

air conditioned buildings with many devices on 24/7). Trust me, the cost in power will be a lot higher! That is why many bitcoins are now being mined in bitcoin farms in China (i.e.

You’d need to have your Mac working overtime on the calculations 24/7 for literally months to try and obtain a single bitcoin. There is a real cost in mining bitcoins, starting with the cost of electricity. So, using your iMac as an example, the best GPU your model shipped with was a Radeon HD 5670 that had 512MB memory and while this may have been okay to mine bitcoins in 2010, it would take so long to do now that the cost of electricity would outweigh the value of any Bitcoin you’d be able to mine (as it now takes a lot longer to mine and the cost of power only goes up). a graphics card is better at processing these than a CPU is).

And, as time goes by, it will continue to get harder.Īnother contributing factor is that the kinds of calculations needed to mine bitcoins are actually better suited to GPUs instead of CPUs (i.e. Without going into a lot of detail, and at the risk of oversimplifying things, in the early days mining bitcoins was easier than it is now.
