They could still sell their hardware to recoup some costs. And I doubt most miners are using free electricity.
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