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Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

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11–20 of 129 posts

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is electricity really that cheap in the USA? The cheapest price I've found for my city here in Germany is like 0,24 EUR. And this is already including a new customer discount and cashback. Not even guaranteed green energy... 0,24 EUR is currently ~0,29 USD. That's 0,29 USD for my cheapest price against your most expensive price with 0,20 USD.

Varies greatly based on state or even county. Hundreds or maybe thousands of utility districts each with a unique set of regulations and resources.

Is there any state or nation wide search for good utility prices? We've got Check24[1] in Germany which basically is a no brainer to find good price for stuff like this.

[1] https://www.check24.de/strom/

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#12
post #4

Quick, rough calculations suggest to me that the RTX 3080 is about what you need to turn a profit - based on 200k annual revenue you need 600k in hardware. Three years to pay itself off - about the lifetime of the hardware, my guess. That's if you could find the hardware - and I didn't include stuff like motherboard/rack/etc. If it's that hard to make a profit on the RTX 3080 then I doubt the M1 Mac Mini was ever in…

Really? A 1080 TI still produces a few dollars a day easily.

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#13
post #2

> Is it worth it? > Um. Not really. At current Ethereum prices (2021-02-26), it generates $0.14 of profit per day. It’s still a profit, but very miniscule. The real question is if it makes more money than it costs in electricity. Apple claims it uses 39 W max. That adds up to 0.936 kWh of electricity per day, which we can approximate at 1 kWh. Electricity prices range from ~4¢ to ~20¢ per kWh in the USA, which means…

Is electricity really that cheap in the USA? The cheapest price I've found for my city here in Germany is like 0,24 EUR. And this is already including a new customer discount and cashback. Not even guaranteed green energy... 0,24 EUR is currently ~0,29 USD. That's 0,29 USD for my cheapest price against your most expensive price with 0,20 USD.

[deleted]

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#14
post #2

> Is it worth it? > Um. Not really. At current Ethereum prices (2021-02-26), it generates $0.14 of profit per day. It’s still a profit, but very miniscule. The real question is if it makes more money than it costs in electricity. Apple claims it uses 39 W max. That adds up to 0.936 kWh of electricity per day, which we can approximate at 1 kWh. Electricity prices range from ~4¢ to ~20¢ per kWh in the USA, which means…

Is electricity really that cheap in the USA? The cheapest price I've found for my city here in Germany is like 0,24 EUR. And this is already including a new customer discount and cashback. Not even guaranteed green energy... 0,24 EUR is currently ~0,29 USD. That's 0,29 USD for my cheapest price against your most expensive price with 0,20 USD.

see: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

There are several states where the retail rates are lower than 10 cent/kwh.

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#15
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is electricity really that cheap in the USA? The cheapest price I've found for my city here in Germany is like 0,24 EUR. And this is already including a new customer discount and cashback. Not even guaranteed green energy... 0,24 EUR is currently ~0,29 USD. That's 0,29 USD for my cheapest price against your most expensive price with 0,20 USD.

see: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... There are several states where the retail rates are lower than 10 cent/kwh.

Thanks for the link. Insane to see that some of them even got cheaper in 2020.

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#16
post #4

Quick, rough calculations suggest to me that the RTX 3080 is about what you need to turn a profit - based on 200k annual revenue you need 600k in hardware. Three years to pay itself off - about the lifetime of the hardware, my guess. That's if you could find the hardware - and I didn't include stuff like motherboard/rack/etc. If it's that hard to make a profit on the RTX 3080 then I doubt the M1 Mac Mini was ever in…

Really? A 1080 TI still produces a few dollars a day easily.

I'm just doing rough numbers here and I claim to know basically nothing about mining outside of a simple calculator off google. Hardware wise (more my knowledge base), I imagine the older hardware might have interesting economic characteristics - like if you could stock a fleet of company vehicles with really super great 20 year old Toyotas versus newer Toyotas. Problem is, finding that many 20 year old Toyotas of that reasonable quality, etc.

Edit - "quality" not "quantity"!

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#17
post #4

Quick, rough calculations suggest to me that the RTX 3080 is about what you need to turn a profit - based on 200k annual revenue you need 600k in hardware. Three years to pay itself off - about the lifetime of the hardware, my guess. That's if you could find the hardware - and I didn't include stuff like motherboard/rack/etc. If it's that hard to make a profit on the RTX 3080 then I doubt the M1 Mac Mini was ever in…

Really? A 1080 TI still produces a few dollars a day easily.

It depends on what his assumptions are. Currently a 3080 produces $7.71/day in revenue[1]. If you extrapolate that out for a year you can break-even on your investment in less than a year, even if you pay scalped prices. However, this doesn't factor in difficulty increases, and depending on your forecasts it can vary from never breaking even to breaking even in less than two years.

[1] https://whattomine.com/coins

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#18
I thought the main strengths distinguishing the performance of the M1 were the idle power chips that saved a lot of energy, and the shared CPU/GPU memory. Am I remembering that right?

Do either of those things equal better intensive mining efficiency, much over a dedicated traditional rig, where you're flat out all the time and emphasizing GPU?

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#20
post #2

> Is it worth it? > Um. Not really. At current Ethereum prices (2021-02-26), it generates $0.14 of profit per day. It’s still a profit, but very miniscule. The real question is if it makes more money than it costs in electricity. Apple claims it uses 39 W max. That adds up to 0.936 kWh of electricity per day, which we can approximate at 1 kWh. Electricity prices range from ~4¢ to ~20¢ per kWh in the USA, which means…

Is electricity really that cheap in the USA? The cheapest price I've found for my city here in Germany is like 0,24 EUR. And this is already including a new customer discount and cashback. Not even guaranteed green energy... 0,24 EUR is currently ~0,29 USD. That's 0,29 USD for my cheapest price against your most expensive price with 0,20 USD.

Yes, Germany has very expensive energy because of their transition away from reliable energy sources onto renewables.
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