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Can you get rich using a Raspberry Pi to mine cryptocurrency?

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After the first 20 minutes, the water temperature seemed to increase at a fairly constant rate of 0.0006 degrees Celsius per second. This increase in temperature represents an increase in thermal energy, which we can calculate as:

Here metro is the mass of the matter (in this case, water), and do is the specific heat capacity: the amount of thermal energy needed to raise the temperature of that substance by 1 degree Celsius. For the water, do is 4.186 joules per gram per degree Celsius. So with 1000 ml of water and my rate of temperature change, I get that the water requires a power of 2.51 joules per second (or 2.51 watts).

Oh, look at that. Even with this rudimentary measurement system, this is pretty close to the power going into the Raspberry Pi. The difference is probably due to imperfect insulation. So you can see that the power of cryptocurrencies is just thermal energy. Honestly, I’m surprised it worked out so well.

Show me the money!

While it’s possible to run a crypto miner as a way to heat your house, that’s probably not the reason people do it. What is the reward? Well, let’s do some quick calculations. I ran my Raspberry Pi miner for 12 hours. How much money did that make? Wait for it… 0.00000006 XMR. Converting this to US dollars, it is 0.0012 cents (not dollars). Yes, this would be a slow way to amass a fortune. Even if I used it for 12,000 hours, I still couldn’t buy a piece of gum. He probably didn’t even use gum.

And that’s not counting the cost. I mean, mining is not free: you have to pay for electricity. The average cost of electricity in the US is 16.94 cents per kilowatt-hour. If I run my miner at 3 watts for 12 hours, that would be 24 watt-hours or 0.024 KWh. Using the price of electricity, this would cost 0.41 cents. Let me do some quick calculations here. Yes, 0.41 cents is more than the money I created. I’m not a financial expert, but it seems like a bad business model.

Of course, no one other than a physicist would mine cryptocurrency on a Raspberry Pi. There are sophisticated mining machines (costing thousands of dollars) that allow you to mint coins faster and with less energy. The other thing to consider is the future price of a cryptocurrency. Even if the cost exceeds the reward today, perhaps one day it will be worth much more. Finally, a crypto miner could be in a place with cheaper electricity. It is even possible to run a miner with solar energy.

However, don’t forget that for every joule of energy you put into a miner, you will produce 1 joule of thermal energy. You have to get rid of that heat or it will cause problems for your computers. But cooling systems use more energy and that can make it difficult to produce profitable currency.

But it must work, since there is quite a bit of mining in the United States. In 2024, it is estimated that 2.3 percent of electrical energy was allocated to cryptocurrencies.. That’s quite a bit, and I’m really not sure it’s the best use of our energy supply, especially since cryptocurrencies are a made-up thing.

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