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What is unsustainable about Bitcoin?
by sawjet 5y ago
What is unsustainable about Bitcoin?
- Clewza313 5y agoIs there anything sustainable about Bitcoin? But getting back on topic, Bitcoin miners long since moved to custom ASICs, you can't make a profit with GPUs any more.
- irq 5y agoI make $7-8 per day, after electrical costs, letting my 2080ti (normally used for flight sim, but when not in use…) run nicehash’s miner software. My electricity costs $0.0816 per kWh. Not a ton of money but it adds up after a month and the GPU was a sunk cost since I got it for gaming. It literally is profitable, for my situation anyway.
- Clewza313 5y agoSo at around $2500 a pop, you'd be looking at a year just to amortize your costs, and that's assuming BTC stays at its current insane levels. (A mighty assumption, since it's dropped 30% in the last week.)
- parineum 5y agoAs long as it's taking a year to pay for itself, have a look at bitcoin's change in value over any recent 12 month period. I'm not really a crypto guy but mining in your downtime on a decent gpu is a pretty good gamble.
- cableshaft 5y agoHe bought it for Flight Sim it sounds like, the mining is just a bonus. And Flight Simulator 2020 needs crazy specs if you want the pretty graphics at decent frame rates. I was planning on doing the mining on the side just to reduce how much it cost, but I'm mainly getting it for the pretty Flight Sim graphics.
- pfisch 5y ago2080ti's don't cost $2500. ???
- hellbannedguy 5y agoUsed on Amazon is $2099.00
- Clewza313 5y agoOh yes they do: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=2080ti https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=2080ti
- mrweasel 5y agoThat's absolutely insane. I'm sure it's a nice card, but it's not worth three payments on my house. Doesn't all this limit the game publishers as well? Surely someone who is currently developing a game has to consider whether or not to even care that something like a 2080 even exists, it might as well not. And if games starts to be developed with older and slower cards in mind, to ensure that games can even play them, won't that hurt GPU sales in the future?
- pfisch 5y agoScalpers prices are not retail. I have bought around 4 3070s/3080s all for under 1000 at actual retail pricing.
- freeflight 5y agoWhen even retailers have these prices, then those are the prices. > I have bought around 4 3070s/3080s all for under 1000 at actual retail pricing. How much time and effort did you spend to accomplish that? I've signed up with multiple AIBs and Nvidia itself for months to get notified if anything I'm interested in gets in stock. Nvidia stopped selling directly in my region (Europe) a while ago, no AIB has notified me yet. Probably because I picked all the most affordable models, all of which are still more expensive than 3080 FE MSRP, while 3080 FE has not even an official retailer left in mainland Europe. Sure, I could setup a whole range of alerts and spend all day hanging out in a bunch of discords to catch one of those super rare stock drops. But tbh that's not the experience I'm looking for when I'm already willing to spend money: I don't want, and most people simply can't, having to organize the rest of their life around the possibility for a purchasing "opportunity" at any given moment.
- greycol 5y agoThe volatility is the problem as it makes calculations unreliable but a year to cover your costs on a 2 year (if you upgrade to the latest graphics card every generation) or 4 year (if you go every second gen) life is a reasonable investment. It's literally a ROI of 100-300%. Or to put it another way it's similar to a risky stock with a compounding yearly return of 41% for four years. Using a graphics card for mining that you have anyway is just gravy (apart from externalities which are another big problem).
- tempestn 5y agoOr looked at another way, with only a year of mining you cover your costs, and everything after that is profit. I don't GPU mine, but I can certainly see why people do.
- sellyme 5y ago> My electricity costs $0.0816 per kWh. I agree that the statement "you can't make a profit any more" is just incorrect because of the subjectivity of "you", but it's also worth noting that this is extremely variable - my electricity costs $0.38/kWh off-peak and $0.54/kWh on-peak. Whether or not mining on existing hardware is profitable depends entirely on where you live, and since we're explicitly talking about the effects of an increased demand on GPUs due to mining, people are clearly not just using existing hardware.
- verall 5y agoIf you're using nicehash you're not mining bitcoin. The payout is in BTC but it mines whatever it thinks is most profitable. On your 2080ti, it's not bitcoin.
- einpoklum 5y agoPlease stop doing that. You are just wasting energy.
- djmips 5y agoBut gaming is fine, that's not a waste of energy at all.
- Dzugaru 5y agoWell.. yes?
- einpoklum 5y agoI didn't encourage or discourage gaming. Also, mining means stressing the GPU 24-7, gaming is occasional. ... if you're gaming 24-7, then please stop doing that to, it's not good for your physical and emotional well-being :-(
- PeterStuer 5y agoIn reality most mining happen with under-clocked GPU cores (and admittedly overclocked VRAM), and at very stable temperatures. The GPU that is used 24/7 for mining will be far less stressed than a GPU that is powered on and off, and cycles through a lot of thermal changes throughout the day
- einpoklum 5y agoSo, will the occasional gaming work still consume more energy / produce more heat?
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoLas vegas called, they want you to know they have the brightest and most energy consuming lightsource* in the world blasting at the sky, drawing fambling addicts like a moth to a flame. *excluding laser research laboratories and weapons.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- freeflight 5y agoThat sounds kinda low, at least compared to the 8-9€ that nicehash allegedly pays me out in profitability with my 1080 Ti+5800x at €0.32 per kWh.
- actually_a_dog 5y agoFor one thing, it consumes more electricity than the entire country of Norway: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-power-consumption-of-bitcoin-mining/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-power-consu...
- bitcoinmonger 5y agoCorrection: you need more energy than Norway to attack the system.