Someone on r/BitAxe put it perfectly last winter: "I have been mining at 1.1 Th/s on my $100 miner for over 12 hours and have not won a $300,000 block yet. What did I do wrong?"
It was a joke, but the confusion underneath it is real and extremely common. "How long does it take to mine 1 Bitcoin" has two completely different answers depending on whether you are mining in a pool or solo, and most articles blur them together. So let us separate them properly, with the actual arithmetic.
The short answer for a pool miner: a single 270 Th/s machine takes about 20 years to accumulate one bitcoin at today's difficulty. To earn one bitcoin per day you need roughly 2 Eh/s — around 7,500 of those machines.
The short answer for a solo miner: the same machine has about a 1.6% chance of finding a block in a year. If it does, it gets 3.125 BTC at once. That is a lottery ticket, not a plan.
Everything below is worked from on-chain data pulled in the first week of September 2026, and every formula is shown so you can re-run it when the numbers move.
Where the network actually is
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Bitcoin price | ~$77,700–81,000 |
| Network hashrate (7-day average) | 922 Eh/s |
| Difficulty | 125.81 trillion |
| Block subsidy | 3.125 BTC |
| Average fees per block (last ~7 days) | 0.01935 BTC — just 0.6% of the reward |
| Blocks per day (current epoch) | 146.25 (nominal 144) |
| Hashprice | ~$38–40 per Ph/s/day, or 49.1 sats per Th/day |
| Next halving | Block 1,050,000, ~April 2028 — subsidy falls to 1.5625 BTC |
That fee figure is worth pausing on. Transaction fees are currently contributing less than 1% of what miners earn. Almost all mining revenue is still the subsidy, which halves in about a year and a half. If you are modelling a machine's lifetime earnings, that is the single biggest thing you need in the model.
One more useful habit: quote hashprice in sats, not dollars. At 49.1 sats per Th per day, the figure only changes when difficulty or fees change. The dollar figure bounces every time Bitcoin moves, which makes month-to-month comparisons meaningless.
The whole network only produces about 453 BTC a day
This is where the "mine 1 Bitcoin" question starts to make sense. At 144 blocks a day and 3.14435 BTC per block including fees, the entire global network issues 452.8 BTC per day — about 165,000 a year. Every miner on earth is splitting that.
Your share is simply your share of the hashrate. So:
| To mine 1 BTC in… | You need | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| One day | 2,037 Ph/s (2.04 Eh/s) | ~7,500 machines at 270 Th/s |
| One month | 67.9 Ph/s | ~250 machines |
| One year | 5,581 Th/s | ~21 machines |
Two Eh/s to mine a bitcoin a day is about 4.6% of Riot Platforms' entire 44 Eh/s fleet. That is the scale involved, and it is why "how long to mine 1 BTC" is a question with an uncomfortable answer for individuals.
One machine, one bitcoin: the real timeline
Steady-state figures at current difficulty. These ignore pool fees, downtime and — crucially — difficulty growth.
| Machine | BTC per day | BTC per year | Time to 1 BTC | Gross revenue/day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 200 Th/s (S21 class) | 0.0000982 | 0.0358 | 27.9 years | $7.63 |
| 270 Th/s (S21 XP class) | 0.0001325 | 0.0484 | 20.7 years | $10.30 |
| 400 Th/s (S23 class) | 0.0001964 | 0.0717 | 14.0 years | $15.26 |
| 1,160 Th/s (S23 Hyd 3U) | 0.0005696 | 0.2079 | 4.8 years | $44.26 |
Do not treat these as forecasts. They are a snapshot. Difficulty has risen roughly fivefold since 2021, and CoinShares models the network at 1.8 Zh/s by the end of 2026 and 2 Zh/s by March 2027 — roughly double where it is now. The April 2028 halving then cuts the subsidy in half. A machine bought today will earn materially less over its life than a static-difficulty table implies, and it will not last 20 years anyway; our guide on how long ASIC miners actually last puts the realistic working life at three to five years.
A miner on r/cryptomining tracked this precisely over one quarter in 2025: daily rewards fell from 0.000132 to 0.000121 BTC — about 8% in three months — while difficulty climbed 9%. The two curves overlay almost exactly. That is the erosion you are fighting.
Which leads to the practical reframe: stop thinking in bitcoins and start thinking in payback. Nobody sensible buys a miner to accumulate a whole coin. They buy it because it returns its purchase price in X months at their electricity rate and then keeps producing. Our daily profit guide and the live profitability model are built around that question instead.
Solo mining: the maths of the lottery
Solo mining is a completely different distribution. You do not accumulate a fraction of a bitcoin each day — you get nothing, repeatedly, and then possibly 3.125 BTC at once.
The formula is simple. Expected hashes per block is difficulty × 232. At 125.81 trillion difficulty that is 5.40 × 1023 hashes per block. Your expected time is that number divided by your hashrate.
| Hashrate | Odds per day | Expected time to a block | Chance of ≥1 block in a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Th/s (Bitaxe class) | 1 in 6,254,000 | ~18,220 years | 0.006% |
| 200 Th/s | 1 in 31,270 | 85.6 years | 1.16% |
| 270 Th/s | 1 in 23,163 | 63.4 years | 1.56% |
| 400 Th/s | 1 in 15,635 | 42.8 years | 2.31% |
| 1 Ph/s | 1 in 6,254 | 17.1 years | 5.67% |
The critical property, and the one that trips everyone up: this is a memoryless process. Mining for six months does not bring you closer to a block. Your odds tomorrow are identical to your odds on day one. There is no "due."
And yet people do win. Three verified solo blocks in 2026 alone:
| Block | Date | Pool | Reward | Miner size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 943,411 | 2 Apr 2026 | Solo CK | 3.139 BTC (~$210k) | ~230 Th/s |
| 957,382 | 10 Jul 2026 | Public Pool | 3.138 BTC (~$200k) | ~995 Gh/s |
| 960,804 | 3 Aug 2026 | Solo CK | 3.157 BTC (~$200k) | ~100 Ph/s (rented) |
The July win is the one that gets shared. Under 1 Th/s — a single Bitaxe-class device — running for roughly eight hours, against expected odds of about 1 in 6.65 million per day. That is the story people remember. Here is the base rate they do not: solo pools found just 20 blocks in the twelve months to April 2026, distributing 63 BTC in total. One solo block roughly every 19 days, across every solo miner on earth combined. CKpool's April block was its 312th since 2014.
So the honest framing for a solo lottery miner is the one people use for premium bonds, not the one they use for an investment: buy a small, efficient, quiet machine, accept that the expected value is negative at most electricity prices, and treat the block as a genuine long shot. If that is your plan, the quiet home miner guide covers the hardware that suits it.
What it costs to produce one bitcoin
Here the numbers get genuinely contentious, because "cost to mine a bitcoin" means at least three different things and people quote them interchangeably.
| Definition | What it includes | Reported figure |
|---|---|---|
| Electricity only | Purchased power, nothing else | MARA: $38,690 (Q2 2026) |
| Cash cost | Power + site opex, excluding depreciation | Riot: $49,912 (Q2 2026) |
| All-in | Plus depreciation, SG&A, interest, tax | Riot: $90,631; CoinShares sector average ~$96,100 |
Riot's Q2 2026 filing contains the most uncomfortable number in mining right now. Its fully-costed cost to mine — $90,631 — was 126.5% of the production value of the bitcoin it actually mined ($71,667). On a fully-costed basis, one of the largest listed miners in the world produced bitcoin at a loss last quarter.
Riot's own disclosure also gives us something rare: audited real-world energy intensity. It used 1,785,649,387 kWh to mine 1,587 BTC. That is 1,125,173 kWh per bitcoin — and a net power cost of 3.6 cents per kWh, which tells you what industrial scale actually buys.
Be sceptical of headline sector averages. CoinShares warns explicitly that AI and HPC buildouts are inflating cost-per-BTC across the listed sector: debt and depreciation from data-centre construction get divided by a shrinking bitcoin production base. TeraWulf's reported $471,841 per BTC is not a mining cost — it is a data-centre company's overheads spread across 262 residual blocks. Any single "cost to mine a bitcoin" figure is meaningless without its definition attached.
What it would cost you
Energy per bitcoin depends only on efficiency, not on how big your machine is. A bigger machine gets there faster; it does not get there cheaper.
| Fleet efficiency | kWh per BTC | @ $0.01/kWh | @ $0.05/kWh | @ $0.10/kWh | @ $0.28/kWh |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13 J/TH (S21 XP / S23) | 635,595 | $6,356 | $31,780 | $63,560 | $177,967 |
| 15 J/TH | 733,379 | $7,334 | $36,669 | $73,338 | $205,346 |
| 17 J/TH (global fleet average) | 831,163 | $8,312 | $41,558 | $83,116 | $232,726 |
| 21 J/TH (older S19 class) | 1,026,731 | $10,267 | $51,337 | $102,673 | $287,485 |
Read the right-hand column carefully. At $0.28/kWh — a normal UK or EU household tariff — producing one bitcoin costs between two and four times what the coin sells for, at every efficiency class including the newest hardware. There is no machine that fixes this. The break-even electricity price for a 13 J/TH miner at $77,700 Bitcoin is about $0.122/kWh, and most European domestic tariffs are well above it. That is the entire argument of our apartment mining guide, restated in a different unit.
CoinShares corroborates the squeeze from the other direction: it found that any miner less efficient than an S19 XP is losing money at 6 cents/kWh or above, which covers an estimated 15–20% of the global fleet. The S19 XP's break-even electricity price fell from about $0.12/kWh in December 2024 to $0.077/kWh a year later.
How much energy is one bitcoin, really?
The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance puts total network consumption at roughly 138–141 TWh a year (mid-2026), implying about 840,000–860,000 kWh per bitcoin mined. Digiconomist's higher estimate of ~204 TWh implies about 1.23 million kWh. Riot's audited figure of 1.125 million kWh sits between them.
Take the Cambridge midpoint: roughly 850,000 kWh per bitcoin, which is around eighty years of a typical household's electricity. That single figure explains why mining migrated to stranded hydro, flared gas and grid-balancing contracts, and why it will keep doing so.
The scarcity clock is running out too
Bitcoin crossed 20 million coins mined in March 2026 — 95.2% of everything that will ever exist. The final million will take roughly 114 years. Daily issuance drops from about 450 BTC now to 225 after the 2028 halving, 112 after 2032, and below 30 by the 2040s.
So the question "how long to mine 1 Bitcoin" gets a worse answer every year, permanently and by design. Between 2.3 and 3.7 million coins are also considered permanently lost, which makes the real circulating supply somewhere between 16 and 17.7 million.
What to do with all this
If your goal is to own a bitcoin, buying one is faster and cheaper than mining one. That is not a sales-defeating admission — it is the reason people mine for other reasons: to earn at below spot cost, to monetise power you already control, to convert heat you were paying for anyway, or to hold hardware rather than the coin.
If you do want to mine, the only variable that reliably decides the outcome is your electricity price. At 3.6 cents Riot mines a bitcoin for about $40,000 in power. At 28 cents you would spend $178,000 in power to produce the same coin. Same machine, same difficulty, same everything else — a 4.5× swing driven by one input.
That is why the practical route for most individual buyers is to separate the two decisions: buy the hardware you want, then put it somewhere the power is cheap. Our hosting locations exist for exactly that, and the home-versus-hosted comparison runs the numbers both ways. Whatever you decide, put your own electricity rate into the profitability model before you spend anything — the answer changes completely between 5 cents and 15.
Sources: mempool.space API (price, hashrate, difficulty, block rewards, fee statistics and coinbase verification of all three solo blocks cited); Riot Platforms and MARA Holdings Q2 2026 SEC filings; CoinShares Bitcoin Mining Report Q1 2026; Luxor Hashrate Index; Cambridge CBECI; Digiconomist. Network data as of 3–7 September 2026. Solo-mining probabilities are computed from difficulty × 2³² and were validated against CKpool's own published odds for the April 2026 block. Mining income is never guaranteed and moves with difficulty, fees and price.