Energy Efficient Bitcoin Mining to Maximize the Mining Profit: Using Data from 119 Bitcoin Mining Hardware Setups

In recent years, cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin has attracted much global attention. Bitcoins are produced by mining as a fee for authenticating any transaction. This process requires a significant amount of computing power. In the early stage, mining started from personal computers and currently, specialized hardware developed to increase the mining speed by reducing power consumption. Therefore, this research aims to explore the impact of hardware efficiency from the early stages of Bitcoin mining hardware to current customized mining hardware for better Bitcoin mining process to maximize mining profit. In this study, we analyzed miner performance from basic to advance hardware and discuss how to identify a suitable miner to increase the profit by comparing their performance and price. We extracted data from 30 peer-reviewed scientific publications (2013-2018) describing 119 Bitcoin mining hardware setups to record the power consumption and hash rates for cryptocurrency mining. Hardware efficiencies were calculated using power consumption and hash rate, then compared with different miners for identification purposes. Our findings suggest that Nvidia GPUs are inefficient and more expensive than the ATI GPUs. Additionally, ASICs and FPGA miners are more efficient compared to CPU and GPU miners. The BitmainAntminer S9 is the most efficient miner for cryptocurrency mining. This study could be utilized to identify common hardware efficiencies to maximize Bitcoin mining profits. Moving to cloud/hosting solutions rather than spending money on upgrading mining hardware could be an exciting future research avenue