reasonable cost of power is approximately 10 cents per kwh. This is below the national average for retail power rates in the U.S. To run a mining rig you will likely pay at least 10 cents per 1,000 watts run for each hour. This means one full day of mining comes with an electricity cost of $2.40. We will also use the block reward and block difficulty from January of 2018 as our base point. And we assume mining with a single rig is only reasonable when working with a mining pool. Some mining pools take up to 10 percent of your earnings, but some of the best only take 1 percent. For that reason, we’ve pick a modest 1.5 percent.
Taking several points across Etherescan’s historical chart of the difficulty factor, we were able to run an exponential regression. This gives us an exponential growth factor that describes the increasing growth of the difficulty of Ethereum mining:
