Convenient for the criminals that there's a safe and easy way to launder expensive hardware into currency, without even needing to move it.
What a lovely system we've created, and what lovely incentives.
What a lovely system we've created, and what lovely incentives.
It’s not going to the moon hard, but waaaaaaay harder than reselling it on Craigslist. And requires significant capital investment.
(Likewise I suspect the weed is the cheapest part of a grow operation.)
Still significantly cheaper than setting up a mining farm with hundreds of legally obtained GPUs.
Several of these companies are publicly traded its really not that hard to get done.
Once you move past the Internet forums debating the existence of this market, try actually research this market its very fast paced and robust.
Its not distinguishable, even for liability purposes and nobody cares, the battle for network control and resource share is far bigger than the worrying about this. I doubt people are going to try to register these gpus and be like “ruh roh this one didnt register”
Most multi-GPU farms run like 4-6 GPUs off a single machine. Although some specialized "BTC" motherboards have whacky scalper prices it's not hard to find other motherboards with OK multi-GPU support. You do not need a 'gamer' high performance motherboard to mine effectively. The only thing that really matters is being able to run as many GPUs as it's supposed to without bluescreening.
The power requirements are also not as high as you would expect from the typical power consumption of 30 series cards because it's overall more efficient to mine on much lower overall power consumption than you would get from a gaming workload. Mining just puts stress on different parts of the GPU than gaming and requires less power than a full throttle gaming workload. So you are able to run many more 3080s or what have you on a smaller PSU than you would be able to if you were using those 3080s overclocked and with a high power limit on gaming workloads. You just do not get that much extra hashpower if you go past certain levels of power consumption: it's easier / more efficient to just add another card.
Source: my workstation has 10 GPUs in it. Two are plugged into the mobo. 8 are plugged in via two PCIe switches.
I'm not sure what you mean by "easy", but "stolen and available" is a lot easier than "legal but require waiting if available at all".
My video card has completely paid for itself almost double what I initially paid for it ($2K in cash from a seller on craigslist, back in January).
The reason I mine this way (instead of with ASICs or dedicated hardware) is because this is all equipment that I would have bought anyways for gaming and/or programming work. I do a lot of gaming in 4K at 120 fps, and the RTX 3090 is pretty much the only video card that can actually pull that off.
Being able to toggle the gaming rig into mining mode whenever I'm not actively using it means that the equipment pays for itself. It's a lot easier to justify spending $6,000 on a gaming rig when that same gaming rig earns you over $100 a month worth of passive income!
Probably more than the entire market cap of Bitcoin.