If they're either using subsidized or pirated electricity, and their hardware is paid for, why would miners pull out?
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/26/bitcoin-miner-c...
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/12/31/miner-bitfarms-...
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/28/battered-bitcoi...
So the same hardware that becomes useless when the btc price falls?
False. For westerners who have to pay market price on electricity that's true, but GPUs have still been used in geographic areas where dirty energy is super cheap of even free for the right connected people (China, Iran, Russia and former Soviet republics, disputed conflict zones in former Yugoslav states, etc.)
That's also where most of the mining is still happening.
Other coins are minable with GPUs (because their algorithm was purposely designed to be ASIC resistant)
But bitcoin has been exclusively ASIC mined since probably 2013 at least
Even with free electricity and stolen GPUs you cannot profitably mine bitcoin (you'd get a fraction of a penny a month, less than the cost of simply storing a gpu)
And even if you could mine it profitably, you would be better off mining the worst shitcoin instead, much less a reasonable alternative like ETH or RVN.
How much intelligence is required to mine bitcoins?
Not true. Almost 40% of the hashrate is being generated from the US. https://ccaf.io/cbeci/mining_map
So instead of being dependent on central banks, crypto is dependent on inside knowledge held by plain criminals or at least very shady businessmen. That much about the openness and transparency in real life.
The discussion is not interesting. It is well-known GPUs are not used for mining BTC. Mining other cryptocurrency? Sure. BTC? No.
Sure you won’t make money if you are lying 35c/kWh, but bitcoin could be seen as a way of exporting abundant renewable electricity from isolated areas.
For example: heavy industry that's located in Mexico instead of U.S for environmental regulation reasons.
Take a step back and look at what you're doing: lamely attempting to justify and carry the water for Bitcoin's horrible energy waste and pollution, when you already know quite well what the counterarguments to your ridiculous shilling and apologetic whataboutism arguments are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Your arguments have been thoroughly and widely debunked already, in glorious detail, and claiming you don't have enough time in your busy online shilling and gambling schedule to educate yourself by watching a factually accurate video about reality is a cop-out that shows you're afraid to look at the facts because you know you're wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
Surely you don't actually believe what you're saying, that factories are as useless as bitcoin, and already know why that is an invalid argument, so I should not have to remind you.
Or do you really not give a flying fuck about the environment or public health? Then say so.
I'm bending over backwards trying to give you the benefit of the doubt that you're not that dumb to believe your own argument that heavy industry justifies bitcoin, so if you've simply lost a lot of money gambling on cryptocurrencies and you're just trying to trick other suckers into covering for your unforced mistakes, then just admit it and stop pretending.
I think I'm not doing that. I'm just part of a conversation and my goal is not to make excuses for Bitcoin. Broadening the view and mentioning other facts doesn't mean that I make excuses for something else. I just don't want to argue pointlessly about this. I'm already in the "ban bitcoin" camp, so anything you try to say to convince me is also time wasted :)
I would advise, do more conversation and less argumentation on the forums
You're the one who is throwing whataboutism arguments around. So don't say you don't want to have an argument, after you started with an invalid whataboutism argument and an inconsistent position, in defense of another invalid argument that bitcoin is "a way of exporting abundant renewable electricity from isolated areas".
In case you haven't been paying attention for the past few years, of if you're only pretending to be incredulous, your argument and the argument you're defending are regularly made by bitcoin shills, and always shot down by the facts because they make no sense.
If you'd watch Line Goes Up or read any other comprehensive analysis critical of cryptocurrencies, you'd already know quit well how terribly bad and insincere your whataboutsim argument and the "exporting abundant renewable electricity" arguments you're defending are, and how thoroughly they have already been debunked, and how tired the HN community is of hearing them mindlessly parroted again and again.
You're not the first person to think of using whataboutism to justify bitcoin.
You're just very rude in your first reply. That's one thing.
The second thing is that I don't care to argue so much about bitcoin, so I just want to not be in your path, you seem to really be angry about this. That's fine, but I don't want to be in the way. Let me leave thanks.
Bitcoin uses electric power. So does electric cars, your iphone, lights that businesses leave on overnight. If you are against bitcoin because it uses power.. you really need to lobby for a law that would ban businesses polluting the night sky with lights that aren't needed.
The electricity is simply wasted, not exported. It cannot be used to do work anymore.
They should be able to, with the yearly supply of mined coins at just over 1% of the circulating supply.
Selling off large amounts will push the price down, simply because you're going to run out of people buying for the high price. Then people realize you're dumping coins, and then realize since you need to get rid of them, they can buy for cheaper since you need to unload them, so why spend more? And also the psychological aspects of dumping coins (why are miners dumping unless they thought they would go down).
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/06/17/bitfarms-looks-...
As a result, the power is only going to be useful if you can move whatever consumes it to that location.
Since power demand isn’t entirely predictable, flexibility is rewarded in these markets. For example, if there’s a downward spike in demand that causes an imbalance, you can earn extra money by either having a power plant that can ramp down very quickly, or by being a consumer that can ramp up very quickly.
I wouldn’t be surprised if mining rigs participated in these spot markets. In theory, they should be able to adjust their power consumption within seconds.
BTW, it’s been theorized that overnight charging of electric cars could do the same thing and dynamically adjust the charging speed based on spot prices.
It's also under-provisioned but increasing supply is a problem because of excess energy.
So they started making deals with miners where the miners act as a sponge for excess energy and in turn pay much less.
Taking the same situation just more extreme (and likely more local) and being payed for handling excess energy doesn't seem absurd.
(I intentionally didn't judge anything about the Texas gird here, it's just meant as an example.)
We have no technology to quickly store and release huge amounts of energy.
In the short term, sure. There'll probably be fireworks for the next month or two. But thread ancestor might well be talking medium-long term where the economics are really simple - the amount of resources the miners put in to hashing will drop until they are making a profit again.
The miners will be profitable again inside 12 months. Even if all that means in practice is that "miners" is some kid in a basement in Khazakstan with an old Pentium.
Once bitten, twice shy? We’ll see.
On the PCs he runs an app that basically manages the mining for you, automatically switching between cryptos to get the most microcents per watt per second.
I have no idea why the allotment gardens got the cheap deal on electricity and I don't know if the mining gives him a significant "discount" on the heating.
At least for GPUs, the cost of switching workloads on the fly, is actually quite high.
And yes the auto switching which in this case is almost certainly nice hash is a joke. For years the only thing you would mine on a gpu has been ethereum.
Nicehash takes an absurd fee and their software might as well be return "Ethereum".
A lot of GPU miners really believe that since they are paid in bitcoin, they are mining bitcoin. Just look at any FB group of GPU miners. It goes to show that a lot of people really don't understand what they are doing at all, which is kind of neat actually... all this stuff still works even though the underlying infrastructure is run by people who don't even fully understand it.
[1] https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/66417/hacking/nicehash-...
It depends what you mean by mining at a loss.
It's never rational to mine when the cost of power is higher than the expected return. Turn off your equipment and go buy bitcoin directly.
Amusing fact: if we go look up dollar auctions [0] the process described sounds superficially like Proof of Work mining.
All in all agree than BTC will adjust is difficulty with long term economics, and so, it will not be quick, short-term actors will lose money.
No, a 1000 watt heater is just as efficient as a 1000 watt computer in heating.
Not to mention that heat pump efficiency isn't linear as it depends on the humidity and temperature in which it's operating.
Electric heaters more or less just lose energy in light that they produce, which is quite often negligible.
An electric heater uses 1000W of electricity to increase the energy in an air volume directly.
Heat pumps use 1000W of electricity to transfer energy from one area to another.
In the former case, the energy in the warmed air is entirely from the supply of electricity.
In the latter case, the energy in the warmed air comes from the intake air and the electricity is only used to move that energy around.
So absolutely a heat pump using 1000W of electricity can move 3000W of thermal energy from the hot side to the cold side.
This, by the way, is why you're absolutely right that efficiency is variable, as it depends on the energy gradient between intake and output.
Only in a closed system, heat pumps are not a closed system, they take advantage of ambient heat in the environment which brings efficiency above unity if measured as power input vs heat output.
And best of all, it becomes completely obsolete at around 6 months when better specialised hardware comes out. So the only thing the miners can do is stop and throw their hardware in the dump.
But not on GPUs in bulk for a decade, that is likely a true statement.
I imagine there are more than a few dorms where this kind of thing is going on.
It really wasn't anyway practical or fun experience.
I'm sure you wouldn't be interested, but for people who are doing it for other reasons and do t really care about the return rate, why would you try to deny their existence?
So I'll say again, it's likely that a graphics card mining bitcoin right now would produce nothing. Ever.
I'd be looking for proof that these people exist before assuming that there are people who are wasting their time and energy on doing something that will never produce a single cent's worth of bitcoin, 'for fun'.
Hell, Jeff Geerling is the kind of guy who would attach a GPU to his Raspberry Pi(s), just to prove that he could. And then turn around and do some Bitcoin mining on those rigs, again -- just to prove he could. And he'd get lots of hits on his YouTube channel for doing so.
And he's not the only one to try to do that sort of thing. Have you eliminated all the possible YouTube channel owners who might be inclined to pull this kind of stunt, just for publicity and traffic to their YouTube channel?
Right, but is he actually doing it? Or are you just supposing again that someone might?
> Have you eliminated...
I don't need to, that's not how evidence works. You're claiming this thing happens, it's up to you to prove that. Unless you can find any actual evidence of people still mining BTC on a GPU at this point, you're just grasping at straws to try and justify your position.
The original point was that bitcoin mining is not done on GPUs any more. This is true in the sense the original post was meant, because the industry moved on years ago and mining on GPUS is now entirely unproductive. It's also true philosophically - if you don't produce anything, can you really be said to be 'mining' anyway?
And even if you show that one person or a few people are still doing it "for fun", it doesn't really contradict or disprove the post you replied to.
Yeah, no. Waiting for this massive crypto bubble to finally deflate so I can see if there's anything worth caring about in the mess that'll be left over.
Unless someone launched a miner ten years ago, before the advent of protocol switching software, they do not mine Bitcoin.
Here is a list of profitability of coin mining on GPU. Bitcoin is not even on a list. https://whattomine.com/coins
I’ve met multiple people from the bitcoin mining and research community in my 10 years and I don’t remember a single person doing gpu mining since 2013.
edit: also, you can’t even find an up to date gpu bitcoin mining software novadays. I dare you to provide a link here if I’m mistaken
Didn't think so.
The former is popular on gpu, looks the same from the user perspective (to the point of users only needing a bitcoin wallet and receiving payouts only in bitcoin), but doesn’t actually mine any bitcoin underneath - just other cryptos that get transparently exchanged into btc.
But there are still some people in this world who are panning for gold.
The functionality is burned into the silicon at the factory and cannot be changed. There are also specialized devices that can give you the benefits of an asic and can also be changed and reprogrammed. these are called field programmable gate arrays (fpgas). Large scale miners do not use gpus or fpgas due to cost and efficiency reasons.
for some other crypto currencies small and mid-sized miners do use graphic cards but large sized ones still use custom chips
for some other all miners use graphic cards
and for some no one uses graphics cards
The non-miners that need to use that hardware would suffer because of increased demand