In calculating your potential profit, keep in mind the following factors:
The cost of your FPGAs
Electricity costs to run the hardware
Cooling costs—FPGAs generate a decent amount of heat
Your percentage of the total network hashing power
To calculate expected rewards from mining, we can do the following. First calculate what percentage of total hashing power you command. To look up the network mining speed, execute the getmininginfo
command in the console of the Bitcoin Core wallet. We will do our calculations with an FPGA that can hash at 1GH/s (which is 0.001 TH/s). If the Bitcoin network hashes at 400000 TH/s, then our proportion of the hashing power is 0.001/400000=0.0000000025 of the total mining power.
A Bitcoin block is found on an average of every 10 minutes, so six per hour and 144 for a 24-hour period. The current reward per block is 25 BTC; therefore, in a day we have 144*25=3600 BTC mined.
If we command a certain percentage of the mining power, then on...