Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

coindesk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 96 posts

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#81

Post by SippinLean »

arcticfox wrote: post #44
paulpauper wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major problem with buying mining rigs is that they may be pre-mined. Often the developers will use the rigs for mining and then when the rigs stop becoming profitable (assuming the bitcoin price is stable), sell them as 'new'.

This doesn't make any sense at all as a major problem. Used vs. new is basically irrelevant as long as no one is lying about the hashrate. As long as the sale is immediate there's basically no problem at all there. The actual problem, especially in the past, was that you could pay for the hardware but not actually obtain it for months, by which point it was no longer profitable. Presumably, the manufacturers were usi…

It was certainly a major problem, if you bought a new car but the dealer gave you one with 50k miles on it would you shrug it off if the gas mileage was still the same? At a basic level it's fraud.

There are practical concerns as well, these machines are usually pretty poor quality and the immense heat + poor cooling typically means the chips will burn out one-by-one over time. The PSUs are especially poor and will burn out and need replacing as well. Getting a used ASIC means these will be problems sooner.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#83

Post by danmaz74 »

bigtunacan wrote: post #50
mabbo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source of the power is irrelevant: you could be selling that electricity to the grid, or offsetting the cost of your home's usage. Buying a solar panel may eliminate the middle man, but there's still lost opportunity cost.

The source of power may be irrelevant to you, but not to me. Where I live net metering is capped at 30% of my utility costs. So if I produce more than 30% of what I use the utility company sucks up the excess that I produce and keeps it for free.

Well at least they don't charge you negative prices, as instead happens to some utilities...

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#84

Post by dang »

chx wrote: post #73
stale2002 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crytocurrencies transactions are significantly cheaper than wire transfers. That's a real world use case.

LOL! Congrats to HN for going 24 days without bringing this up. I have written it up last time in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14563751 so let me copy > Every time I ask, people come and say but... but... international transfers! and I point it out that for that transfer the sender needs to buy bitcoins, transfer and the receiver needs to sell them because there is no legal, useful application of it :) And th…

Please don't do this here.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#86

Post by yuhong »

Analemma_ wrote: post #17
danmaz74 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more importantly, electricity costs weren't accounted for, while they should be pretty relevant.

According to its Amazon listing, the Antminer S9 consumes 1247 watts at the wall. Assuming he ran it 24/7, over a year he would consume about 11,000 kWh, or about $1,300 at the average U.S. electricity price of $0.12/kWh. Without knowing how much he was paying for power of course we can't know exactly how much he spent, but this certainly doesn't seem like a slam-dunk win, compared to just buying Bitcoins outright. A…

I think commercial rates are generally lower than residential rates, right?

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#87

Post by Fjolsvith »

kartD wrote: post #27

I think this article is mistaken. People are mining Ethereum causing GPU prices to spike 2-3x. Eth is designed to use a lot of memory so GPU mining is always viable. GPU prices: https://camelcamelcamel.com/search?sq=geforce+1060 Mining centric cards are being released as well: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11607/cryptocurrency-mining-ca...

My wife and I do this. We have 3 computers running 4 gpus and more than pay for our household electricity with them mining eth.

The computers were always on before we started mining so we don't consider the expense as a loss.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#88

Post by tertius »

Cerium wrote: post #64
tertius wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shorting SBUX since June 4th? Where have you been?

Better off with ISRG since January.

You know I should have been on this bandwagon. I did some VR work using one of their robots.

Tell me more.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#89

Post by yuhong »

astrodust wrote: post #38
kartD wrote: post #27

I think this article is mistaken. People are mining Ethereum causing GPU prices to spike 2-3x. Eth is designed to use a lot of memory so GPU mining is always viable. GPU prices: https://camelcamelcamel.com/search?sq=geforce+1060 Mining centric cards are being released as well: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11607/cryptocurrency-mining-ca...

Using a lot of memory complicates any ASIC design but it doesn't eliminate the possibility of such a thing being made. If someone really knows their hardware engineering they could interface with GDDR5 memory on a custom board and mine as fast or faster than a GPU. It's just a matter of how much money it will take to develop such a chip. I'd guess at least $2-5 million given how you'd need to fabricate it at 14nm or…

Thinking about it, I wonder how much QDR SRAM bandwidth compare with GDDR5. This would be useful for Monero for example. Nobody is going to care about spending a few hundred for FPGAs with large amount of memory if a 5x-10x boost over GPUs is possible, but...

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#90

Post by astrodust »

yuhong wrote: post #89
astrodust wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a lot of memory complicates any ASIC design but it doesn't eliminate the possibility of such a thing being made. If someone really knows their hardware engineering they could interface with GDDR5 memory on a custom board and mine as fast or faster than a GPU. It's just a matter of how much money it will take to develop such a chip. I'd guess at least $2-5 million given how you'd need to fabricate it at 14nm or…

Thinking about it, I wonder how much QDR SRAM bandwidth compare with GDDR5. This would be useful for Monero for example. Nobody is going to care about spending a few hundred for FPGAs with large amount of memory if a 5x-10x boost over GPUs is possible, but...

There's a price trap here. The good FPGAs still cost $10K or more each and if you're intending to ship that hardware, which is how the Bitcoin and Litecoin ASIC platforms bootstrapped themselves, you're going to be in trouble if your FPGA solution can't beat the equivalent spend on GPUs. Bitcoin lends itself to FPGA acceleration extremely well, SHA256 is trivial to implement in an absurdly parallel way. Scrypt is a bit more messy but not impossibly hard. The Ethereum one is a beast by design, so it'll be a true challenge for any implementor.

Ten R580 cards can really crank out hashes for Ethereum. For a GPU to keep up it's going to have serious memory bandwidth issues as that's one of the limiting factors in this brand of mining.

What you might see is someone getting a license to make "OEM video cards" and then produce a line of mining-optimized cards. Given the constrained supply across the board on any AMD GPU this would be an easy win for a company like MSI or Gigabyte that's already making GPUs. Strip off the useless ports, tune the memory bandwidth, and make them work over USB-C instead of PCI-e so you can really pack a system full of these things.

Making an external GPU that comes in a nice housing with USB-C interconnect would also sell well in the machine learning market where you wouldn't have to worry so much about shoe-horning GPUs in your case. You could just stuff them in a rack.

Post reply on HN