with 1 reasonably powerful computer how much could be mined in a month?
0.000000BTC
You need a huge amount of hashing power to have a chance of winning a block on your own. Even the best desktop computer with 6 top of the range gpus wouldn't mine a thing even if you ran it for 20 years continously.
You could however:
- mine other cryptocurrencies with lower difficulties
- join a BTC mining pool and combine your hashes with thousands of other miners then split the rewards accordingly.
What would the start up cost be ? What should I purchase?
Depends.... if you have more than $100,000 to invest you might be able to consider solo mining BTC. If not then there's no threshold to what you need to invest, just invest as much as you can and then take your cut from a pool.
It works something like this:
- You invest $x into mining equipment and $y into electricity (normally), plus $z into renting a property if the operation is big enough to need one.
- In your situation you just need $x, congrats - you have an advantage over anyone that needs to take electricity and rental out of their profits.
- You put your $x into equipment. This is just a collection of computer parts that are needed for any desktop computer - motherboard, RAM, power supply, processor etc. These parts contribute jack shit to your "hash power", which is all you care about but you still need them for a computer to function.
- Things that can generate "hashes" (aka attempts at solving the current Bitcoin "puzzle") are (in order of worst to best):
1. a CPU
2. a GPU
3. an ASIC
- Nowadays CPUs and GPUs cannot be used to mine Bitcoin, they are too weak compared to ASICs which dominate the mining market and have done for years and years.
- So 95% of your investment will go into buying the best ASICs you can, hooking them up to your other equipment, and then generating as much "hash power" as you can.
- If your hash power is high enough, you might be able to win a block.. making tens of thousands of dollars on your own in the process.
- 99% likely though, you won't be able to generate enough hash power to have a chance of winning a block, so you will have to join a pool.
- A pool is thousands of miners, all having relatively small hash power, but collectively being able to compete with large multi-million dollar mining farms.
- When your pool wins a block, a fee is taken from the winnings by the pool for administration, and then the rest of the reward is split between all miners that contributed to mining the block according to how much hash power each miner contributed.
You need ASICs + other computer equipment that are all compatible with each other - it takes a solid amount of research to understand the hardware side of it.
Then you need to research the software side - how to properly download the BTC blockchain, set up as a node, run the mining software needed for you to take part, download and run any software provided a mining pool in order to join them.
It's not a trivial process - it's hard as fuck to learn everything without a background in some of it, but it can be done if you're determined and organised.