Glossary: ROI (Return on Investment)

Glossary: ROI (Return on Investment)

Glossary
2 min readUpdated: 19. February 2026 · By Makar

One-Sentence Definition

ROI (Return on Investment) is the percentage or ratio that shows how much profit or loss you make from mining compared to your total costs for hardware, electricity, and maintenance.

Why It Matters for Solo Mining

For solo miners, ROI is honestly pretty complicated to calculate because you might never find a block—or you might hit one tomorrow and get massive returns. Unlike pool mining where you get steady small payouts, solo mining ROI is more like asking “what’s the ROI on a lottery ticket?” You need to think about both the expected ROI based on probability and the actual ROI if you get lucky.

How It Works

The basic formula is: ROI = (Profit – Cost) / Cost × 100%. For mining, your costs include the upfront hardware price (like a Bitaxe Gamma 602 or Lucky Miner LV08), plus ongoing electricity bills. Your profit is whatever crypto you mine minus those electricity costs. A mining calculator can help estimate this, but for solo mining it gets weird—you might spend $500 on hardware and $50/month on power, find a block worth $200K after three months, and suddenly have an insane ROI of like 39,900%. Or you might never find a block and have negative ROI forever.

Most solo miners don’t actually expect positive traditional ROI. They mine because they want to support the network, learn about crypto, or just enjoy the lottery aspect. Some setups like the Canaan Avalon Nano 3S double as space heaters, which gives you “value ROI” even without finding blocks—you’re offsetting heating costs.

The break-even point is when your ROI hits 0%—you’ve made back exactly what you spent. For solo mining Bitcoin with small devices, traditional break-even is statistically unlikely, but that doesn’t stop thousands of us from trying!

Example

Let’s say you buy a Bitaxe GT 801 for $300 and run it for a year at $5/month electricity ($60 total). Total cost: $360. If you never find a block, your ROI is -100%. But if you hit a block reward of 3.125 BTC (worth about $300,000 at $96K per BTC), your ROI is roughly 83,233%. That one guy with the Bitaxe Gamma who won when the block reward was higher? His ROI was absolutely insane—he turned $120 of hardware into $200K.