Can you get rich using a Raspberry Pi to mine cryptocurrencies?

After the first 20 minutes, the water temperature appeared to rise at a fairly constant rate of 0.0006 degrees Celsius per second. This increase in temperature means an increase in thermal energy, which we can calculate as follows:

Here M is the mass of the substance (in this case water) and C is the specific heat capacity – the amount of thermal energy required to increase the temperature of this substance by 1 degree Celsius. For water, C is 4.186 joules per gram per degree Celsius. So, given 1,000 ml of water and my rate of change of temperature, I conclude that the water requires a power of 2.51 joules per second (or 2.51 watts).

Oh, look at that. Even with this rudimentary measurement system, this is pretty close to the power flowing into the Raspberry Pi. The difference is probably due to poor insulation. So you can see that cryptocurrency power is just thermal energy. Honestly, I’m surprised it worked so well.

Show me the money!

Although it’s possible to run a crypto miner to warm up your own home, that’s probably not why people do it. What is the payout? Well, let’s do some quick calculations. I left my Raspberry Pi Miner running for 12 hours. How much money did that make? Wait for it… 0.00000006 XMR. Converted to US dollars it is 0.0012 cents (not dollars). Yes, that would be a slow way to accumulate a fortune. Even if I let it run for 12,000 hours, I still wouldn’t be able to buy a piece of gum. I probably haven’t even used gum yet.

And that doesn’t even take into account the cost. I mean, mining isn’t free – you have to pay for the electricity. The average cost of electricity in the In the USA the price is 16.94 cents per kilowatt hour. If I ran my miner at 3 watts for 12 hours, that would be 24 watt hours or 0.024 kWh. Based on the price of electricity, this would cost 0.41 cents. Let me do some quick math here. Yes, 0.41 cents is more than the money I created. I’m not a financial expert, but this seems like a bad business model.

Of course, no one but a physicist would mine crypto on a Raspberry Pi. There are fancy mining machines (that cost thousands of dollars) that allow you to mint coins faster and with less energy. The other thing to consider is the future price of a cryptocurrency. Even if the cost exceeds the reward today, it might one day be worth much more. Finally, a crypto miner could be located in a location with cheaper electricity. It is even possible to power a miner using solar energy.

However, don’t forget that for every joule of energy you put into a miner, you create 1 joule of heat energy. You need to get rid of this heat or it will cause problems for your computers. But cooling systems use more energy, and that can make it difficult to produce profitable money.

But it has to work because there is a lot of mining in the US. This was estimated in 2024 2.3 percent of electricity flowed into cryptocurrencies. That’s quite a lot, and I’m really not sure it’s the best use of our energy supply – especially since crypto is just a made-up thing.