Mining should be taken as business, which means that you should make a projection of your profits before you start doing it. There are several ways to assess the profitability of cryptocurrency mining, but what should be considered includes the price of mining equipment, electricity costs, operation costs and the expected block reward.

The price of mining equipment and electricity costs are the two simplest ones of these factors to calculate because both are the most predictable of all four. The expenses related to maximising the uptime of your mining equipment are harder to calculate. They include cooling costs and maintenance expenses as mining equipment is prone to suffer mechanical breakdowns, and that should be reckoned with when making your profit projection.

The block reward is the least predictable factor as cryptocurrencies are highly volatile assets, on top of which come transaction fees which are also part of block reward. Given the high volatility of the cryptocurrency market that cannot be predicted, the only option here is to believe in the cryptocurrency market and that the cryptocurrency you are going to mine will make your mining profitable. 

Still, there are mining calculators that can give you an approximation of what your mining profit can be in different periods of time, up to a year in some cases. They allow the user to make a calculation for the profits of their mining with account to the price of miningware and electricity costs.

CoinWarz

There are two sections of the CoinWarz website that you can use to calculate cryptocurrency mining profit. They are called “Mining Profitability” and “Mining Calculators”. 

The mining profitability section features 11 hashing algorithms, which embrace a vast array of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies that you can mine. Among them, you select the hashing algorithms which interest you and enter the values of hashrate, wattage and electricity costs. To get the results, you should press “Calculate”, and the calculator will give you a list of the most profitable coins to mine in a descending order.

For each coin in the list there will be such metrics as mining difficulty, market price over the last 14 days, mining revenue and profit in the next 24 hours in USD and BTC values. However, in the “sort by” filter you can sort the list of coins by other parameters, such as block reward and network hasrate among others.

Mining calculators do the job for individual coins. There are three different sections these calculators are consolidated into: top 10 mining calculators, the most popular mining calculators and the rest of them. You should know that, almost all of the latter are no longer functional: either the coin is no longer functional or it is no longer being monitored. So, you should look at the list of the most popular mining calculators.

In each of these calculators, you can enter the values for hashrate, wattage, electricity costs and pool fee. They also have advanced options, including mining hardware costs, which, however, will not give you an estimate of how fast you will cover your investments.

When you have specified all the values, press “Calculate” and you will get an estimate for the daily profit in the first window. If you scroll down, you will lower see a breakdown for various time periods from hourly to annual.

WhatToMine

WhatToMine mining calculator provides calculators for lots of various hashing algorithms and coins. It has a division between GPU and ASIC algorithms, which highlights the sophistication of this mining calculator service. 

On the GPU page, you will see various models of mining hardware. You can select some of them and denote the number of those to see particular values of hashrate they will produce for the various GPU-minable hashing algorithms listed below. You can also select the algorithms you are interested in and deselect the others. Once you finish and press “Calculate”, you will get a list of respective cryptocurrencies listed by profitability within 24 hours in a descending order. In the last to the right column, you will also see how much profit you will be able to make in three and seven days. You can also sort them by other parameters listed in the “Sort by” tab above.

In the ASIC section, you will see a list of ASIC-minable hashing algorithms. ASICs are asynchronous integrated circuits which are able to implement multiple simultaneous calculations. The ASIC page is all similar except it does not have models of mining hardware.

All in all, WhatToMine is a highly advisable mining calculator that can give you good insight into what profit you can make within the timeframe of one week.

Nice Hash

Nice hash is both a cloud mining service and a mining calculator for the SHA-256 hashing algorithm. In its calculator section, it has two types of calculators: autodetector and manual entry. The first type can automatically detect the mining hardware you have and make automatic calculation of your profit. For that to be done, you will have to download and install a NiceHash autodetector on your PC that is part of your mining network. When you launch it, it will identify your mining equipment and then do its job.

If you choose the manual option, you will pre given an extensive list of mining hardware to choose from, featuring CPUs, GPUs and ASICs. You can add several models to a list and specify quantity for each one. Above, you can also manually enter your electricity costs and specify the type of currency you want to see profits in.

This mining calculator has several big limitations. Firstly, it can only give you a projection of your mining profit with regard to Bitcoin and no other cryptocurrency. Secondly, you cannot manually enter the hashrate you have and can only choose from the given list, which might not necessarily have the minerware model you would like to check. Thus, it could be advisable to miners who are only mining Bitcoin, in which case the autodetector would be preferable.

Bottom Line

No mining calculator can guarantee you a precise estimation of what profits you might make with cryptocurrency mining because of the highly volatile nature of the cryptocurrency market and the accordingly volatile prices of mining hardware. You still can incorporate those predictions into your business plan to get an approximation of daily profits and an estimate of the period within which you can expect to cover your expenses in mining hardware.