Wow, what amazing self-made entrepreneurs. This inspires me and says to me, "Maybe I can pull myself up by my bootstraps and make something of myself."
But I have a feeling there is vital information missing here. Oh, what's this near the bottom?
In addition to being very complicated, mining is certainly not cheap, as it requires expensive equipment, a lot of energy and computer power.
Ishaan and Aanya, for example, have over 97 processors, which their father Raj, a former investment banker, helped fund by taking out a loan.
Raj declined to disclose the exact loan amount. But, the worldwide shortage of computer chips made finding equipment much more difficult and set prices at a premium.
Ishaan and Aanya mostly use Nvidia RTX 3090 graphics cards, Ishaan says, and each card alone can cost around $2,500 to $3,000 to buy.
Though at home, the siblings say they use “100% renewable energy for our mining,” because “we want to be environmentally friendly,” they also rent a data center in Dallas, Texas. In total, for both their home and the data center, the electric bill costs just below $3,000 per month, Ishaan says.
These kids are probably going to lose a ton of money at this, actually. I did some mining years ago and I know a thing or two that this article doesn't cover.
For one, that $36k is probably gross, not net. Meaning it's actually $33k with power costs deducted. Then there's hardware depreciation. GPUs don't last forever running at full tilt as they do for mining; I had some GPUs die along the way (though I sold most of them on eBay when I wound up my mining efforts). I figure they have maybe 1-2 years until the things break down under that level of stress. Call it 18 months. That means you're looking at losses of around $16.6k a month in hardware depreciation, assuming it was $300k for the hardware ($13.3k if you assume it was $240k). So now the kids are looking at a net profit of around $17k to $20k in truth.
Now that sounds pretty good so far. But next they have Uncle Sam to contend with. The IRS considers mining equivalent to receiving a commodity, which means you owe standard income tax on the $33k of net, minus depreciation on the hardware over five years, which is far too long. So you get $4k to $5k in depreciation costs, bringing it to $28k to $29k total income on which taxes have to be paid. That means they owe another $5.9k to $6.1k in monthly business taxes, bringing the real net down to only like $11k to $14k. Still not bad.
But wait, there's more! ETH has been gaining value rapidly lately, and that shows in the ETH mining difficulty: https://2miners.com/eth-network-difficulty (select year or all time to see the trend line clearly). As more chumps like this try to squeeze in and grab a piece of the pie, the respective share each GPU earns shrinks. Difficulty is up 30% since the bottom of that drop in late June, and there's no reason to think it won't keep cranking up until mining reaches a point where it kicks out very little profit over even just the power costs (unless your electric rate is super low), or until the price of ETH drops through the floor again. Meaning that $11k to $14k is going to rapidly shrink to 0, then go negative--but because realizing this requires considering the cost of hardware and its likely rate of breakdown, it's very hard to tell before it's too late.
All of this is assuming this is just Daddy handing them money and not actually borrowing from a bank, in which case interest costs are going to take another big bite out of them.
And to top it all off, mining is incredibly stressful--every second the machine isn't mining is money lost. It drove me crazy until I stopped doing it.
Edit: And on a related note, every extra day you have to wait for hardware that's "on order" is also money lost, and with difficulty on the rise, every day is less profitable than the last. Meaning any delays are going to take nasty bites out of that $36k.
Interesting analysis, thanks.
The article says the dad took a loan out: