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It's an interesting analysis, but it misses the key point: the payout will on average always be a little more than the running costs on a completely optimised s
by dmurray 9y ago
It's an interesting analysis, but it misses the key point: the payout will on average always be a little more than the running costs on a completely optimised setup, and therefore a bit less than your running costs if you don't have the most power efficient machine and the cheapest electricity, and certainly not enough to pay for your time on a single machine with a handful of GPUs. If you want to mine cryptocurrencies because you have an interest in them, fine, but if you want to make money you'll be just as well (or as badly) off by buying them with dollars.
- tzs 9y ago> It's an interesting analysis, but it misses the key point: the payout will on average always be a little more than the running costs on a completely optimised setup, [...] Is that necessarily true? I can see why it would be true for a blockchain system when it is at a stage of development where the primary reason people run nodes is to mine for that chain's cryptocurrency, but there is other functionality provided by many blockchain systems besides just a simple currency. If those other functions become important enough to enough people, then could we end up in a situation where people who rely on those functions run nodes to help keep those functions working even if what they can make from the coins and transaction fees of their nodes will not cover the costs of running the node?
- dmurray 9y agoIt's possible if there isn't an easy mechanism to exchange the benefits of the mining. If there is, in a large enough market, the people who benefit from the nodes being run could pay others a premium to run the nodes, and that premium can be thought of as part of the "payout".