Cryptocurrency mining profitability: a historical RTX 3090 example

This is a historical cost example, not a current mining-income forecast. The site's news index places this entry under 5 June 2022. The original article questioned whether buying hardware to mine cryptocurrency would pay for itself. Its prices and daily revenue figures were not accompanied by a dated benchmark, coin, algorithm or electricity tariff.

Difficulty and competition

The source explained falling returns in terms of more miners competing. That is a useful starting point, but the number of people alone does not determine income. In proof-of-work systems, computing power, the network's difficulty rules, rewards and operating costs matter; a miner's revenue is not simply a prize divided equally among people.

The Bitcoin FAQ explains mining and its competitive, specialised nature. Do not generalise an early Bitcoin story to every cryptocurrency or assume all early miners made a profit.

The RTX 3090 figures in the original

• Earlier reported revenue: USD 10 per day, or USD 300 over a 30-day month.
• Later reported revenue: USD 2 per day, or USD 60 over a 30-day month.
• Reported Argentina purchase price: ARS 347,259, quoted in the article as equivalent to USD 1,693.94.

These preserve the article's figures. The phrases “a year ago” and “today” referred to its original comparison, not to the date you are reading this translation. The dollar equivalent is not a current exchange-rate conversion.

Revenue is not profit

Using the source's assumptions, USD 1,693.94 ÷ USD 2 per day = 846.97 days, about 2.32 years. This is a simple gross-revenue calculation, not a verified break-even forecast. It assumes that the daily amount stays constant and excludes electricity, cooling, fees, maintenance, downtime and other costs.

A meaningful assessment needs net income after those costs, plus the risk of equipment failure and changes in asset prices, difficulty and rewards. If net income is zero or negative, this calculation does not yield a finite payback period.

Ethereum's documentation also makes clear that Ethereum mining has ended. Old GPU-mining examples cannot be carried forward unchanged across network changes.

The original's optimistic conclusion about cryptocurrency's future was an opinion, not a guarantee of future value or another reliable source of income. This archive is educational and does not establish that mining is always profitable or always unprofitable.