Mining Bitcoin on a Laptop - What I learned

About a year ago, I had been hearing a lot about bitcoin online and on the news. I did some research online until I developed a basic understanding of bitcoin and the blockchain. I wanted to obtain some bitcoin, but I didn't have much money, so I decided to mine bitcoin - on my laptop.

I knew there were plenty of fancy bitcoin mining calculators online, but most of them couldn't accurately calculate yield for the low specs on my laptop.

A little bit about my laptop:

• 2013 Dell Inspiron
• 4 GB DDR3 RAM
• Intel i5 Processor
• Intel Integrated Graphics

I downloaded a simple bitcoin miner online designed for PCs and fired it up. I waited. And waited. And waited. After about 12 hours of continuous humming, I could tell my laptop was overheating. I shut it off and let it cool down for about an hour and a half. I then repeated the 12 hours on, 1.5 hours off cycle for about 4 days. My laptop was completely unusable during the time that is was mining, so I never had a chance to check my bitcoin yield until after I finished.

I finally checked my yield when I powered on my PC after its well-deserved cooling break. The grand total was... 0.0000002 BTC (2 x 10^-7). I soon figured out that I had spent much more on the electricity bill than what I had earned mining bitcoin.

Further research informed me that people had stopped mining bitcoin with PCs several years ago. If you want to be competitive in the bitcoin mining industry, you definitely need a dedicated ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) miner that you can run pretty much 24/7. ASIC miners that are competitive nowadays can easily run into the thousands of dollars. They will also be obsolete in a few years as the bitcoin mining complexity continues to increase.

If you want to mine bitcoin with an ASIC miner, be sure to do calculations comparing your expected return to the price of the unit + price of electricity (there are plenty of calculators online).

Hope you learned something and happy mining!