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Guide · Oct 11, 2026 · 6 min read

Can you mine bitcoin with a laptop, a phone or a graphics card?

You can run the mining program on any of them, and none will ever win a block. A modern mining machine is about 400,000 times faster than a graphics card from the Bitcoin wiki's table. Here is the sum, step by step, and what to check in any offer to mine on a device you own.

Firsthand card: "Can you mine bitcoin with a laptop, a phone or a graphics card?", the figure 400,000x, how much faster a modern mining machine is than the best graphics card in the Bitcoin wiki's table, with a line of the network's hashrate over the past year.

TL;DR

Short answer: it runs, and it never wins

Nothing stops you installing mining software on a laptop, a phone or a gaming PC. The program will run, the fans will spin and the device will get warm. What it will not do is earn anything you can measure.

Mining is a guessing race, explained in what a bitcoin miner is and what it does all day. Whoever guesses a valid block first gets paid, and the whole world races for one block about every ten minutes. Your device is allowed to enter. It is simply a walker at the start of a motorway race.

Computers climbed a ladder, and each rung left the last one behind

The Bitcoin wiki's mining page tells the story in four steps. Early bitcoin software let ordinary computer processors mine. Then graphics cards arrived, and the wiki says the advent of GPU mining "made CPU mining financially unwise", because the bitcoin a processor produced was worth less than the power it burned.

Specialised chips came next. The wiki says ASICs for bitcoin mining were first released in 2013 and describes an ASIC as "a microchip designed and manufactured for a very specific purpose", "vastly faster than all previous technologies". On its hardware comparison page the same wiki keeps the old graphics-card results "for historical interest" and says GPU mining has become impracticable.

That is the whole answer to "why not my graphics card". It was a good miner once. Then a chip that does nothing else arrived.

One modern machine is about 400,000 of a graphics card

Put numbers on it. A Radeon HD 7970 in the wiki's table is listed at up to 825 million hashes a second (825 MH/s), on 214 watts. A Whatsminer M74S+ in our store, an air-cooled machine, is rated at 332 TH/s, which is 332 million million hashes a second. Divide one by the other and the machine is about 400,000 times faster.

Power tells the same story. That 7970 entry works out at about 3.9 million hashes per joule. The M74S+ is rated at 12 J/TH, which is about 83 billion hashes per joule, more than 20,000 times as much work for each unit of electricity. A processor is further behind still: the wiki lists an Intel Core i5-2400 at 4.5 MH/s on 95 watts.

Those cards are from around 2012 and 2013, and newer ones are faster. The wiki's verdict on graphics cards stands regardless, and the reason is on the other side of the gap: the machines kept improving as well.

The chip that does one job beat the chip that does everything by a factor of hundreds of thousands.

Chart: The whole network's hashing power over the past year. Everything on the chart is machines built for the job; it averaged about 1,010 EH/s over the week to 11 October 2026. Open the chart

What the graphics card would earn: one satoshi every 25 days

Now the sum, with today's numbers. On 11 October 2026 one petahash (1,000 TH/s) of hashing earned 0.00047599 bitcoin a day on our hashprice chart, and bitcoin closed at $82,917.

The 7970 entry is 825 MH/s, which is 0.000000825 petahash. It would mine about 0.0000000004 bitcoin a day, about 25 days for a single satoshi, the smallest unit of bitcoin, worth under a tenth of a cent. Its listed 214 watts, left on for those 25 days at 6¢ a kilowatt-hour, would burn about $7.85 of electricity to earn it.

The M74S+ is 0.332 petahash. That is about 0.000158 bitcoin a day, worth about $13.10, against about 96 kilowatt-hours of electricity: $5.74 at 6¢ and $3.73 at 3.9¢, the rates at our sites. Same sum, the opposite sign. Both figures are before the pool's fee, and what a machine earns is not guaranteed.

A processor does worse. The i5-2400, at 4.5 MH/s, would earn about 0.0000000000021 bitcoin a day on the same figures, roughly one satoshi in thirteen years, while its 95 watts at 6¢ cost about 14¢ a day. Nobody is being unlucky here. The sum comes out that way every time.

Chart: What one petahash of hashing earned each day, in dollars, over the past year. The sum above uses the last point. Open the chart

A phone app that promises to mine is the worst version

A phone is slower than a graphics card, so the arithmetic is worse, not better. An app that says it will pay you bitcoin for your phone's mining has to be paying from somewhere else, and it is fair to ask where.

The US Federal Trade Commission published one answer on 29 June 2015: a "Prized" rewards app was promoted as safe but contained malicious software that used phones' computing power to mine virtual currencies for its developers. It drained batteries faster, slowed recharging and used up monthly data plans. The device owners carried the cost and the developers took the coins.

Check any offer in three steps

Step 1: find the hashrate, and read the unit. Mining machines are quoted in terahashes a second (TH/s). If an offer quotes megahashes (MH/s) or gigahashes (GH/s), the device is a million or a thousand times too slow before you start.

Step 2: multiply by hashprice. Convert the hashrate to petahash (divide TH/s by 1,000) and multiply by the day's figure on the hashprice chart. That is the most the device can earn in a day, before the pool takes its fee. What hashprice means walks through it.

Step 3: subtract the power. Take the device's watts, multiply by 24 and divide by 1,000 for kilowatt-hours a day, then multiply by your electricity rate. If step 2 is smaller than step 3, you are paying to run it. For the graphics card above it was about $0.23 of power against two thousandths of a cent.

Here is the whole check on the M74S+ as a practice run. Step 1: 332 TH/s, so the unit is right. Step 2: 0.332 petahash times the day's hashprice gives about $13.10. Step 3: 3,984 watts times 24 hours is about 96 kilowatt-hours, which is $5.74 at 6¢. The machine clears its power; the card never did. If a seller will not tell you the hashrate and the watts, that is the answer to the check.

What does work: a machine built for the job, in a building built for it

Real mining machines are the ASICs the wiki describes. Reading one is a five-number job, set out in how to read a miner's spec sheet. They draw thousands of watts and run loud and hot, which is why most owners have one hosted rather than plugged in at home. The machine, the building and the power contract are all chosen for the same job, and that is what makes the sum come out positive.

If you are weighing a first machine, the one number to take from this guide is the unit: terahashes, not megahashes. Where the coins go and how they get there is in the guides to mining pools and wallet addresses.

What it means for a miner

Mining is a business of scale and efficiency, and the gap above is the reason. The question to ask of any machine is the one the sum answers: does a day's hashprice share beat a day's power? A machine with high terahashes and a low J/TH does. A device that was not built for the job never will, at any electricity price. Run the three steps on any machine you are looking at, and keep the coins it makes.

Sources and further reading

Disclosure

Firsthand Bitcoin sells and hosts mining hardware, including this machine. No manufacturer, distributor or affiliate programme paid for or reviewed this page and we take no commission on the links above. Historical figures are computed from daily bitcoin price and network hashprice, each day valued at its own prices. Nothing here is investment advice.