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Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

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Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#51

Post by salty_biscuits »

speedgoose wrote: post #38
toomim wrote: 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…

And you don't take into account the environmental cost.

That really depends, a lot of people generate too much solar during the day and typically feed it back into the grid for peanuts (especially in regions with high solar uptake, the wholesale cost of electricity gets towards zero in the middle of the day). Maybe more people doing this instead of feeding back into the grid in these places makes some sense.

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#52

Post by fake-name »

tshaddox wrote: post #39
speedgoose wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you don't take into account the environmental cost.

But precisely as much as you don’t take into account the environmental cost of every other unit of electricity you use.

Ignoring the horrible externalities is effectively the point of all cryptocurrencies by now.

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#53

Post by salty_biscuits »

Robotbeat wrote: post #25
CallMeMarc wrote: post #5

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.

Yes. 1) The US has good hydro resources (in the northwest where it rains all the time and there are lots of mountains so you have both lots of water and altitude change) as well as nuclear (especially in the long-industrialized northeast) that (mostly) has long been paid for and that we just keep running for cheap. Nuclear is about 19% of our electricity, and it's cheap once it has been built for decades. 2) Lots of…

Also your network infrastructure is much cheaper than a lot of places around the world. This is a large part of the price of electricity where I come from (which is far more expensive).

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#54

Post by Scene_Cast2 »

No-one has mentioned that ETH mining is memory bandwidth bound. M1 macs, unfortunately, have slow GPU memory compared to your discrete GPU's GDDR6X.

Here's a great post showing that - https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor... - GPU mining is only 10% slower than the theoretical memory-bound maximum (if compute was infinitely fast).

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#55

Post by fy20 »

CallMeMarc wrote: post #5
toomim wrote: 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.

Here in Lithuania it's ~€0.18/kWh for peak rates. That includes all connection and admin fees, which in the US is usually billed as a separate line item. Most of our electricity is imported from Sweden. Our media keeps saying we have the highest electricity prices in the EU, but I guess not :-)

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#56

Post by [deleted] »

toomim wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#57

Post by gyf304 »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #54

No-one has mentioned that ETH mining is memory bandwidth bound. M1 macs, unfortunately, have slow GPU memory compared to your discrete GPU's GDDR6X. Here's a great post showing that - https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor... - GPU mining is only 10% slower than the theoretical memory-bound maximum (if compute was infinitely fast).

I suspected that as well. Since M1 CPU and GPU shares memory, this also means you really can't do anything else while mining. You can't even scroll a webpage smoothly.

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#59

Post by sildur »

fake-name wrote: post #52
tshaddox wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But precisely as much as you don’t take into account the environmental cost of every other unit of electricity you use.

Ignoring the horrible externalities is effectively the point of all cryptocurrencies by now.

The standby mode of only the devices in the US consumes 1.5 times the energy of the entire bitcoin network. At least the bitcoin network is doing something useful.

Re: Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU

#60

Post by G3rn0ti »

127 wrote: post #43
lalaland1125 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of why we need a carbon tax

Only problem with this is I can't figure out how to spend all the money generated by the tax. Obviously it should be used at a technology or process to reduce carbon from the atmosphere, but I don't think that's what governments are going to decide to do. Add a new tax, waste most of it. Or worse, use it to fund societally harmful things. That's what the history shows.

Yes, that’s why a carbon tax is stupid and „emissions trading“ was invented. Under such a system the government sells a limited amount of certificates during an IPO. Later, the biggest energy consumers buy emission rights from the best energy savers.
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