Three ways to put $21,000 (about the price of 1 PH/s of S21 Pro-class machines) to work from the April 2024 halving, valued at each daily close.
An investor whose capital is in dollars measures every strategy in dollars. An investor whose capital is in BTC measures it in BTC, against simply holding the 0.3231 BTC the $21,000 bought on the first day. The same three strategies rank differently.
A and B count what the mining produced; the machines are bought with the $21,000 and not valued afterwards. C starts at the $21,000 (0.3231 BTC).
The simplest way to compare mining and buying: dollars spent per BTC ended up with.
C stops at 0.3231 BTC. The miner in A and B keeps producing BTC for as long as a day's mining revenue is above the $18 power bill. The chart follows B (mine and hold): BTC held after selling just enough to pay for power, up to today and then under four illustrations.
Solid: actual. Dashed: illustrations from 15 Oct 2026. A line goes flat where daily revenue no longer covers power, so the machine would be switched off; that is where the BTC from mining is capped. If difficulty keeps rising at this cycle's pace, the 2028 halving takes this machine below its power cost unless BTC is above about $110,605.
¹ 20 April 2024. The day is included because the halving block was mined at 00:09 UTC. Its revenue is exceptional: the Runes protocol launched in the halving block and fees reached 310% of the subsidy, so 1 PH/s earned $194.08 that day against $84.40 on 21 Apr. This lifts A and B by about $110; it is not a repeatable level.
Every figure names its source. BMM node figures are BMM's own data.
| Source | Used for |
|---|---|
| BMM Bitcoin node (Bitcoin Core) | Block height, difficulty, hashrate estimates, block rewards and fees, hashprice |
| Kraken public API | BTC/USD daily close and daily high/low from Oct 2024 |
| Yahoo Finance BTC-USD history | BTC/USD daily prices before Oct 2024 |