3 ms·
Ask HN: What is the market price of a day of CPU?
I'm curious about the economics of cryptocurrency mining on ordinary hardware. If there are any experts out there, I'd appreciate a back of the envelope estimate of the value of a day's worth of the CPU of a random computer, say a 5 year old Mac laptop.
- mattbillenstein 9y agoI'm not sure, but you can't compete with mining ASIC rigs using CPUs is my general understanding.
- montrose 9y agoI believe that. But a day of ordinary CPU must have some value, however small, and I'm curious what it is.
- JPLeRouzic 9y agoCheck the cost of a basic cloud/saas product. Otherwise an accountant would tell you it is something like the cost of ownership: Let say very roughly $0.5 per cpu/per day.
- mattbillenstein 9y agoNot true -- it has a definite cost, power. Plenty of perfectly fine working rackmount servers are replaced every year because for their power/space footprint you can put something that's about to do 50% more work.
- anonfunction 9y agoThere are too many variables at play, what CPU, what crypto, etc... Why don't you run a miner on your computer and find out. If you're paying for your energy and equipment it'll most likely be a negative in terms of profit but would be a fun experiment and espouse a hacker ethos.
- eesmith 9y agoI did a DDG search for "economics of cryptocurrency mining on ordinary hardware". The first hit was for https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.01354.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.01354.pdf . > We assumed that miners in the market at initial time ... own a personal PC such as Core i5 2600K, and hence they are initially endowed with a hashing capability ... equal to 0.0173GH/sec, that implies a power consumption equal to 75W as well as: > Over time, the different mining hardware available was characterized by an increasing hash rate, a decreasing power consumption per hash, and increasing costs. For example, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 3100M, 16 cores, belonging to the GPU generation, has a hash rate equal to 3.6 MH/s and a power consumption equal to 14 W [16]; ModMiner Quad, belonging to the FPGA generation, has a hash rate equal to 800 MH/s and power consumption equal to 40 W [16]; Monarch(300), belonging to the ASIC generation, has a hash rate equal to 300 GH/s and power consumption equal to 175 W Using those numbers to give hash/Joule (a watt is a Joule/second): CPU = 17.3MH / 75 W = 0.23 MH/J GPU = 3.6 MH/s / 14 W = 0.25 MH/J FPGA = 800 MH/s / 40 W = 20 MH/J ASIC = 300000 GH/s / 175 W = 1700 MH/J Since the primary cost is power consumption, that suggests that a CPU is about 1000x more expensive than an ASIC. There's a bajillion other cryptocurrencies these days. The economics is different for every one.
- chatmasta 9y agoDepends if you’re selling the coins immediately or not. If price is up 2x in 6 months the ROI will obviously be different than today.
- arithma 9y agoCheck mining for Monero on a CPU. The economics still work for that cryptocurrency (it's the one commonly found in Web Ads. maliciously)
- gusmd 9y agoYou could use a website like WhatToMine[0], together with an estimate of the hashrate of the specific CPU you are looking at, to figure out how much money you could generate with said CPU over a day of mining at 100%. Estimates can be obtained from crowd-sourced websites like monerobenchmarks[1]. Focus on CryptoNote-based coins: Monero, Electroneum, Sumokoin are some of them. These are still profitable with modern CPUs. Hashrate of a given CPU will be the same over any CryptoNote-based cryptocurrency. [0] https://whattomine.com/ https://whattomine.com/ [1] http://monerobenchmarks.info/ http://monerobenchmarks.info/ Edit: Just to add some real numbers. My home desktop is based on a Ryzen 1700. It is currently overclocked @ 3.4 GHz. I can get mine around $1.60/day worth of Electroneum at current prices. Estimated TDP is <80W (CPU alone), which at SoCal electricity costs results in $0.30/day. Profit is then around $1.30 a day.
- anonfunction 9y agoThis is a good reply, and one thing to keep in mind is the profit is for current prices. If they go up and you don't sell then that $1.30 a day could be more like $1,300 a day in a few months or years.