Three questions that separate an honest mining model from a sales document. All of them are about what the model assumes, not what it concludes.
Mining converts electricity into coins at a rate set by your hardware. Whether that is a good trade depends on three variables, and any projection that hides one of them is not telling you enough to decide.
Question one: what does it assume about difficulty?
As more machines join a network, difficulty adjusts upward so blocks keep arriving at a steady rate. Your machine therefore earns fewer coins every month even if the coin price never moves.
A model that holds difficulty constant is not a projection. It is a sales document. Ask for the assumed monthly difficulty growth rate, and then ask what the payback period looks like if that rate is higher.
Question two: what electricity tariff is it using?
Electricity is the entire operating cost of mining. A rig drawing 3,500 watts runs 24 hours a day, which is roughly 84 kilowatt-hours daily and about 2,550 a month. At ₹7 per unit that is close to ₹18,000 a month, every month, whether or not the rig is profitable.
Change the tariff by a rupee and the whole picture moves. If a projection does not state the tariff prominently, it is hiding the variable that decides the answer.
Question three: does it account for the halving?
Bitcoin's block reward halves roughly every four years. When it does, mining revenue per unit of work halves overnight.
If a halving falls inside your projection window and the model does not step revenue down at that point, the model is wrong — not conservative, wrong.
The break-even that matters most
There is a coin price below which a rig costs more in electricity than it earns. Past that point every additional day it runs loses money, and the rational action is to switch it off.
Ask any mining operator what that break-even price is for their hardware and tariff. If they cannot tell you immediately, they have not modelled the downside.
Hardware is a depreciating asset
Mining rigs have a limited productive life and a thin resale market. A machine bought when coin prices were high can become permanently uneconomic before it recovers its purchase cost — and at that point its resale value is low precisely because everyone else's machines are uneconomic too.
That correlation is the part most projections leave out.
Use the estimator
Our mining payback estimator exposes all of these as inputs you can move. Set difficulty growth high and coin price change negative, and see whether the venture still works. That scenario is the one worth planning around.
Crypto assets are unregulated in India. Mining returns are not guaranteed and any figure shown is a scenario under stated assumptions, not a forecast.