Bitcoin mining has been catching up a lot of fire recently. People are setting up complete mining farms and rigs to mine bitcoin as well as other cryptocurrencies, and apparently, it’s making them good money.

One of the core parts of mining bitcoin is that it can be done on any computer. All you need is a good GPU and a decent enough CPU and you’re good to go.

This raised a lot of question among members of the PC community. Since mining can be done on any computer, a lot of people flocked to mining, thinking that it’ll make them money. But does it really work?

To answer your question, bitcoin mining doesn’t really work that way. Yes, if you have a good dedicated GPU you might be able to make some money out of mining, but when you compare it to the cost that it took to mine, it isn’t really a profitable venture.

Also read: 15 important cryptocurrency terms that you should know

How to properly mine bitcoin using your laptop?

For a machine to successfully make money from bitcoin mining, the mined value has to be greater than the backend costs. The backend costs here include the cost of the GPU and the rest of the machine itself, the electricity and cooling costs act as overheads.

In case you’ve rented a machine solely for mining, the pressure goes up. In this case, you have the added burden of paying a fixed rent plus the overheads. Your earnings, on the other hand, will keep varying as bitcoin prices vary by the second.

So if you were to make money out of mining bitcoin, you have to be really picky with all your variables.

First and foremost, you need to choose the right GPU. As recorded by several tests, a GTX1080 Ti can produce up to $174.82 in bitcoin. For AMD people, a Radeon RX Vega 64 can get up to $123.08 in bitcoin.

While this seems a really good amount of money, this is where the accounting factors come in. A GTX 1080 Ti costs about $980. Then there’s the electricity consumption per hour in your specific location. Since you’re running the GPU 24×7, you need good cooling and hence, added cooling solutions.

All of this can drive the investment price really high for mining needs. Besides, the only constant about bitcoin is the constant change in its value. This means that your estimated daily earnings can change any second. The cost of production, however, remains the same — relatively.

Also read: 5 risks you should know when investing in cryptocurrency

So, is it possible to use your gaming laptop for mining?

In short, yes it is. As aforementioned, you can mine bitcoin on almost any machine.

The real question here is, how practical is mining bitcoin on a gaming PC?

In my opinion, not really. For mining to be profitable, the mining machine needs to run 24×7 to account for all the factors that may affect the profit.

Most gaming PCs just aren’t built for this kind of load. Yes, they’ll handle all the latest games thrown at them with ease and on hours at end, but this isn’t gaming we’re talking about.

Mining works in a significantly different way. A more practical approach would be to set up a dedicated mining rig or even a farm if one can afford to invest. There are mining specific cards in the market that offer much better value as compared to regular gaming GPUs.

Also read: What is cryptojacking? How to detect and prevent it