The internet is full of mining calculators that quietly assume the price of a coin goes up and the network never grows. A spreadsheet you build yourself, with your own numbers and your own assumptions written down, is far more useful than any of them. This guide walks through the columns you need and the traps to avoid.

The four inputs that matter

Every honest profitability estimate comes down to four numbers:

  • Your hashrate in hashes per second for the hardware you actually own, measured during a real mining session, not pulled from a marketing slide.
  • Your power draw in watts at the wall, ideally measured with a cheap inline meter rather than read off a spec sheet.
  • Your electricity rate in your local currency per kilowatt-hour, including any time-of-day variation.
  • The current MLRT block reward and network hashrate, which together decide how much MLRT your share of the work earns per day.

Lay out the columns

Start with one row per piece of hardware. Columns should include the hashrate, watts, daily kWh, daily power cost, daily MLRT earned at current network conditions, and the implied break-even MLRT price. Then add a column for net daily result. If the math says you make a fraction of a cent, write that down honestly rather than rounding up.

The assumptions cell

The single most important thing in your spreadsheet is a clearly labelled block that says: "These numbers assume MLRT price = X, network hashrate = Y, my electricity rate = Z." When any of those move, the spreadsheet should update. Most public calculators hide their assumptions; yours should make them obvious.

What you should not put in the spreadsheet

Do not include a column for "MLRT price next year." You do not know it. Do not include a column for "if the price doubles." That is wishful thinking, not planning. Do include a column for "what if network hashrate doubles," because that is the realistic downside as more people start mining.

Use it as a sanity check, not a sales pitch

The point of this spreadsheet is to keep you honest. If the bottom row says "covers electricity and a small amount left over," that is a fair description of home mining. If it says "huge profit," check your assumptions before you do anything else.