Frisco kids are making $32,000 a month mining Ethereum | Hacker News Reader

Frisco kids are making $32,000 a month mining Ethereum

dallasnews.com

27 pointsbreckenedge15 comments

So they say 12cents per kwh, they say they're mining ETH, according to [1] the hash rate of ETH on a RTX 3090 is max 150MH/s (realistically lower) at 300W. According to [2] that means 1 RTX 3090 is giving you about $350/month. Yet they say their old gaming rig made 3x that? Somehow they're also buying up 3090s like there are no supply issues?

>So far, they’ve sold small amounts to pay for expenses such as the electric bill, graphic cards, software and the data center.

This also seems really weird, surely they're selling off all their ETH to buy more hardware? They've got 94 "mainly rtx 3090" rigs - probably around 2k each, so they've spent probably >$200k just in pure GPU costs, they started mining in March so even if they were making their 32k per month, every penny would've gone into new rigs, so how have they not sold all the ETH to reinvest in hardware?

[1] - https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-m...

[2] - https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/eth?HashingP...

their investment banker father loaned them the money for the rare video cards (which has to be at least ~0.25 MUSD). This article is trash, and does not reflect economic realities.

Where did they get these cards, did they pay $3k+ each?

If the whole setup actually does make money this seems like a decent tax minimisation scheme for crypto mining.

The kids have two "blank" incomes you can sink money into, and if you needed to put some money aside for them anyway...

In that case, you need an article like this to prove to IRS that it's really "them" because an alert tax officer will also be extremely skeptical about this operation.

"They started mining in March with an old gaming computer, making $1,000 in their first month."

This is completely BS, in March even a 3090 was at absolute best making $250/mo

That sentence was the beginning of many red flags with the article. Looks like the father wants a nice little story for his kids' college admission essay, if anything.

It also looks like the article was at least partially written by someone else. It seems weird that the journalist would state something like:

> They have 14 rigs comprising 82 processors mining for Ethereum and five small rigs with 12 processors mining for Raven Coin (because those processors weren’t optimized for Ethereum).

Well... when I was a kid I didn't have money for a GPU, or a garage in which to store a server rack. So I don't feel bad I didn't "have the ambition" to do something like this as a kid.

Not a problem for this kid, she just asks her daddy.

“Ishaan said he tries to keep up with news on the cryptocurrency world.”

Its pretty late to start an Ethereum mining operation with PoS so close. I suppose they’ll switch to a different coin when that happens

It's gotta be a concern right - Proof of stake stops in December, all the mining operations switch to the other coins and not only do you lose Eth profits but rewards elsewhere fall throguh the floor too.

These articles that frame a story as “while you were watching tv as a kid, this genius 9 year-old was starting a hedge fund” are the worst. Sometimes, yes, they really are remarkable young people but often it’s just a case of wealthy parents trying to make headlines for their kids. Let’s not upvote this please.

Once the ETH 2.0 cutover for staking is completed mining will be no longer a thing sadly. Pulled back on starting but maybe there is still time.

Is Mining still profitable?

GPU ETH mining beats cost of electricity by 400-800% at $0.09-0.12/kWh, even with various losses and a single card. (300W total system draw for $24/month and $100-200 USD output)

I've got a 1660 that I sometimes set to mining when I'm not doing anything else with it. I use Nvidia-smi to set the power limit to 75W to keep the fan from being audible.

A full month of mining would net about $50 in ETH for $4 in electricity. If you are buying equipment just to mine, it's probably not a good plan. But if you already have it, sure, it's pretty profitable.

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