These include white papers, government data, original reporting, and interviews with industry experts. For that reason, Bitcoin is designed to evaluate and adjust the difficulty of mining every 2, blocks, or roughly every two weeks. It is possible to buy large quantities of cryptocurrencies outright, but based on the volatility of cryptocurrency, trading in your cash for Bitcoin or altcoins could quickly lead to a big loss. Easy enough to understand so far. The current up-front investment and maintenance cost required to solve the mathematical problems makes Bitcoin mining simply not profitable for individual miners using consumer-level hardware. So to figure this out you need to do some light research on a few of the coins from each algorithm.