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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

If you're talking about mining, setting up a mining farm with hundreds of GPUs isn't easy or cheap at all.

Did you miss the part about the GPU being stolen ?

Setting up a mining farm with hundreds of free stolen GPUs isn't easy or cheap at all. You still have to find power and cooling and buy a bunch of motherboards, power supplies, networking, shelves, etc.

(Likewise I suspect the weed is the cheapest part of a grow operation.)

> Setting up a mining farm with hundreds of free stolen GPUs isn't easy or cheap at all.

Still significantly cheaper than setting up a mining farm with hundreds of legally obtained GPUs.

That's not relevant, though. The question is whether "there's a safe and easy way to launder expensive hardware into currency". The fact that it's expensive now doesn't conflict with the fact that it could counterfactually be even more expensive.

North America is literally the best market for this, we have the most robust and efficient mining market and supply routes. One level of efficiency is that large scale mining operations allow for space leases and profit sharing at their data centers. If you wanted to fire off a message saying “I have a bunch of GPUs” they will give you a quote about their terms.

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.

If you have the balls to roll a pallet of stolen GPUs into a colo, yeah that does sound like a great idea.

I mean you would just say they’re from a Kazakhstan or Chinese operation looking for a new home

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”

You wouldn’t need to colocate this since bandwidth isn’t a big issue with mining. Power is a bigger issue since most home circuits can’t support maybe more than 3-4 high power workstations.

Seeds are cheap (~$10 USD/ea), whole ready to harvest plants are not (and hard-ish to estimate). If you grow inside the expensive part is the electricity. Indoor and outdoor both spend lots on labour for harvest/cure/trim processes (variable cost, hourly). Expensive equipment are things like CO2 extractors $XXX,XXX USD. So yea, seeds cheap, loads of other higher cost items to get ~$10/g flower on the shelf at your favourite retailer

Weed ops don't grow plants from seeds fwiw, unless they are trying to discover the next new varietal, as each seed is different from the next. Quality control at scale is accomplished using clones.

GPUs are the expensive part of a mining operation.

OpEx is always greater than CapEx. You don’t see mining farms moving to countries where GPUs are cheap, they go where electricity is cheap.

Because GPUs are small and easy to transport?

Apparently not. As they can be stolen en route.

You need to plug those GPUs into computers. You need to plug those computers somewhere as well.

It’s not going to the moon hard, but waaaaaaay harder than reselling it on Craigslist. And requires significant capital investment.

It'd be more efficient to just fence the cards. There are so many communities of flippers / eager buyers out there that it would take minutes to move an entire truckload of 30 series GPUs to buyers of all types.

You have to move low volume any high volume transaction will check for this now

Just like with setting up a weed farm. The cops need to follow spikes in power consumption that are out of the ordinary and they'll find you. However, growing weed may be illegal in most places, mining is not yet.

Cultivation of Cannabis Sativa with low THC is legal in 46 US states afaik with the 2018 farm bill. So you can say growing weed is legal in most places.

Right, except that me, and a large chunk of the world population, don't live in the US, so I was trying to draw a conclusion about the general global status on this.

The comment said it’s not easy or cheap to set up a mining farm.

You can likely recoup the initial cost somewhat quickly with that kind of hardware though.

It's almost as if you're confusing "cheap" with "free".

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".

How expensive would it be to replace the cards in an existing farm with these?

The cards are what's expensive. PSUs are getting more expensive but by far the cards are the toughest thing to get. Just getting serviceable motherboards/CPUs/RAM is just about as easy now as it has always been.

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.

With a PCIe switch, you can run almost (obviously there are PCIe addressing limits, just to name one) any amount of GPUs per machine.

Source: my workstation has 10 GPUs in it. Two are plugged into the mobo. 8 are plugged in via two PCIe switches.

I'm sure there are other shipments they can target

I think you overestimate sophistication of “let’s steal stuff from a truck” businesses.

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