# Smart Timing for Mining: A Deep Learning Framework for Bitcoin Hardware ROI Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05402/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [TSMixer: An All-MLP Architecture for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06053/) (2023)
- [Frequency-domain MLPs are More Effective Learners in Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06184/) (2023)
- [TSLANet: Rethinking Transformers for Time Series Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08472/) (2024)
- [PreBit -- A multimodal model with Twitter FinBERT embeddings for extreme price movement prediction of Bitcoin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00648/) (2022)
- [MRC-LSTM: A Hybrid Approach of Multi-scale Residual CNN and LSTM to Predict Bitcoin Price](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00707/) (2021)
- [Forecasting Bitcoin volatility spikes from whale transactions and CryptoQuant data using Synthesizer Transformer models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08281/) (2022)
- [The cost of Bitcoin mining has never really increased](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04605/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Fundamental Incertitudes Behind Bitcoin Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.7935/) (2013)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bitcoin mining hardware acquisition requires strategic timing due to volatile markets, rapid technological obsolescence, and protocol-driven revenue cycles. Despite mining's evolution into a capital-intensive industry, there is little guidance on when to purchase new Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) hardware, and no prior computational frameworks address this decision problem. We address this gap by formulating hardware acquisition as a time series classification task, predicting whether purchasing ASIC machines yields profitable (Return on Investment (ROI) >= 1), marginal (0 < ROI < 1), or unprofitable (ROI <= 0) returns within one year. We propose MineROI-Net, an open-source Transformer-based architecture designed to capture multi-scale temporal patterns in mining profitability. Evaluated on data from 20 ASIC miners released between 2015 and 2024 across diverse market regimes, MineROI-Net outperforms recurrent, convolutional, and attention-based baselines, achieving 83.2% accuracy and 83.5% macro F1-score. The model demonstrates strong economic relevance, achieving 97.8% precision in detecting unprofitable periods and 81.5% precision in detecting profitable ones, while avoiding misclassifying profitable scenarios as unprofitable and vice versa. These results indicate that MineROI-Net offers a practical, data-driven tool for timing mining hardware acquisitions, potentially reducing financial risk in capital-intensive mining operations.