ASIC Miner Value and WhatToMine rank hundreds of machines on live data with fixed pool fees and fixed power rates. If your rate is $0.05 and their table assumes $0.10, their ranking is answering someone else’s question. Here the difficulty, reward, fee, price, and rate are all inputs, so the number describes your situation rather than a fleet average.
Winning move 2: break-even as a first-class answer. Buyers ask “when does it pay for itself”, and most tools bury that under daily profit figures or skip the machine price entirely. This tool takes the price, returns the day count, and tells you plainly when the answer is never.
Winning move 3: workings printed with the result. The output restates the formula with your numbers substituted at each step, so a result can be checked on paper in a minute. Live-data tools show outputs whose inputs you cannot see (one popular calculator’s fine print reveals a fee-adjusted “block reward” of 3.1359 BTC and a 485-second block time doing quiet work). Visible assumptions beat hidden ones for a purchase this size.
Frequently asked questions
In three steps. First, expected bitcoin per day: (hashrate in hashes per second x 86,400 x block reward) divided by (difficulty x 2^32), reduced by your pool fee. Second, revenue: that BTC amount times the bitcoin price. Third, cost: (watts divided by 1000) x 24 x your electricity rate. Profit is revenue minus cost. In the worked example (200 TH/s, difficulty 1.3 x 10^14, 3.125 BTC reward, 1% pool fee) the result is 0.000096 BTC a day, $10.53 of revenue, $6.82 of electricity, and $3.72 of daily profit.
3.125 BTC. The April 2024 halving cut the block subsidy from 6.25 BTC, and it stays at 3.125 until the next halving, expected around 2028, when it drops to 1.5625 BTC. The calculator defaults the reward field to 3.125 and leaves it editable, so the next halving is a one-field update instead of a stale assumption baked into the math.
The current network difficulty, which you can read from any block explorer on the day you run the numbers. Difficulty retargets every 2,016 blocks, roughly two weeks, to hold block times near ten minutes, so last month’s figure is already stale. The worked example uses 1.3 x 10^14 (130 trillion) as a labelled snapshot, not as live data.
About $0.124 per kWh, at the worked example’s other settings. Its electricity cost is 3.55 kW x 24 hours x your rate, and that equals its $10.53 daily revenue at a rate of roughly $0.124. At $0.12/kWh it still clears $0.31 a day; at $0.04/kWh it makes $7.12 a day. Your own break-even rate moves with the bitcoin price and difficulty, which is why the rate is an input, not a verdict printed in advance.
Because almost nobody mines solo, and pools keep a percentage of the reward for smoothing payouts, typically 1 to 3%. The fee comes off your bitcoin before it is converted to dollars, so a 1% fee on the worked example trims gross daily output from 0.00009671 BTC to 0.000096 BTC. Leave the field blank and the tool treats it as zero, which flatters the result.
Machine price divided by daily profit, rounded up to whole days. A $3,000 machine earning $3.72 a day breaks even in 808 days. When daily profit is zero or negative the tool says the machine never breaks even at those inputs, which is the honest answer. Either way, treat break-even as a snapshot: difficulty rises and the bitcoin price moves, so a real payback period is a moving target, not a date to circle.
No, and it is worth being precise about what the model leaves out. The reward input is the block subsidy (3.125 BTC by default); transaction fees paid to miners are not added unless you raise the reward figure yourself. Cooling, maintenance, pool payout thresholds, and downtime are not modelled either, unless you fold them into a higher electricity rate or machine price. The estimate is the clean mining arithmetic, before the messier costs of running hardware.
It depends entirely on today’s difficulty, today’s bitcoin price, and your electricity rate, which is why the calculator takes all three as inputs instead of quoting a live verdict that expires. The worked example pairs a $110,000 bitcoin price with a difficulty of 1.3 x 10^14 as a snapshot for checking the math. Enter the current figures from a block explorer and your own power bill before drawing any conclusion about a purchase.
Add This Calculator to Your Website
References
- Bitcoin Developer Documentation, “Block Chain” developer guide – defines difficulty, the expected hashes per block relationship, and the block reward structure the formula uses. Bitcoin Developer Guide: Block Chain. Accessed October 2026.
- Bitcoin Developer Documentation, “Block Chain” reference – technical reference for blocks, difficulty retargeting every 2,016 blocks, and target spacing of ten minutes. Bitcoin Developer Reference: Block Chain. Accessed October 2026.
- Bitcoin.org Glossary, “Difficulty” – plain-language definition of difficulty as the measure of how difficult it is to find a hash below the target. Bitcoin.org Glossary: Difficulty. Accessed October 2026.
- Bitcoin.org Glossary, “Mining” – definition of mining and the block reward incentive that pays for hashing work. Bitcoin.org Glossary: Mining. Accessed October 2026.
- Nakamoto, S., “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (2008) – the original paper: proof-of-work, the difficulty adjustment, and the halving subsidy schedule. Bitcoin Whitepaper (PDF). Accessed October 2026.
- mempool.space, Documentation and FAQ – block explorer documentation used to read current network difficulty and block data for the difficulty input. mempool.space: Documentation FAQ. Accessed October 2026.