Skip to main content

How to mine $1 million in Bitcoin on an $800 laptop

Here’s the thing: Just about any device capable of banging a few numbers together can contribute to a cryptocurrency mining pool, and that means almost any device can technically mine any cryptocurrency you choose, even Bitcoin.

Thing is, it might take you a little while.

Related Videos

Setting up

For our tests to figure out how long it might take you to make, say, $1,000,000 in Bitcoin using just a couple laptops, we used user-friendly mining pool NiceHash. Getting set up on NiceHash is as simple as creating an account and downloading a free software suite. Once it finishes installing, connect your NiceHash wallet by signing into the app, and then all you have to do is click start, and you’ll be rolling in bitcoins in no time!

A dip in the pool

To figure out how long it’d take for us to strike it rich mining with just a laptop, we used an Asus ZenBook UX330UA with an integrated graphics chip. Just in case, we also had a couple others standing by — a Dell Inspiron 15 Gaming, a Dell XPS 13, a Microsoft Surface Pro, and a MacBook Pro 15.

First, we ran the ZenBook on its own for about 24 hours to establish a baseline, but pretty soon after that we realized our little pool was going to need more power if we wanted to come anywhere close to our goal of $1,000,000 in bitcoin, so we fired up all of our laptops, bringing some serious horsepower to bear on the task.

Doing that was as simple as installing the NiceHash software on each laptop and connecting them all to our NiceHash wallet. After we left ’em running for another twenty-four hours, we were starting to see some real results.

Results

How much did we make with all of our laptops toiling away in the bitcoin mines? Well, we made about nine cents a day with just one laptop, and with all of them running we made around forty cents a day, give or take, depending on the current price of Bitcoin. That means it would take us an excess of 6,800 years to become bitcoin millionaires from mining off just a couple laptops.

So, while you can mine Bitcoin — or any other cryptocurrency — from any old laptop, you probably shouldn’t. Unless you have a couple thousand years to spare.

Editors' Recommendations

What is an ASIC miner?
best bitcoin miner admin ajax2

Cryptocurrency mining used to be something you could do easily, but those days are long gone. Today, whether you’re mining Bitcoin, Litecoin, DASH, or a host of other cryptocurrencies, the most effective way to do so is with dedicated hardware known as an ASIC miner. And even then, it's only really for professionals with masses of capital to invest upfront.

What is an ASIC miner? Short for Application-specific integrated circuit, the underlying ASIC chip is typically designed with a singular purpose, like audio processing or managing a cellphone call. In this scenario, it's designed to "mine" a specific cryptocurrency.
What an ASIC miner actually does
In a nutshell, mining is running complicated calculations in the search for a specific number. Whether it's an ASIC miner or a GPU mining rig, mining hardware must run through many calculations before finding that number. In proof of work systems like Bitcoin, the first one to find that number gets a reward -- at the time of writing, 12.5 Bitcoins worth around $96,850. That reward will fall to 6.25 Bitcoins in May 2020.

Read more
How to buy Bitcoin with PayPal

Buying Bitcoin is much easier today than it was in the past, but it would still be easier if you could just use your Paypal account, wouldn't it? It turns out if you try to do that, it's a bit more tricky -- and much more expensive.

One of the main reasons why it's difficult is the potential for chargebacks. Major exchanges won't allow PayPal transactions because it would be too easy for people to buy Bitcoins, then use PayPal's support system to chargeback their purchase and receive their original purchase fee back. That would be an improper and fraudulent way to buy Bitcoin -- even when using the services below -- so it's not encouraged in any manner.

Read more
Passing the $1 trillion mark, Bitcoin is almost as big as Google
Large Bitcoin on a laptop keyboard

The price of Bitcoin has surged in recent days, sending the cryptocurrency value soaring. With a high value of $53,750 per coin as traded on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange, the combined value of all existing coins is now $1 trillion dollars.

This means that Bitcoin's market capitalization rivals some of the top and most well-known technology companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is valued at $1.42 trillion, for comparison, putting Bitcoin within striking distance of it if the cryptocurrency's price continues to rise, while Amazon's current market capitalization is $1.67 trillion and Microsoft's value sits at $1.82 trillion.

Read more