GPU Mining Calculator

A graphics card mining a proof-of-work coin earns a share of block rewards equal to its share of total network hash power. The estimate here multiplies hash rate by block reward and by 86,400 seconds, then divides by difficulty scaled by 2^32, which is the Bitcoin-style difficulty convention. That matters as a caveat: coins whose difficulty is defined directly against a 256-bit target, or whose block time differs from the reference, need their own scaling, so cross-coin comparisons should be sanity-checked against a live pool estimate. Pool fees of 0.5 to 2 percent come off the top, and electricity is the only cost that runs continuously, at power in kilowatts times 24 hours times the tariff. The metric that separates viable rigs from scrap is efficiency in watts per unit of hash rate. An RTX 3080 on a memory-bound algorithm delivered roughly 100 MH/s, and undervolting could cut its draw from over 300 W to about 220 W without losing hash rate, which is often the difference between positive and negative margin. Break-even in days is card cost divided by daily net profit, but the naive figure is optimistic because difficulty climbs as competitors deploy, coin prices move faster than difficulty, and cards degrade. Practitioners usually add a 30 to 50 percent buffer and count on recovering 40 to 60 percent of the purchase price through resale, since a mining GPU retains far more value than a purpose-built ASIC once the coin stops paying.

GPU mining began in 2010, when open-source OpenCL miners showed that a consumer graphics card could compute Bitcoin hashes hundreds of times faster than a CPU. The advantage was short-lived on Bitcoin, where ASICs took over from 2013, but it shaped the design of later coins. Litecoin, launched by Charlie Lee in October 2011, adopted the memory-hard scrypt function specifically to keep commodity hardware competitive, establishing the idea that an algorithm can be chosen for who it lets participate rather than only for security. Ethereum took that further in 2015 with Dagger-Hashimoto, later called Ethash, which forced every hash to read from a directed acyclic graph that grew past several gigabytes. Memory bandwidth and VRAM capacity, not raw compute, became the bottleneck, and consumer GPUs held their ground for seven years. That created the mining-driven card shortages of 2017 and 2021, Nvidia hash-rate-limited variants and dedicated CMP cards in 2021, and then a collapse: the Ethereum Merge on 15 September 2022 removed the single largest GPU mining market overnight. Displaced hash rate moved onto Ravencoin KawPow, Ergo Autolykos2, Flux and Kaspa, second-hand card prices fell sharply, and the economics of GPU mining shifted from expected profit toward hardware residual value.