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

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

Here m is the mass of the object (water in this case) and C specific heat capacity is the amount of heat energy needed to raise the temperature of that substance by 1 degree Celsius. for water, C is 4.186 joules per gram per degree Celsius. So with 1000 mL of water and the rate of temperature change, I figure that the water requires 2.51 joules (or 2.51 watts) of power every second.

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

Show me the money!

While it’s possible to run a cryptocurrency miner to heat your house, it’s probably not why people do it. What is the stake? Well, let’s do some quick math. I ran my Raspberry Pi miner for 12 hours. How much money did it pay? Wait for it… 0.00000006 XMR. Converting this to US dollars is 0.0012 cents (not dollars). Yes, it would be a slow way to accumulate wealth. If I worked it for 12,000 hours, I still wouldn’t get a piece of gum. Probably, chewing gum was not even used.

And that’s not even counting the costs. I mean, mining is not free – you have to pay for electricity. Average price of electricity in Azerbaijan 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, it would cost 0.41 cents. Let me do some quick math here. Yes, 0.41 cents is more than I made. I’m no financial expert, but this seems like a bad business model.

Of course, no one but a physicist would mine cryptocurrency on a Raspberry Pi. There are fancy mining machines (costing thousands of dollars) that allow you to mint coins faster and with less energy. Another thing to consider is the future price of cryptocurrency. Even if the cost exceeds the reward today, it may be worth more someday. Finally, a cryptocurrency worker can be in a place with cheaper electricity. It is even possible to run a miner on the sun.

But remember that for every joule of energy you put into a miner, you will produce 1 joule of heat energy. You need to get rid of that heat or your computers will have problems. But cooling systems consume more energy, which can make it difficult to generate profitable currency.

But it should work because there is enough mining in the US. It was calculated in 2024 2.3 percent of electricity went into cryptocurrency. It’s a bit low, and I’m not sure it’s the best use of our energy supply – especially since cryptocurrency is just a made-up thing.