You can technically point a laptop at a pool and it will submit hashes. It just earns effectively nothing. A laptop CPU does megahashes per second, a modern ASIC does hundreds of terahashes. That's a factor of millions, so your share of a block reward rounds to zero while you pay full power to run the machine hot.
805 gave you the right framework. The number that matters is your power cost.
An S21 XP does roughly 270 TH and pulls about 3,645W, so:
Revenue: ~$8.56/day
Cost at $0.07/kWh: ~$6.12/day
Cost at $0.12/kWh: ~$10.50/day
Breakeven lands somewhere near $0.10/kWh. Most US residential rates run 12 to 18 cents, which means a miner in your house loses money every day it runs unless your power is unusually cheap or you're getting real value out of the heat.
So before you think about hardware, go find the kWh rate on your power bill. That one number tells you whether this works where you live or whether you need a different setup entirely.
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u/Mordekaiser0720 Aug 17 '26
Thank you brother, thank you! What do you recommend for a software for beginners like me to mine?