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Comment by hughrr | Hacker News Reader

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hughrr·

So the police are getting RTX cards this Christmas and we still aren't :(

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Those are ASICs. Mining Bitcoin on an RTX is untenable.

Not if you get electricity for free.

The police images show ASICs.

It still is unless you get the GPUs for free as well

Who says they wouldn't be stolen too?

Even when you get those stolen GPUs placed on your porch for free, you still have to set them up in mining rigs, install software, cables, cooling et cetera, and you need to cater to the hardware once it is running and fix problems coming up.

The difference between Bitcoin ASICs and GPUs in performance is large enough to make the expenses with these activities not worth the hassle, even if you get the hardware AND the power for free.

other crapcoins are possible w/ GPUs

https://whattomine.com/

Even with the new GPU mining protections that nvidia baked in?

edit: i mean it's probably a moot point, mining at 10% efficiency is still worth money if you're tapping electricity from somewhere.

The protection is only against Ethereum specifically. You can mine non-Ethereum shitcoins at full blast.

Just point them at a multipool and you can set it up to auto-switch to whatever "shitcoin" is currently most profitable and auto convert everything to BTC (or your output coin of choice). As someone who lived through the original GPU->FPGA->ASIC arms race it's surprising to me but you can make decent amounts of BTC with just a high end CPU let alone GPU rigs or old sha256 ASICs.

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