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Comment by ninjinxo | Hacker News Reader

Being generous you can mine ~$10 of crypto per day with a 3080 based on its hashrate, zero electricity cost.

So to transfer $1 million out over 3 years, you'd need to run mine ~$900 of crypto per day, ie. run 90 RTX3080s 24/7/365.

Also note that this would draw around 20kW.

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

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NiceHash shows a profitability of $9/day (1) given $0.08/kwh which is average in China (2). So to get a positive return on your investment assuming a cost of $700 per card, it takes less than 80 days. Never before have you been able to launder and invest your money at the same time.

The questions of number of cards and electricity usage are pretty secondary and easy enough to hide. Go off grid, setup a similar legitimate company, lots of options to hide it.

This is backed by the fact the vast majority of hash power for BTC comes from China (3). There are world wide shortages for sha asics and gpus. I'm not describing a hypothetical.

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

(2) https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/China/electricity_prices/

(3) https://www.statista.com/statistics/731416/market-share-of-m...

Googling I see the price of a 3080 is 700 dollars, so this would cost 700 * 90 = 63,000. Plus electricity, which, maybe you can get cheap somehow in China if you have the right friends. Seems like an amount this size is pretty small compared to what you're moving. If you think bitcoin will go up long term then the cost might work out to be negative.

> Googling I see the price of a 3080 is 700 dollars

assuming you're able to buy them and have the money upfront and are able to hide the purchase.

"What this person could be doing with 90 3080, I wonder" asks the Chinese government employee that checks your bank transactions.

https://www.techradar.com/news/nvidia-rtx-3080-shortage-coul...

Training facial recognition models for the CCP of course.

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