I've got a pretty powerful gaming PC and I was thinking of trying to mine a bit in my spare time. But I've heard that it's not worth it anymore, that the energy costs are too high compared to the profits. Is that true? Is it worth trying even just to get some experience?
With a gaming PC you'll never see positive margins - your electricity costs will far exceed what you generate, especially if your power bill isn't particularly cheap. Serious mining would require specialized hardware (ASICs) and even then there's no guarantee it'll be profitable - it depends too much on Bitcoin's price, difficulty levels, your geographic location, and energy costs. If you just want to try it to learn how the technology works, technically you can do it, but get it in your head that you'll spend more money than you make.
Mining on a gaming PC in 2026 is basically a waste of money and energy - anyone who's done the math realizes that the electricity bill completely eats up your Bitcoin earnings, especially if you don't have some special industrial rates. If you really want to understand how mining works, you could try a small-scale experiment with public pools (where lots of people mine together), but expect to make basically nothing; the real money in mining these days is with specialized hardware in locations where electricity costs almost nothing, not with whatever you already have at home.
The numbers that never get considered enough are hardware wear and tear: a gaming PC pushed to its limits for mining burns through GPU batteries, memory, and power supplies way faster than it would just gaming, and replacing those components costs a lot. Even if you managed to mine something (which is hard without dedicated equipment), you'd have electricity costs, the depreciation of physical damage to your machine, and the hassle of managing it all for gains that probably don't top out at more than a few cents a month. If you want the experience of how it technically works, that's one thing, but don't expect to make any money back: you're going straight into the red.
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