Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: Mining under a ltd company
by
Divax
on 21/09/2021, 01:29:58 UTC
Is there any benefit to setting up a limited company and mining as such rather than mining personally?

We started as a personal mining operation and quickly filed an LLC.  There are several things you need to consider:

1.  Section 179 deduction (brought up before and is an excellent point).  Basically, until you make more than you paid for the miner, no taxes.

2.  Miner insurance.  As a business entity, you can begin (and I mean begin) to find some levels of insurance for miners.  General Business Liability for crypto mining companies is essentially non-existant, but property coverage is key.  What if they get stolen?  Burn up in a fire?  The rates are high, but with a pretty large investment in mining equipment, I don't want to start over with no type of offset.

3.  Personal Liability.  This is still an emerging space, especially regarding what liability a mininig company can have, but if you hosting in someone else's facility, and your rig bursts into flames, can they sue your LLC / Corp, or will they try to sue you personally for damages to the building, etc.

4.  Taxes.  I keep my crypto mining gains/losses separate from personal, use crypto mining software to help track what I am making and so its mentally separate from my personal bank account. 

5.  Banking.  Banks do not want to open accounts for Crypto Mining companies.  Even a simple checking account.  I found 1 that is actually got their head on straight.  Mercury bank is an online bank.  I am not advocating, I am just sharing what I ended up with after trying at 10 different banks.  Even the "crypto friendly" banks are BS because they want $50k or 250k average balances.  For small operations like us, I would rather run $10k in an account and pour $40k into miners.

6.  Access to capital.  There was a warning about using leverage to acquire equipment.  You have to decide that on your own.  We poured a significant amount of capital into our starting equipment footprint, but wanted to grow more.  So we added leverage.  You can't get "equipment loans".  I have tried both equipment purchase and leasing and it just doesn't really exist until you get into the $2M+ level given institutional scale debt is available, but not for the small guy.  I found 1 lender who gave me an equipment focused business loan, but it is a 3 year, high single digit loan.  We can talk offline, but its about starting somewhere and building a relationship.  I have heard of folks using zero-interest credit cards and then paying them back with mining profits but its a forward risk if crypto drops sharply, build a reserve so you can just pay it off.  I have seen working capital loans (we did this route) to expand the fleet, but they are longer term 3 - 7 years at low teen fixed interest.  We can absorb the payment if everything falls apart, but it is an option.    Leverage at your own risk.

I hope this helps.


Thank you for sharing your experience! Very useful!

How do you go about showing revenues for accounting and converting to fiat to cover your opex?