You can do the smart thing:
- Step 1: Understand how bitcoin difficulty works and why.
- Step 2: Understand how many hashes per second your mining equipment can calculate.
- Step 3: Understand how much electricity your mining equipment will use.
- Step 4: Understand the real amount your electricity costs (including all taxes, fees, and additional charges).
- Step 5: Determine if you will need to run any cooling equipment to keep your mining equipment from overheating.
- Step 6: Understand how much electricity that cooling equipment will use.
- Step 7: Do some math and (unless you have really cheap electricity, really cheap cooling, and access to really cheap mining equipment) realize that you'd get more bitcoins by just buying the bitcoins with the cash instead of spending all the cash on mining.
- Step 8: Give up on mining and buy some bitcoins
Or you can do what LOTS of people do:
- Step 1: Buy some mining equipment.
- Step 2: Plug it in and ignore and configure it to start mining
- Step 3: Ignore the increased cost of electricity to run the equipment and cool it
- Step 4: Wait for the bitcoins exchange rate to go up
- Step 5: Convince yourself that since you get more USD for the bitcoins than you spent to generate the bitcoins you came out ahead
- Step 6: Live happily in your ignorance, never realizing that you would have had a LOT more bitcoins (and therefore a LOT more money) if you had just bought the bitcoins with the cash in the first place instead of trying to mine them
There is not much of a profit that can be made with mining now.
People create different methods on acquiring bitcoin for cheap.
So the only solution to most people is how creative can you get.. and do people want it is the answer. If you know the halving is coming up or know certain information - you can take an iphon5 as a investment and sell it then wait for the value to pop further and cash in.
Theres really no method on mining unless you have a ton of cash or you get into ETH which is the hype right now for alt coin mining..