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Is it profitable to use these for mining cryptocurrency?
by mankoxyz 9y ago
Is it profitable to use these for mining cryptocurrency?
- dkersten 9y agoNo. Nowadays the big players in mining cryptocurrency have datacenters full of ASIC's. The currencies that are resistant to ASIC mining (due to eg using memory-bound hashing functions), like Monero, are probably just as resistant to GPU mining as they are to ASIC mining, although if you were to investigate it, I'd look at one of those and not bitcoin.
- baq 9y agogaming GPU prices and availability would like to talk with you. where i live, 1070 price has gone up 50% in 6 months - if you manage to get one. it's crazy and was attributed to ethereum/zcash mining.
- dkersten 9y agoA similar thing happened when bitcoin GPU mining became big. I was watching an interview recently with one of the large mining operations where they basically bought all of a suppliers GPU stock (of whatever type of card was popular for mining at the time) and couldn't find any other suppliers who weren't out of stock.
- arithma 9y agoThis does not apply to Equihash (ZCash) or DaggerHashimoto. NiceHash consistently mines those on my 2 rigs (3x 1070 GTX rigs.)
- jnwatson 9y agoNo. Making a GPU resistant algorithm is hard. Ethereum is ASIC but not GPU resistant.
- dkersten 9y agoWhy is that? I understand that GPU's have a ton more memory than an ASIC, but couldn't you attach a huge amount of RAM or something to your ASIC (kinda like how GPU's work)?
- imtringued 9y agoThose ASICs will cost as much as GPUs or more for the same amount of performance.
- dkersten 9y agoThanks! Although, since an ASIC is application specific, couldn't you pack more cores (since you can ignore the circuitry that you don't need) or otherwise optimise for the application? If you can do more work, or do the same amount of work with less energy, then it could still be worth it. I am obviously ignoring a rather important factor: its unlikely a "small" player could make a more performant ASIC than a "big" player like the GPU vendors, who have invested billions into building high performance hardware in a cost effective way. I'm not really asking "why don't people do this", but rather asking if its possible at all given a big enough budget.
- BillinghamJ 9y agoNo
- toredash 9y agoOf course not. Then everyone would use it for that purpose alone.
- BenoitP 9y agoNope. I have made profitability assessments on several different cloud GPU solutions having different hardware. As a general rule, for every 100 USD you'd only mine about ~50 USD's worth of crypto-currencies. Which is not surprising since on these products you get a fancy motherboard + high-end Intel CPUs + boatloads of RAM. These are of little to no use when mining, and account for about half of the cost of this hardware. Also, the local cost of electricity is not the lowest price in the world (China having one of the lowest) While the price of hardware is fixed, crypto-currencies possess a difficulty adjustment mechanism. This makes the whole system have an upper bound on mining profitability, and this bound converges on the profitability of the best-yield-hardware's. Which would be something to the tune of this [1]. Note that while having 6 GPUs, this system has 8 GB of RAM and an Intel Celeron. [1] https://blockoperations.com/6-gpu-mining-rig-amd-rx580-intel-lga-1151-ethereum-zcash/ https://blockoperations.com/6-gpu-mining-rig-amd-rx580-intel... ---- EDIT: We're talking about IO-bandwidth-bound crypto-currencies here, like all the ones based on EThash[2][3], Ethereum being one of them. Bitcoin's upper bound on profitability is set by the best ASICs for SHA256 processing. [2] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash [3] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash-Design-Rationale https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash-Design-Rational...
- Jdam 9y agoYou probably didn't evaluate Spot prices. I wrote a tool once to evaluate current AWS spot prices against the Ethereum price and sometimes it was a low as losing 2 cents per hour and G2 instance.
- logicallee 9y agoAWS is by far the most profitable business unit at Amazon, with margins consistently in the 25% range. https://www.recode.net/2017/4/27/15451726/amazon-q1-2017-earnings-profits-net-income-cash-flow-chart https://www.recode.net/2017/4/27/15451726/amazon-q1-2017-ear... if this is true: > it was a low as losing 2 cents per hour then it seems someone should be able to negotiate with you (even if not Amazon), especially if you're willing to use 1,000 or 10,000 instances - and don't need memory, etc. it seems 2¢ should be within what you might be able to shave off of somewhere... maybe not, though.
- kayoone 9y agowell in 2011 i was using a Desktop PC + 3 GPUs to mine bitcoins which was barely profitable at a Bitcoin price of around $20 USD. Would i have kept them though and not sold at that price.... FML
- Dolores12 9y agoIt's not profitable to mine using your own money. But i am pretty sure those instances will be abused by carders. Like you invest 100$ in carded money and get 50$ back in cryptocurrency.