Every few months someone plugs a new ASIC into their garage, and every few months the same discoveries follow. Here's the honest comparison before you buy.
A modern ASIC draws 3.2–5.7 kW continuously — like running two ovens around the clock — at 75+ decibels, roughly a vacuum cleaner that never switches off. Residential electricity in most countries costs $0.10–0.30/kWh against the $0.05–0.07 professional facilities pay, which alone usually erases the margin. Add single-phase wiring limits, heat management, and the absence of anyone to swap a failed fan at 3 a.m., and home mining with current-generation hardware is, for most people in most countries, a subsidized hobby rather than a business.
Fairness requires the exceptions: genuinely cheap or free power (own solar with excess capacity, certain subsidized regions), useful heat capture (a miner is a 100%-efficient space heater — the Nordics have real projects here), or quiet hydro-cooled units in dedicated outbuildings. If your power is under ~$0.07 and you can solve noise and cooling, the math can work. Most readers can't tick those boxes.
Hosting moves your machine to industrial power and professional operations: from $0.055/kWh at our Ethiopia facility, 24/7 monitoring, on-site repair, and a remote dashboard replacing the garage anxiety. The machine is still yours — you simply pay for power and care. The trade-offs are real too: hosting fees, a contract term, and trusting an operator (verify them — uptime history, repair capability, references).
And if the goal was never owning a physical box but earning from mining: fractional ownership skips the logistics entirely. From $100 you own shares of an entire professionally deployed miner lot — costs pooled fairly across the batch, profits paid monthly. The right answer depends on what you're optimizing for — control (home), economics at scale (hosting), or simplicity (shares). We're happy to talk you out of the wrong one for your situation.