Guide · Nov 14, 2026 · 8 min read
How much internet does a bitcoin miner need, and what happens when the connection drops?
A bitcoin miner draws thousands of watts and almost no internet: about 10 to 50 megabytes a day, less than a minute of high-definition video. What it cannot do without is a connection that stays up. Here is what travels over the cable, what the machine does when the line goes quiet, and what to ask a host about it.
Short answer: very little internet, but it has to stay on
A bitcoin miner uses the internet for one thing: talking to its pool. The pool sends it a small piece of work, the machine spends its electricity guessing at it, and the machine sends back short messages to show the guessing was done. All the heavy lifting happens inside the box. Only the instructions and the receipts cross the line.
The repair firm D-Central puts a number on it in its guide to miners and bandwidth: a single machine, "even a high-end Antminer S21 running at 200 TH/s", uses "roughly 10-50 MB per day". Each piece of work the pool sends is "typically under 1 KB". Over a month that is about 0.3 to 1.5 gigabytes for one machine.
For scale, Netflix says one hour of high-definition video uses up to 3 gigabytes, which is 50 megabytes a minute. A miner running flat out for 24 hours uses, at most, what a television uses in a minute.
Speed is not the issue either. In 2018 the hardware site ServeTheHome measured about 1,000 machines mining other currencies on one network and found that "a 10mbps connection can handle 1000 miners without issue". That is a hundredth of a megabit for each machine. Its verdict on the old rule of thumb of one megabit per miner was that it is "too high by a few orders of magnitude".
So the useful question is not how fast the line is. It is whether the line is there every minute of the day, because a miner with no connection has nothing to work on.
A full day of mining moves no more data than one minute of high-definition video.
| What | Data used |
|---|---|
| One bitcoin miner, one day | 10 to 50 MB |
| One bitcoin miner, one month | about 0.3 to 1.5 GB |
| One hour of high-definition video | up to 3 GB |
What travels over the cable: work in, proof out
It helps to see the connection as a conversation that never hangs up. The pool ViaBTC describes it in its guide to connection drops as "a continuous two-way" connection that the pool uses "to deliver work and receive submitted shares".
Work comes in. The pool tells the machine what to guess at, and sends a fresh job whenever the network moves on, which happens every time a new block is found, about every ten minutes.
Proof goes out. Each time the machine finds a guess good enough to count, it sends the pool a short message called a share. The pool adds up the shares from each machine, and that count is what your payout is based on.
Nothing else needs to travel. The bitcoin you earn is never stored in the machine and never sent over this cable. It is credited to your account at the pool and paid from there to your wallet.
A miner plugs in with a cable, not Wi-Fi
A full-size miner has a socket for a network cable and nothing else. MicroBT's operation guide for its air-cooled Whatsminers lists the internet connection of the M61 and the M60S++ in one word: Ethernet, the ordinary network cable an office uses. Our own catalogue says the same. Of the 266 models that record a network connection, 251 list Ethernet alone, and the 15 with Wi-Fi are small hobby devices drawing between 15 and 190 watts, not machines of the kind this guide is about.
The reason is steadiness. D-Central's guide says every full-size miner "must be connected via Ethernet. No exceptions", because Wi-Fi "introduces variable latency, packet loss, and interference". In plain words: a wireless signal wobbles, and a cable does not.
At a hosting site the cable from each machine runs to a network switch, a box that joins many cables into one, and from there to the site's internet line. The socket sits on the control board, the small computer described in what is inside a bitcoin miner.
Steady matters more than fast
Because the pool keeps changing the job, timing matters more than volume. If the news of a new job reaches the machine late, the machine spends a moment guessing at work the pool no longer wants. If a finished share arrives late, the pool has already moved on. Either way the share is refused as stale, and a stale share is not counted.
ViaBTC's guide to choosing a pool address lists what causes it: "latency, jitter, packet loss, and brief disconnects between the miner and the pool server". Latency is the delay on the line, jitter is that delay changing from moment to moment, and packet loss is a message that never arrives.
Pools shorten the trip from their side. Braiins Pool says on its setup page that its servers "are located all around the world and automatically selected based on your location". A site does its part with a wired network and a stable line. Our guide to rejected and stale shares covers how many are normal and when to look closer.
A slow line costs nothing. A line that hesitates costs a few shares. A line that is down costs everything until it is back.
What happens when the connection drops, step by step
Step one: the work stops arriving. ViaBTC's guide says that when the connection breaks, "the miner stops receiving new jobs until it reconnects and re-establishes the mining session". The machine is still switched on. It simply has nobody to work for.
Step two: it tries its backup addresses. A miner can hold more than one pool address. D-Central's guide to backup pools describes the Antminer's settings page as "three pool slots", Pool 1, Pool 2 and Pool 3, and says they are "strictly failover: the miner uses the highest-priority live pool". Pools publish backup addresses for this purpose: Braiins Pool's setup page gives a primary address and a backup one. If the fault is at the pool's end, the machine moves to the next address and carries on.
Step three: if the site's own line is down, no backup address helps. Every address is reached over the same line. ViaBTC's advice is that "if all configured endpoints fail at the same time", the place to look is the local network and the connection out of the building, not the pool. D-Central describes what the machine is doing meanwhile: it "has nowhere to send work and your hashboards keep burning watts while producing nothing payable".
Step four: when the line returns, the machine reconnects by itself. Nobody has to restart it or set it up again. It opens the conversation with the pool, receives a job and goes back to work. What the pool had already credited to you was held in the pool's records all along, so an outage does not touch it. Changing a pool or wallet explains where earned BTC sit before they are paid.
What an hour without a connection costs
The cost of a dropped line is the bitcoin the machine would have mined in that time. Take an Antminer S21 XP, rated at 270 terahashes a second, which is 0.27 petahash. On 13 November 2026 a petahash earned 0.00042723 bitcoin a day on our hashprice chart, so the machine's share of the day was about 0.000115 bitcoin, worth $8.23 at that day's close of $71,366.
Ten minutes without a connection is about 0.0000008 bitcoin, six cents. An hour is about 0.0000048 bitcoin, 34 cents. A whole day is the full 0.000115 bitcoin. The proportions hold for any machine: an hour is a little over 4% of a day's bitcoin, whatever the day's bitcoin happens to be.
Those minutes are not made up later. A block is found once, and its reward goes to the machines that were working when it was found. What uptime means, and what a day offline costs goes through the sums for a year.
| Time without a connection | Bitcoin not mined | At $71,366 |
|---|---|---|
| 10 minutes | 0.0000008 BTC | $0.06 |
| 1 hour | 0.0000048 BTC | $0.34 |
| 1 day | 0.000115 BTC | $8.23 |
Why the connection is the site's job, and what to ask a host
Data is not what keeps a miner out of a house. An ordinary home connection could carry it many times over. The noise, the heat and the power supply are the obstacles, as how loud a miner is sets out. At a hosting site the internet line is one more thing the host runs for you, along with the power and the cooling described in how hosting works.
It deserves a question of its own, because one line serves every machine in the building. A failed power supply stops one machine. A failed internet line stops all of them in the same minute.
Five questions cover it. How many separate internet lines does the site have, and do they come from different providers? If the main one fails, does the site switch to the other automatically? Are backup pool addresses set on every machine? How will you be told about an outage, and how quickly? And is time lost to the connection counted in the uptime figure the host quotes?
A host who answers all five without hesitating has thought about it. Put the answers next to the rest of the contract in what a hosting agreement covers.
How to see a dropped connection from home
You do not need access to the site to notice one. The pool only knows about your machine through the shares it sends, so when the connection goes, the shares stop and the machine's line on the pool dashboard falls to zero. Each machine appears there under its own worker name.
The pattern tells you the cause. One machine at zero while the others carry on points to that machine. Every machine at one site falling to zero at the same minute points to something they share: the power or the line. That is the first thing to tell your host, and it saves a day of guessing.
A dip is not a drop. The hashrate a pool shows is an estimate that moves around through the day, as why a miner's hashrate reads lower than its spec sheet explains. A connection problem looks like a flat zero that lasts, not a reading that is a little low for an hour.
What it means for a miner
A miner needs electricity by the kilowatt and internet by the thimble. The amount of data is too small to shape any decision, and nobody should pay extra for a fast line on a miner's account.
What matters is that the thin line never goes quiet, because a machine with no pool to talk to mines nothing however good its power price is. For a hosted machine that makes the connection one of the things you are paying a site to get right, and one of the things worth asking about before the machine ships.
Ask the five questions, make sure the backup addresses are set, and check the dashboard once a week. Every hour the line stays up is an hour of bitcoin mined and kept.
Sources and further reading
- Guide to Bitcoin ASIC Miners and Network Bandwidth Optimization — D-Central, updated 22 Jul 2026
- Pool Failover & Backup-Pool Configuration: A Practical Setup Guide — D-Central, 15 Jul 2026
- How to Troubleshoot Stratum Connection Drops on ASIC Miners — ViaBTC, 6 Sep 2026
- How to Reduce Network-Related Reject Rate by Choosing the Right Regional Pool URL — ViaBTC, 6 Sep 2026
- We answer how much bandwidth crypto mining uses with 1000 miners — ServeTheHome, 26 Jan 2018
- Bitcoin Mining Setup — Braiins Academy, read 14 Nov 2026
- WhatsMiner Air Cooling Miner Operation Guide V2.1 — MicroBT, 20 Oct 2025
- How to control how much data Netflix uses — Netflix Help Center, read 14 Nov 2026
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.