Keeping mined bitcoin is buying bitcoin every month

Two owners, one machine

Take two owners with the same machine in the same hall. Each month the machine mines some bitcoin, and the power bill arrives.

• The seller sells just enough of that month’s coins to pay the bill, and keeps the rest.
• The keeper pays the bill in cash and keeps every coin.

Compare them at any date. The keeper holds exactly the coins the seller sold. And the keeper paid exactly what those coins fetched, as extra cash. So keeping is the same as selling and buying the coins back in the same month. It is a monthly purchase of bitcoin, made with your power money.

Keeping is ahead when the price is above the average price the coins were sold at. It is behind when the price is below it.

A three-month example

One Antminer S19 (95 TH/s, 3,250 W) at Segments’ standard hosting rate, April to June 2022. Prices are Binance monthly averages.

The keeper ends the three months with 0.01372 BTC more than the seller. At the June 2022 close of $19,942 those coins were worth about $274, so keeping was about $152 behind. At the October 2026 close of $77,582 they were worth about $1,065, so keeping was about $639 ahead. Same coins. Only the price on the day you look has changed.

Ahead or behind: one S19 since January 2022

Now run the same S19 for 58 months, January 2022 to October 2026, in the sell-or-keep calculator.

• It mined about 0.297 BTC.
• The seller sold about 0.185 BTC to pay power, at an average of about $41,500.
• In 20 months, all after the April 2024 halving, the month’s coins did not cover the bill, so the seller also paid about $568 in cash.
• At the October 2026 close of $77,582, keeping was about $6,700 ahead.

It was not ahead all the way. At the close of 12 of the 58 months keeping was behind: January 2022, every month from April to December 2022, and January and February 2023. The widest gap was about $580, at the end of December 2022. An owner who needed to sell then would have been better off having sold all along.

The rule is simple. Keeping is ahead if, on the day you look or sell, bitcoin is above the average price you would have sold at. Nobody knows in advance whether that will be true.

What studies of monthly buying say

Buying a fixed amount every month is often called dollar-cost averaging (DCA). Keeping mined coins is close to it: the power bill is your monthly amount.

• Amdax, an asset manager, found that DCA cut the worst fall in value by about 20 percentage points compared with buying all at once.
• It does not remove the fall. A Coinbird study reported by The Block found a monthly bitcoin portfolio still fell 76.7% at its worst in 2022.

Two limits matter. These studies look at past prices and say nothing about future ones. And a miner’s monthly amount is not fixed: it depends on the bill and on how much the machine mines that month.

What it means for your power money

If you keep your coins, your power bill is a monthly bitcoin purchase. Plan it like one.

• Use cash you can leave alone. The power money must come from outside your coins, through the bad months too. Running short is how owners become forced sellers, as selling bitcoin to pay the power bill shows.
• Plan for a long dip. In the S19 example keeping was behind for most of 2022 and into early 2023.
• Mix if you like. You can sell part and keep part, and choose when to sell. The calculator shows how each split did over real months.
• Count the halving. After April 2028 each terahash earns about half the bitcoin while the bill stays the same, so a larger share of what you mine goes to power. See the 2028 halving.

Whether a machine covers its power at all is a separate question: see is bitcoin mining profitable.

Paying power ahead at Segments

If you plan to keep your coins, you can pay the power side ahead. At Segments you can prepay 12 or 24 months of hosting: 5% off for 12 months, 8% off for 24 months. The rate stays fixed for the term. Each month is still billed on the energy your machines actually use, drawn from the prepaid balance. Unused credit is refunded when you leave.

It is one or two years on purpose, not the seven-year prepayment that what paying years upfront really costs warns about. The terms are on the hosting page.

Virtual assets may lose their value in full or in part and are subject to extreme volatility. This article is education, not investment advice. Segments sells bitcoin mining hosting.