Pick a device. Travel through Bitcoin's history. See what you could have mined.
This tool lets you select a computing device — a laptop, gaming GPU, or industrial Bitcoin ASIC — and see how much Bitcoin it would have mined per day at any point in Bitcoin's history. In 2009, a standard laptop could mine several Bitcoin per day using its CPU, because the network had almost no competition. By 2013, GPU mining had taken over. By 2015, dedicated ASIC machines had made CPU and GPU mining economically obsolete. Today, industrial ASIC farms consume megawatts of electricity and earn fractions of a Bitcoin daily.
The reason a laptop can no longer mine Bitcoin profitably is not a flaw — it's a feature. Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment algorithm automatically recalibrates every 2,016 blocks (approximately two weeks) to maintain a 10-minute block time regardless of how much computing power joins or leaves the network. As more miners compete, each one earns less, and the cost to attack the network grows. The hashrate time machine makes this visible: the computing power needed to mine one Bitcoin today is trillions of times greater than it was in 2009, which is why the network is more secure than it has ever been.
Historical network hashrate data: mempool.space. Device specifications from manufacturer datasheets. For educational purposes only — not financial advice.
2009
Satoshi and a handful of cypherpunks
90000.00
BTC/day
32850000.00
BTC/year
2010
First GPU miners appear late in the year
3600.00
BTC/day
1314000.00
BTC/year
2011
GPU mining takes over, CPU becomes obsolete
36.00
BTC/day
13140.00
BTC/year
2012
First halving. FPGAs bridge the gap to ASICs
0.0090
BTC/day
3.29
BTC/year
2013
ASICs arrive. GPUs become unprofitable
0.00001800
BTC/day
0.0066
BTC/year
2014
Industrial mining begins
6.00e-7
BTC/day
0.00021900
BTC/year
2016
Second halving. Mining consolidates
4.50e-8
BTC/day
0.00001642
BTC/year
2018
Hashrate 10x in two years
2.25e-9
BTC/day
8.21e-7
BTC/year
2020
Third halving. Institutional miners enter
3.75e-10
BTC/day
1.37e-7
BTC/year
2022
Hashrate recovers from China ban
1.80e-10
BTC/day
6.57e-8
BTC/year
2024
Fourth halving. Sub-3.125 BTC rewards
3.75e-11
BTC/day
1.37e-8
BTC/year
Speed and versatility are a natural tradeoff. The more things a machine can do, the slower it is at any single task. Think of it like a kitchen:
Laptop (CPU) — The Home Cook
One stove, one pan, one pair of hands. Can make anything — pasta, steak, cake — but only one dish at a time. Versatile, slow.
GPU — The Restaurant Kitchen
50 cooks all doing the same prep at once. Great at peeling 500 potatoes in minutes, but they all have to follow the same recipe.
ASIC — The Industrial Doughnut Machine
Dough goes in one end, perfect doughnuts come out the other — thousands per hour. Can't flip a burger. Can't boil an egg. If the world stops eating doughnuts, it's scrap metal.
Bitcoin mining is doughnut-making. The recipe never changes, so the machine that can only make doughnuts wins every time. That's why your laptop went from 50 BTC/day to nothing.
Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment transformed mining from a hobby anyone could do on a laptop into an industrial-scale operation. CPU mining was only viable for a few months in 2009. GPU mining lasted roughly two years before FPGAs and then ASICs made it obsolete.
Today, only specialized ASIC hardware can meaningfully compete. This progression is by design — as more computing power joins the network, the difficulty adjusts to maintain 10-minute blocks. Combined with the halving schedule that cuts the block reward every four years, the economics of mining have shifted dramatically.
The result: Bitcoin's security grows stronger over time while new supply becomes increasingly scarce. Monitor the network's live vitals on the Bitcoin Pulse page.
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