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Comment by SargeDebian | Hacker News Reader

This smells a bit fishy. If you make $100.000 from mining for 3 weeks with $1.500 in power, then the power costs are almost insignificant.

With about 500 hours in those 3 weeks, every hour you don't mine is $200, so if unhooking and restarting your mining equipment takes 4 hours one way, you've lost money after moving it back and forth.

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Assuming the story is true (unlikely) - they could have been mining an easy to mine, low value crypto currency which since then increased in price a lot.

But even then (again unlikely) they did not mine $100k worth of crypto currency, but instead bought a winning lottery ticket/speculated/etc.

Cryptocurrency "mining" is a lottery. The "miner" that guesses the correct number is paid a reward. There isn't much more to it.

They could also have gotten ridiculously lucky and solved a block with a small mining pool.

Whatever it was, they would have made money regardless of power costs.

I mean, nobody would just go on the Internet and tell lies and all, and the story's only coming out now, but crypto's been on a wild. If they mined and sold ETH at the peak in 2021 when it was above $4,500, that's 23 Eth they would have had to have mined to hit $100,000k. Someone else will have to do the math on how achievable that was in difficulty, but I don't think it's that inconceivable.

Because the author thought "I stole $1500 of electricity from my AirBnB host" would not generate enough view for them.

The point is that if you could make $100k from $1.5k in power then it makes no sense to not do it in a data center where you don't have to move the computers around and break them.

If they'd make $1,000 I'd believe it.

if your projection was for making $1,000, but then because spiked up to over $4,500 an ETH, that it's suddenly lucrative, it makes sense. cryptocurrency's been on a wild ride so a projection that they'd only make $1,000, but ended up with $100,000, isn't impossible.

It isn't impossible, but wildly unlikely.

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