I signed up for an account on Hashnest as I had decided that this was the best option to choose. This gave me the opportunity to have a look inside. All you need is the “Hash” section with their different miners (each with stats, blocks, shop, code, market and history) and the wallet to deposit some BTC to invest.

The Antminer S5 has currently the lowest maintenance fee due to its low power usage, so this one got my attention. My calculations say that I won’t break even when the difficulty keeps increasing by 3% and when 1 BTC stays at $ 243/€ 217/¥ 1509; in fact I will lose 45%. But it is possible to sell your hash rate on the market  to reduce loses or perhaps make some profit.

I decided to take a little risk. Nobody knows if the difficulty will increase. Recently it has even decreased. Are people turning off their miners, because they are losing money? And what will the exchange rates do? Will they go up when the block reward is cut in half? Or will they drop down? Eventually it’s all about speculation and even having Bitcoins might lose you some money. But for me it is also an opportunity to learn. I will start with ± € 130,00 worth of BTC that I transferred to my Hashnest wallet.

To have a good oversight of this project and its costs, I will try to post a summary each week. This seems a good interval and this gives me the time to analyze the results. I am not sure yet how it will look like, but I think the following things are important: daily earnings, daily fee, market price per GHS, amount of blocks found, earnings from start. All this information is provided on their website. I only have to lookup how I should interpret the chart with the market price.

First I will interpret the costs and the result of the first week. I will post them as soon as I have found a clear way to show them to you.