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I would really like to try NiceHash, but the fact that I have to add it as an exception to Windows Defender antivirus, and that one of the founders has previously been convicted [0] and served time for writing botnet malware, really gives me pause.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiceHash

I'd bet that writing botnet software was pretty good training for writing distributed processing software like NiceHash, though I think your concern is still valid.

Yes absolutely, I'm sure writing a botnet is not trivial so I respect the technical ability!

NiceHash is on GitHub and you could always build it yourself if you’re worried. I think the reason it flags as malware is because virus scanners flag anything crypto mining-related as malware by default.

Windows Defender flags all crypto miners. It is not unique to NiceHash. You don't have to add an exception for the whole NiceHash directory for it to work, but it makes it easier. NiceHash updates the miners occasionally, and if you don't add an exception for the whole directory, then every time a miner gets an update, it's disabled by Windows Defender until you manually allow it.

Seems like there should be a way to have NiceHash sign their binaries or otherwise vet with Microsoft so Defender can automatically allow it. Setting an exception seems like it makes it a target for other malware to hijack or piggyback on.

A signed binary won't help.

Cryptominers fall into the "Potentially Unwanted Program" category, along with remote access software like a VNC server. They're not malware, but can be installed maliciously. If Windows Defender finds a cryptominer, it has no way to determine if it was deliberately installed, so it flags. Manually excepting the directory NiceHash installs the miners is the only way around it.

I wonder if other actual malware now actively looks for that directory to opportunistically install itself into if available?

Yes this would be my concern!

Nicehash (the app) is a convenience tool to manage miner executables -- it's mostly those that are flagged by AVs. You can connect most miner executables to Nicehash (the service) or other pools directly, and some are open-source.

For instance I GPU mine with https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer and CPU mine with https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig, both built from source and I don't use Nicehash (the app). But I haven't looked at the source, so at some point I'm still trusting someone.

This is interesting, so I could run the NiceHash app (which doesn't require an AV exception) and have it mine using open source miners which I have built myself?

Possibly.

Depends on whether or not the heuristics scanning in Windows Defender would still flag the miners if you compiled it yourself.

Not really - each miner (and versions of them) may have different command line arguments or monitoring APIs Nicehash wouldn't know about, so it's going to be more trouble than it's worth. I meant just starting them from the command line:

ethminer.exe -P stratum2+tcp://<your nicehash wallet address>@daggerhashimoto.usa.nicehash.com:3353

Self-ad: check mine (which is also conveniently called Mine). https://losttech.software/Downloads/Mine/

I am considering to add a feature, that would pause when external sensor reports high temperature. But you can already hack around that by creating a background window titled "DON'T MINE" and setting the tool to stop when it sees it.

I'll take a bit of your NiceHash and add some water [0] to that and make you something tasty. A bit more turnkey and a middleman if you don't mind.

[0]: https://www.753.plus/

You're not actually mining Bitcoin with your GPU. I think nicehash automatically picks the most profitable coin to mine at the time and just pays out in bitcoin.

It hasn't been profitable to mine bitcoin with a GPU since 2013 or 2014.

No, nicehash pays you in bitcoin for the specific hash rate that you sell. It’s a hash marketplace denoted in BTC. Nicehash doesn’t mine, it’s customers do.

Sure, but nobody is buying time on your GPU to mine Bitcoin. They are buying time on your GPU to mine some other cryptocurrency. One that uses a different hashing algorithm.

I'm well aware of all this.

Cool

Aren't you concerned with hardware degradation with your GPU running at 100% most of the time?

just limit power to maximum efficiency. My card mines eth 52MH/s@100% and 49MH/s@55% power

The only thing that really degrades is fans.

Running a GPU for ~3 years at 75-82c

At those rates, the GPU will likely pay for itself before it fails.

No.

My GPU hovers at around 55-60 C while mining with the fans at 77%.

Years ago, I was running an AMD R9 290. THAT ran HOT. Even with fans at 100%, it would hover around 95 C and constantly fight with thermal throttling.

EDIT: And as someone else said, at these mining rates, it will pay for itself in 3-4 months.

This is usually a non-concern. It's likely that the GPU will become obsolete in the time that it fails due to being run at 100% of the time.

The other question to ask, if you compile programs, write webpages, and edit photoshop images: are you concerned with hardware degradation with your CPU if you run at 100% all time time, for example, compiling chrome that takes 3+ hours, applying photoshop filters to an image to get a production quality output, or for rendering a 3 hour long animated movie?

Do you worry about the GPU when you are retraining a GPT-2 or GPT-3 scale AI framework?

These questions are kind of ... dependent on each person. Presumably you buy a computer in order to perform computations. That is its purpose.

Just because it's crunching bitcoins/cryptocurrencies doesn't degrade it any more than ... say running an AI framework on a GPU for 3 months continuously to generate a self driving model ...

The flipside, if you have a CPU and you can't keep it pegged 100% of the time, are you wasting resources?

No, because a CPU isn't a consumable resource, like electricity or labor. You should occupy the CPU with all valuable work (for whatever definition of value) but keeping it pegged for no reason makes no sense, and just wastes electricity.

It's value deprecates over time though, as it's market efficiency drops relative to newer cards.

Your return on the opportunity cost is maximized if you can do work closest to the time the card was acquired.

If you buy a card and leave it in the box for 10 years you have not 'consumed' the card, but you have wasted a few hundred dollars.

From an electricity and financial perspective if you have valuable work to do, your costs are minimized if you do that work closest to the purchase date.

This is obvious if you have a significant workload, but maybe not as obvious if you are running CAD. Is the cost of a new card worth the time saved by the new card? Significantly more efficient if you can keep it busy.

In a way, by not running useful work 100% of the time, you're wasting the resource of time.

I would argue that there is a lot less useful work available to run per unit available CPU time than there is time.

Otherwise, there would be market for people to sell their spare CPU cycles.

The only entities selling CPU cycles are big cloud providers who have much higher utilization in general.

If my phone or laptopbattery dies on me I could lose a lot more time/money than by simply not wasting precious resources like battery charge. People buy devices for specific needs. If they can't meet those needs the purchase is a net negative.

I was quite surprised by this, but when running NiceHash on my 2070S with no overclocking etc. it stays at ~60C, fans aren’t even audible, etc. And it generates the equivalent of $5 of BTC every day. Can’t complain.

The main causes of degradation in electronics are usually material failure due to thermal stress (cycles of expansion and contractor weaken the electrical pathways, resistance goes up, that causes more stress etc.) and electromigration due to over-voltage (the flux of electrons induces a shift in the position of the atoms it goes through).

Considering mining is a constant load (not much thermal stress) and improving efficiency requires lowering the voltage those aren't really concerns. There's far less risk than overclocking a GPU for gaming. The only electrical part that may be of concern would be the voltage regulation, but that's still an outlier as long as cooling is adequate.

Fans are know to fail because they're ran at high speeds all the time, but they're a commodity.

Electromigration can happen because of constant high temperatures as well!

I have a 3090 and cheap-ish electricity. Is it actually worth doing GPU mining again? I thought that died out long ago.

Nvidia even offers dedicated mining GPUs: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/

Mining bitcoin no, but other cryptocurrencies yes.

Sounds like with the run crypto is on right now, you can make some pretty decent money.

Not for Bitcoin.

Other crypto currencies can work better though.

https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-rtx...

Claims you can earn ~$17 per day if you can get electricity to 10c/kWhr running a single RTX3090 but that's all mining Etherium (DaggerHashimoto) not BTC.

The 3090 runs super hot. You probably want to look into a heatsink/fan for your vram.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/comments/loxagu/improve...

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/optimize-your-gpu-for-et...

> If I'm going to consume that much power, I might as well mine crypto and make a few dollars. Mining for NiceHash, a service that lets people rent hashing power from miners

What's the benefit of this vs. just participating in a mining pool?

I'm not sure I get it either. Maybe just simplicity / path of least resistance in that NiceHash provides a quick way to get up and running potentially without needing to install mining software and decide on a pool to participate in etc?

https://www.nicehash.com/ got the HN hug of death!

What is the $ cost of the power?

$0.10/kWh @ 300W = $0.1/kWh * 0.3 kW * 720 hrs/mo = $21.60/month

About $20-25/month.

But it's not as if the cost of power is wasted. It's generating heat which I desire. If my GPU is consuming 300W, then that's 300W of heat that my heater doesn't have to generate.

Electric resistive heating is the worst form of heating, though - heat pumps are something like 3-4x the heat per kwh used. So not totally wasted, but a much worse way to get heat into your house, if that's your goal.

Fair enough, but my goal isn't to heat my whole house, just add a little bit to this one room.

My whole house is heated with gas anyways, which AFAIK is more efficient than a heat pump, or at least, is more cost-effective.

Cost effective yes, efficient no.

The efficiency of a heat pump heating a home depends on the temperature outside of the home. I imagine a gas furnace is far more reliable and efficient during times when the outside temperatures are near or below freezing.

I'm stull struggling to understand this concept can someone explain further

Think of the way your fridge works, but your house is the outside of the fridge and the ground is the inside of the fridge. That is, the heat pump uses electrical energy to move heat from the ground (more specifically a deep hole that is drilled) into your house. It takes less than 1J of electric energy to move 1J of heat, therefore one can claim an efficiency >100%.

Think of an inside-out refrigerator.

A fridge moves a certain amount of heat energy from the inside to the outside, but that doesn't come for free. You have to put extra energy into the system to make that happen. The hot side of the fridge gets the "moved" heat plus the heat from the work you had to do to move the heat. The work heat is waste.

If what you're trying to do is make something hot, you're moving heat energy from the outside to where you want it to be hot. That makes it hotter, but it requires work. In this case, since you want to make things hot anyway, that work heat is extra bonus heat.

Say you have a 1kWh budget of energy to spend to heat a room and access to a variety of heating methods such as an air pump and an electric resistor (space heater or computer). Which one should you choose to maximize increase in warmth? While the electric resistor will convert the energy it uses to heat with a very high efficiency, the air pump will usually heat the room even more because it doesn’t just locally convert electricity to heat, it moves heat from outside the room to inside the room. Further info in [1] and [2].

EDIT: great explanation/details in sibling comment by ’prutschman’.

[1] https://www.homecomfortexpertsinc.com/why-are-heat-pumps-mor...

[2] https://www.quora.com/Why-are-heat-pumps-more-efficient-than...

You're still maximizing power generation demand. That makes environmental issues worse even if it does make fiscal sense. You aren't "using power tgat would go to waste anyway".

All power is JIT. It makes a difference.

> You aren't "using power tgat would go to waste anyway".

That's not what I said.

I'm not "using power that would go to waste anyways", I'm generating heat that I would have needed anyways.

In other words, I need to add a little bit of heat to this room. I can either run a small space heater on Low and consume about 300W and get nothing but 300W of heat, or I can mine crypto and consume around 300W, generate the heat I wanted, and earn about $200/month on top of it.

In either case, I'm consuming 300W. I might as well make money in the process.

Is there any cost analyze for using solar panel power for Crypto?

I am installing Solar from Tesla, wonder if I should just use the external power generated for crypto than to send them back to PG&E.

Since you can make money mining crypto paying for power, and the power company pays you less than they charge, or course using it for crypto makes financial sense.