Is Kaspa A Profitable Crypto To Mine At Home?

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In the hunt for a profitable crypto to mine at home, Kaspa rose to prominence after a huge surge in price.

It was already a popular choose due to the ASIC-resistant nature of the mining algorithm (kHeavyHash) which favoured GPU mining.

But as electricity costs have soared in many countries and the crypto winter has continued to suppress coin prices, a lot of people have questioned whether it’s still profitable to mine any crypto at home.

To that end, I decided to experiment with Kaspa – ticker symbol KAS – on a reasonably powerful home PC to see if Kaspa was the secret to making a profit using off the shelf equipment.

My setup is: Intel i7 12700 with 16GB of ram alongside an 8GB GeForce GTX 3060 Ti GPU.

What is Kaspa?

Let’s start by taking a look at what it is that Kaspa does.

Kaspa is a blockchain layer that enables instant transaction validation using a Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

In a nutshell, Kaspa is designed to try to solve one of the three issues of the blockchain trilemma – scalability (the other two being security and decentralization).

As an aside, the trilemma is named as such because at present many people believe it’s only possible to achieve two out of three issues at the same time.

Kaspa mining guide

As with most of the coins that are still mineable at home with a GPU or CPU, it is possible to go it alone and mine solo.

But unless you’ve got a very powerful rig, it will be hard to mint any coins and the consensus is that you should join a mining pool instead.

There are many different mining pools out there, but I decided to use one of the largest – F2Pool – as I’ve already been mining Ravencoin here.

F2Pool is not the actual miner but rather the platform which people use to monitor their miners, amalgamate earnings and receive payouts.

You’ll need to use mining software to actually connect to the mining pool. Again, there are many options but I selected lolMiner as it’s a popular choice among Kaspa miners.

You’ll also need a Kaspa wallet address – I used the official one available through the Kaspa website, although there are other options.

At the time or writing though, Kaspa wasn’t supported by popular hardware wallets such as Ledger and Trezor, or software wallets such as Exodus and Trust Wallet.

Setting up lolMiner with the F2Pool settings is quite straightforward, and there’s a quick start guide on the F2Pool which gives you all the information you need.

Is mining Kaspa profitable?

In the first quarter of 2023 Kaspa saw a price surge which suddenly raised the question of whether mining crypto on a PC could become profitable again.

Surging electricity prices around the globe and the end of PoW Ethereum mining meant that for most people mining was no longer profitable with a standard set-up.

However, the renewed interest in Kaspa meant a new wave of home miners fired up their rigs in the hope of making a profit.

However, judging by my experience, I still don’t think it’s a profitable enterprise once you factor in the cost of the equipment in the first place, the wear and tear and energy prices.

In the first two hours of mining Kaspa I had minted a touch over 1.25 KAS coins. At the time they were worth about $0.038 per coin.

While this is significantly more profitable than mining Ravencoin, it’s still way below what would be required to cover the electricity/hardware costs.

So, in my view, it’s still not profitable to mine crypto on the average home PC set-up at the current prices.

However, the general consensus is that Kaspa could show strong long term growth and its value could increase considerably over the coming years.

If this does happen, it could be a good coin to mine and hold.

Kaspa price prediction

Kaspa is generally thought of positively by many crypto commentators as it has a genuine use case and a strong team behind it.

If don’t want to invest in Kaspa using your own cash, you could mine a couple of hundred KAS tokens and forget about them for a few years on the off chance that they increase in value.

To give you an idea of where people think the price of KAS will go, some commentators have predicted a price of around $0.30 by 2028. By 2030, KAS could go as high as $0.70.

It’s important to take these price predictions with a pinch of salt as it’s impossible to know where the value of a specific coin, or crypto in general is heading.

It’s important that you never invest more than you can afford to lose and always remember that crypto is a highly volatile asset class.

Other cryptocurrencies that you can mine at home

While I personally don’t believe it’s possible to profitably mine crypto at home using a standard PC, it’s still fun to have a go.

While Bitcoin and Litecoin are beyond the reach of home computers and need specialist ASIC machines to mine, there are other coins that you can experiment with.

They include:

• Ethereum Classic (ETC)
• Monero (XMR)
• Zilliqa (ZIL)
• Ravencoin (RAV)

There are also mining pools that will automatically switch to the most profitable mining algorithm to save you having to monitor prices every second.

This is something to consider if you’re serious about mining and want to maximise your earnings.

Conclusion

Kaspa has the potential to be a profitable coin to mine if you’re prepared to hold onto it for several years.

But if you want to mine and sell then you’ll be running at a loss until there’s a significant reduction in global electricity prices (or rise in KAS price).

If you’re a hobbyist or new to crypto mining then minting a handful of KAS is a good introduction and one that may reap rewards if you’ve got diamond hands.