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Comment by weavejester | Hacker News Reader

Actually, even with a $200 ATI graphics card, you can earn about $500 revenue per month for about $100 in electrical costs.

That said, I suspect such a high level of profit won't last for long. It remains to be seen whether the current high value of bitcoins will last, and the more miners there are, the more profit has to be shared.

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how'd you arive at $100 in electrical costs? that's rather higher than I calculated, and actually more than my home's entire monthly bill, with four computers being run sporadically, plus the central air nearly constantly, the washer, drier, water heater, refridgerator, tv, and other incedentals...

I was assuming a 700W power supply running 24 hours for 30 days, paying $0.20 per kwh. My cost estimates are admittedly a little on the high side, as I didn't want to be accused of overestimating the profit.

A PC with one GPU is more like 300W (of course people buy ridiculously overpowered power supplies, but the rating isn't the same as the consumption).

Perhaps true for the general case, but not true for people choosing to mine for Bitcoins. An single efficient modern GPU will use most of that 300W by itself when running full out.

http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=7692.0

And the motherboard uses 10W, the disk 10W, and the CPU 50W. We're still not at 700W.

True. I wasn't arguing for 700W with single card, but felt that 300W sustained might be a bit optimistic if one is aiming for $500 of Bitcoin revenue per month. The OP was offering a conservative estimate, and one could just as well point out that 20 cents/kWhr is also on the high side.

I was just using the layout my tech guy at the comp lab told me, and he was talking about using two gpus.

Ah. My power bill is somewhere around 1.5 cents per kwh..

Where do you live? You should set up a co-location data center for BitCoin Mining rigs. I pay 0.23€ per kwh...

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