Just do the math for yourself. Buy an Asic, pay the electric bill and get the mining reward.
Even if you make the best-faith argument and call it heating cost (which is lying to yourself in lots of cases 🤷🏻♀️) you'll never make the cost of the Asic worth it
Average private person mining is only here for enthusiasts out of principle. But not economic
It's possible if you can find cheaper way to power your gear. It's possible if you can find a really discounted price on batteries, solar panels and charge regulator. You could have it only run when the battery charge is high enough and save on buying more batteries, just have it mining when there is free power.
Don't forget that you won't have to tell the world you own those coins you mine either. No-KYC sats via mining is the most invisible way to acquire sats without giving a pint of blood.
I don't think the replies from @PlebeiusG were "useless". I think you didn't run the numbers as he did and thus you didn't realize yet that what you are proposing ("let's run enough USB miners to "decentralize" bitcoin mining") is not realistic.
It seems like the current best USB miner can reach a hashrate of 200 GH/s [0].
An Antminer S9 can reach a hashrate of 14TH/s (which is old tech since it was released in 2017) [1].
Current global bitcoin hashrate is 356.6 EH/s. [2]
So this means the current best USB miner is as good as 14/0.2 = 70 S9s.
This doesn't sound too bad, right? Wrong. (I included S9s because of this comment from you where you asked about 200,000 thumbdrives compared to S9s.)
Looking at the global hashrate, this means that the best current USB miner is only (0.2/(356.6*1000*1000)) * 100 ≈ 5.61e-10 % of the current hashrate.
This means to reach 1%, you'd need around 1/5.61e-10 ≈ 1,783,000,000 ≈ 2 billion USB miners. That's more than how many iPhones were sold since it launched in 2007 [3]. There are 8 billion people on the earth. So every fourth person on earth would need to run of these USB miners to get bitcoin mining "more decentralized" by 1%.
And that's without assuming that the hashrate will continue to go up. I don't think USB miners will be able to keep up with ASICs. At some point, thermodynamics comes into play and you just need more power than a regular USB port can deliver for increased hashrate and probably a bigger chassis for cooling. At some point, you are better off to buy an actual ASIC, I guess.
Therefore, I think your efforts are better spent at looking into Stratum v2, for example.
How does that change my calculations? It's 200x worse than the USB miner I used for my calculations.
You would need 400 billions of these USB miners to gain 1%.
I have been mining with USB ASIC (100GH/s solo) for four years, but I haven't mined anything.
In theory, mining depends on luck, but in reality it depends on hashrate(capital).
I'm still testing it, and if I can get bitcoins, maybe it's not unrealistic to use USB ASIC mining for decentralization purposes. I haven't got any bitcoin yet though, so I don't think it's realistic either.
Of course, if you're talking about mining blocks from your home, while only spending a few bucks on equipment, that ship has sailed. But, you can help secure the network, and help make bitcoin mining more decentralized using something like that described in the link.
Impossible, no.
Unprofitable in BTC terms (compared to buying BTC), already is, in vast majority of cases.
Unprofitable in fiat terms, depends on time HODLing and future price development between BTC and the fiat in question.
Best reason to mine at home, as someone already mentioned, is to get clean, KYC-free BTC.
Most likely yes, mining is only profitable with access to the best hardware and cheapest energy. A home miner won't get the economies of scale or have access to some cheap power source.
14/0.2 = 70S9s. This doesn't sound too bad, right? Wrong. (I included S9s because of this comment from you where you asked about 200,000 thumbdrives compared to S9s.)(0.2/(356.6*1000*1000)) * 100 ≈ 5.61e-10% of the current hashrate.1/5.61e-10 ≈ 1,783,000,000 ≈ 2 billionUSB miners. That's more than how many iPhones were sold since it launched in 2007 [3]. There are 8 billion people on the earth. So every fourth person on earth would need to run of these USB miners to get bitcoin mining "more decentralized" by 1%.