With bitcoin mining difficulty so high, what is the incentive for people to mine bitcoins beside the current price?

In fact, Bitcoin mining is still profitable to anyone.

Let’s do math:

I buy 1 Antminer S9, which is the common ASIC miner : https://shop.bitmain.com/antmine...

Price : 1415 USD alone, + APU (APW3++) 105 USD, + import taxes, let’s say 300 USD = 1820 USD

Consumption : 1323 W

Power : 13.5 TH

Electricity cost : 0.25$/kWh (lower in my country, but I think it’s a medium value)

Let’s check the daily net income (electricity fees deducted) on this website : https://www.coinwarz.com/cryptoc... : 16.88$ / day on BTC, 19.50 on BCH

1820 / 16.88 = 107.8, so your ROI with these conditions are around 108 days. Not bad uh ? 94 days with BCH!

However this figure isn’t exact as a few parameters come in:

Estimated delivery date is End of January 2018, so you’ll start later and parametres would have changed
Every bitcoin mined and stored wil probably increase in value, so your ROI tends to be faster
Mechanical failure, electricity outage, internet disconnection, or anything could happen, reducing your uptime (it always happens something)
By experience, the most annoying point in mining bitcoin is the noise produced by the ASIC, you can’t run it at home. Trust me I tried and it’s simply impossible, you need a remote location to run it.