Ethereum’s ether (ETH) is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and it is still possible to mine this cryptocurrency at home with the aid of GPUs equipped with sufficiently powerful graphics cards.
Aside from the choice of hardware, an individual miner’s profit and revenue depend strongly on market conditions and the presence of other miners. During bull markets, the price of Bitcoin may skyrocket higher, which results in the BTC they mine being worth more on a dollar basis.

As an investor in the stock market, Duell found the idea of mining fascinating. “You can’t just create your [stock] shares,” he says, “whereas mining, you buy the machine and the machine can create more bitcoins for you.”
More broadly, the region is watching uneasily as one of its biggest natural resources—a gigantic surplus of hydroelectric power—is inhaled by a sector that barely existed five years ago and which is routinely derided as the next dot-com bust, or this century’s version of the Dutch tulip craze, or, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it in January, a Ponzi scheme. Indeed, even as Miehe was demonstrating his prospecting chops, bitcoin’s price was already in a swoon that would touch $5,900 and rekindle widespread doubts about the future of virtual currencies. Even as cryptocurrency enthusiasts have flocked to the region, many locals remain skeptical about what the Bitcoin boom will mean for the area’s economy. Here, a shuttered wholesale retailer in downtown Wenatchee. | Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine