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When I first fired this up, I was pretty sure I would be losing money, which is why "profit" doesn't appear in the title of this piece :) But, you've inspired me to take another look.

Here's a mining calculator: https://whattomine.com/coins/213-etn-cryptonight?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr=50&p=40&fee=1&cost=0.0816&hcost=0.0&commit=Calculate

That's filled with values that I think are pretty accurate. Our power here only costs $.08/kWh and my laptop's charger puts out 45W (actual power consumption of the machine is less). That works out to about a kWh/day or $.08.

I found a better mining pool that only charges 1% pool fee. Their calculator says ~2 ETN/day at my current hashing rate. So, at $.17/ETN that's $.34/day, which matches what the mining calculator says. My profit then is $.27/day.

This is mostly an exercise in mining because I can and meeting the challenge posed to get this working. However, the really interesting possibility is that the value of these coins could go up. If you started mining really early, you did really well, no matter what the calculations said about how much money you were losing at the time.

A couple more considerations I left out:

  1. It's winter here, so in a sense, I'm just using this power to heat my room
  2. This is also putting wear on my hardware. That's probably actually the most significant expense and the most difficult to calculate.

Just got my first payout of 9 ETN earlier today. As interesting as the economic calculations are, there's something special about getting paid for running a program on your computer, and I'd say that's priceless!