How Long Does it Take to Mine 1 Bitcoin in 2022?

Like the answer to most mining questions, the answer to the question: 'How long does it take to mine one bitcoin?' is ... it depends on many factors. We'll take a look at a couple different situations.

How long does it take for a solo miner to miner 1 bitcoin?

It takes 10 minutes for the Bitcoin network to discover a block, and each block yields 6.25 BTC reward for the miner that discovers it.

However, only the miner that actually discovers the block will get the reward. Since there are hundreds of thousands of miners, the odds of discovering a block are very low.

This is not to say impossible. In 2022, a Bitcoin miner with a tiny hash rate of just 126 terahashes per second — quite possibly a single S19 machine — solved a valid block on January 12, earning 6.25 BTC.

Just two weeks later, another solo miner with a mere 86 Th/s solved another block.

Don't count on solving blocks by solo mining though. This is a lottery with insanely low odds. It's so rare that every time it happens, news articles are written about it!

Solo mining a block is so rare that it is always newsworthy!

Con Kolivas, the creator of CKPool Solo, the most well known pool for solo miners says:

“But that does do a disservice to everyone because it makes it look like anyone can solve a block solo. And the answer is, you can, but it ignores the fact that there are 2,000 other miners that have been doing it for one, two, three years and have never gotten any reward at all. All they’re doing is paying electricity bills, and they also paid the upfront costs to buy the mining hardware.”

So if you go solo, know the risk you're getting into. The extremely low probability of solo mining success is the reason most miners choose to be contribute to a pool.

How long does it take to mine 1 bitcoin as part of a mining pool?

The majority of Bitcoin miners work together as part of a mining pool, combining their hash rate to stand a better chance of discovering a block. Regardless of which miner in the pool actually discovers the block, the rewards are distributed evenly throughout the pool.

For example, the largest mining pool today is Foundry USA, which commands 15.59% percent of the global hashrate. This means over time, they will mine 15.59% of all Bitcoins.

Consequently, a miner that contributes 1% of Foundry's hashrate, will also receive 1% of the BTC rewards it accrues.

Let's say we are running a single miner, an Antminer S19 Pro with a hashrate of 110Th/s, and we are using the Foundry USA pool.

With the MinerList ASIC list, we can see that we would make roughly 0.000477 BTC per day.

That means it would take 2096 days (5 years and 270 days) for us to mine a single Bitcoin! And that's assuming difficulty will stay constant, which is impossible.

How long does it take to mine a bitcoin with a mining farm?

Let's use a private mining farm as an example. We've seen many small farms that would fall into this category.

Shipping container private mining farm

A farm running 30-40 S19 Pros with a total hashrate of 4 Ph/s will mine 0.017 BTC right now. That's one bitcoin every 2 months.

If course we should remember, a farm of this scale would cost $140 in electricity bills every day at a modest electricity price of $0.05/kwH.

How much does it cost to mine a bitcoin?

In both these examples, whether we mine 1 bitcoin over 5 years or over 2 months, the electricity cost is the same. At an electricity price of $0.05/kwH, it will take $8000 to mine 1 bitcoin, assuming difficulty does not change, which is impossible.

This is why large scale mining farms are investing so much in equipment, even though the market is down. They know that hashrate difficulty growth means the best time to mine is always now.

How long does it take to mine a bitcoin from my laptop?

We do not recommend laptop mining because of overheating problems. At best you'll make a few dollars a month, at worse you will damage your laptop. It will also be hot and noisy most of the time.

If your laptop has a RTX 2080, a mid-end graphics card released in 2018, then you're looking at less than $20 of Bitcoin a month. This assumes the laptop is running constantly and does not overheat. At current BTC price, this would take more than 10 years to mine a bitcoin, assuming difficulty remains constant. However we know difficulty will keep going up, and it is quite possible a laptop will never be able to mine a single bitcoin.