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Bitcoin? I thought there are lots of free stuff for that.
by mahdix 9y ago
Bitcoin? I thought there are lots of free stuff for that.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoThey might be just doing GPU mining.
- aerovistae 9y agoWhere can you mine for GPUs? Sounds fun
- mchannon 9y agoGPU's aren't used for mining Bitcoin. Bitcoin's algorithm is CPU-intensive, and is nearly exclusively done on from-the-Silicon-up purpose-built chips like Avalon and Antminer. GPU's are used for mining other cryptocurrencies like Litecoin and Ethereum. These can be traded for Bitcoin or fiat currencies.
- simias 9y agoBitcoin was GPU mined for a while (it's "just" SHA-256, it's not particularly designed to be GPU-hard unlike other PoW algorithms) but you're right that since ASIC mining became the norm it's not really cost-effective to mine BTC on the GPU. Some other cryptocurrencies have algorithms that are designed to be hard for GPUs and ASICs (cryptonote for instance) but I think it's just postponing the inevitable. If those altcoins become valuable enough I'm sure people will start making micro-optimized dedicated hardware to mine them and eventually it won't make sense to use GPUs for them either.