Glossary · Profitability & Economics
Payback period
Also: ROI period
The payback period is the time it takes a machine's cumulative operating profit to repay its purchase and setup cost under stated assumptions about price, difficulty and electricity, and it has no meaning when the machine runs at a loss.
Related terms
- Break-even electricity price
- The break-even electricity price is the highest cost per kilowatt-hour at which a specific machine's daily mining revenue still covers its daily power cost, so a miner paying more than that figure loses money on every kilowatt-hour.
- Hashprice
- Hashprice is the expected daily mining revenue per unit of hashrate, usually quoted in dollars per terahash per second per day, and it rises with the bitcoin price and transaction fees and falls as network difficulty grows.
- Difficulty adjustment
- The difficulty adjustment is Bitcoin's recalculation of network difficulty every 2,016 blocks, about two weeks, raising it when the previous blocks arrived faster than ten minutes apart and lowering it when they arrived slower, capped at a factor of four in either direction.
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