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Comment by Heliodex | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin's block reward halves every 210 000 blocks (210k * 10 minutes = 4 years), this block marks Bitcoin entering its 5th epoch with a block reward of 3.125 BTC down from its original of 50 BTC.

Interestingly there must have been a lot of people that wanted to get a transaction in the halving block, including fees and subsidy it resulted in a total reward of over 40 BTC for the pool that mined the block, ViaBTC.

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Was the multiplier high enough for this block that it would have made sense to rent GPUs to mine it?

No, GPUs are literally millions of times less power performant than equivalent ASICs for sha256 mining. In the GPU days, mining was talked about in terms of megahashes per second, and ASIC miners these days are talked about in terms of terrahashes per second.

>In the GPU days...

Back in my earliest days, a CPU could mine bitcoin (it was just a check/enable box in the preferences).

HODL, erryday, frens.

I made my fortune by building a GPU miner in January 2011. Even by then, the best GPU for it was sold out so I bought 4 of the next best one.

I shut it down in July of that year because it was raising my electric bill by like $100/month. Possibly the biggest financial mistake of my life.

I partially heat my 900sqft SFH mining monero... since [compared to resistive space heater usage-offset] there is no additional energy usage, it's effectively free crypto.

Of course this means you can only earn half of the year. Mine ejects its heat under desk toes.

I remember when the first GPU kernels came out... exciting times!

Unrealized gains are unrealized.

Amen... I only vaguely recall something about a boating accident.

Yeah I was mining hundreds of BTC per day on an Athlon 2200. That was the low kilohash era.

I don't think so, partly because the total reward + fees was only 5-6x that of a typical block and partly because almost all blocks are now mined by pools that share block rewards among their members usually based on hash rate, so one would have to be in the pool that mined the block as well. Also the fact that GPUs are less efficient than using specific mining hardware/ASICs for most Proof of Work cryptocurrencies.

if it made sense to rent them on the chance of getting the reward, who who had them would rent them to you rather than pursuing the reward themselves?

Even if it did make more sense in straight EV terms no one is running that calculation of you're in three business of renting GPUs you'd rent them out either way unless it was a really high probability of success.

and the high probability of success is exactly the case we are talking about.

An increase in fees wouldn't increase the probability of success it would increase the reward when there was success which is still an extremely low probability event.

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