Not a ton of money but it adds up after a month and the GPU was a sunk cost since I got it for gaming. It literally is profitable, for my situation anyway.
I agree that the statement "you can't make a profit any more" is just incorrect because of the subjectivity of "you", but it's also worth noting that this is extremely variable - my electricity costs $0.38/kWh off-peak and $0.54/kWh on-peak.
Whether or not mining on existing hardware is profitable depends entirely on where you live, and since we're explicitly talking about the effects of an increased demand on GPUs due to mining, people are clearly not just using existing hardware.
I'm not really a crypto guy but mining in your downtime on a decent gpu is a pretty good gamble.
And Flight Simulator 2020 needs crazy specs if you want the pretty graphics at decent frame rates. I was planning on doing the mining on the side just to reduce how much it cost, but I'm mainly getting it for the pretty Flight Sim graphics.
???
Doesn't all this limit the game publishers as well? Surely someone who is currently developing a game has to consider whether or not to even care that something like a 2080 even exists, it might as well not.
And if games starts to be developed with older and slower cards in mind, to ensure that games can even play them, won't that hurt GPU sales in the future?
> I have bought around 4 3070s/3080s all for under 1000 at actual retail pricing.
How much time and effort did you spend to accomplish that?
I've signed up with multiple AIBs and Nvidia itself for months to get notified if anything I'm interested in gets in stock. Nvidia stopped selling directly in my region (Europe) a while ago, no AIB has notified me yet. Probably because I picked all the most affordable models, all of which are still more expensive than 3080 FE MSRP, while 3080 FE has not even an official retailer left in mainland Europe.
Sure, I could setup a whole range of alerts and spend all day hanging out in a bunch of discords to catch one of those super rare stock drops.
But tbh that's not the experience I'm looking for when I'm already willing to spend money: I don't want, and most people simply can't, having to organize the rest of their life around the possibility for a purchasing "opportunity" at any given moment.
Can't just buy a gpu and plug it into a wall outlet.
It's literally a ROI of 100-300%.
Or to put it another way it's similar to a risky stock with a compounding yearly return of 41% for four years.
Using a graphics card for mining that you have anyway is just gravy (apart from externalities which are another big problem).
*excluding laser research laboratories and weapons.
The light costs about $51 an hour. Arguably the smallest expense involved in running a casino hotel 24 hours a day. Less than a rounding error.
They cut back to half-brightness not because of money, or energy, but because they thought the light pollution was a little excessive.
The strip is mostly solar-powered so the Luxor is basically just taking sunlight and beaming it back up into the sky.
It's not like you could take that energy and ship it elsewhere, or do something more productive with it. The Strip's solar plant exists because of The Strip. If the Strip didn't exist then you'd just have sunlight hitting rocks in the middle of the desert like everywhere else in Nevada.
Oh, and moths to a flame? That's literal. There's an entire ecosystem built up around the moths who flock to the Luxor, the bats that eat those moths, and the owls that eat those bats.