14 ms·
Looking at the picture, they are using really old bitcoin ASIC miners from 2017. A profitability calculator I found says this Antminer S9 can get $948/year of
by phire 5y ago
Looking at the picture, they are using really old bitcoin ASIC miners from 2017.
A profitability calculator I found says this Antminer S9 can get $948/year of income in exchange for $1,371 worth of electricity. That's a loss of $422/year.
Obviously it's not profitable to use anymore, unless you are literally stealing electricity like these guys.
- alex_young 5y agoIsn’t that entirely dependent on your electrical rate? There must be some break even point right?
- phire 5y agoThat website was using a electrical rate of USD 12c per kWh, which is already on the low side. I think most electricity The break-even point is 8c per kWh. But there will be other overheads, so you probably need 6c per kWh to actually make a profit. Such prices most be possible to obtain in a few oil rich countries like Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
- kasey_junk 5y agoYou can routinely get ~2 c kWh in Chicago: https://hourlypricing.comed.com/ https://hourlypricing.comed.com/
- oliwarner 5y agoBloody hell, not in the UK. £0.15/kWh is pretty standard. If you go wholesale there are microscopic portions where it dips as low as minus-£0.10/kWh but generally you're still looking at 10p a unit or more. Of course this is moot when you're not paying the bill, as this story says.
- phire 5y agoThat's not the total price. It doesn't include Transmission, distribution, taxes or whatever a "Capacity Charge" is.
- marktangotango 5y agoI did the math in my area/provider and it came out to a .01 discount on the standard rate, which is not much of a discount at all. Even for the largest industrial, multi megawatt plans, which was surprising.
- kasey_junk 5y agoOn my last bill that added 4.2c per kWh. The bill previous was 3.9. The majority of those fees are fixed cost so don’t scale linearly with usage.
- selectodude 5y agoCapacity charge is how they reduce the shitstorms that happen when the cost of electricity skyrockets and real time pricing becomes national news. They're basically forcing you to hedge your future electricity usage. If you shut off your bitcoin miners during the warmest parts of the day, your capacity charge will go down.
- throwawayboise 5y agoThat's amazing. When I lived in Chicago in the 1990s the rates were some of the highest in the country, ~$0.11 or so at that time. Hourly rates/smart meters were not yet available to consumers (commercial customers could get different plans, IIRC).
- kasey_junk 5y agoMy actual billed amount ranges between 10-12 c per kWh. The hourly rates are highly variable and my usage needs are pretty constant. But if you had a high variable load keeping your rate below 5 c per kWh doesn’t seem that hard in Chicago.
- bluGill 5y agoNot just electrical rate, also what you do with the waste heat. I know at least one person who is heating his garage. Mining bitcoin is cheaper than an electric heater for the same task. A heat pump would probably be more cost effective in the long run, but I didn't tell him that.
- adolph 5y agoIt might be worthwhile for larger electricity customers to perform off-peak mining. Or even better, for someone to offer mining as a service to those customers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
- arsome 5y agoYeah, during the winter I mine on my video card because I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat and my electricity is primarily provided by nuclear and hydro. Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be. I'll definitely look more into heatpumps when it comes time to replace my furnace or air conditioner, but my understanding is they perform quite poorly in Canadian winters.
- Empf 5y agoI'm very curious how that can be better then an electrical heater. It has to be more inefficient as you are not spending energy on calculation but if you substitute it with selling your bitcoins you would need to compensate your co2
- CarelessExpert 5y agoBecause it also generates revenue via bitcoin. So it's "cheaper" insofar as the bitcoin is subsidizing the operation of the rig and, as a byproduct, heating the space.
- arsome 5y agoMy understanding is it's essentially just as efficient as a resistive electrical heater as all the energy used in your video card is converted to heat at some point in the process. There may be some very minor loss here, but I'm not enough of a physicist to say what it'd be.
- 0xfaded 5y agoMan, I was hoping some graphics cards would be liquidated to cover the losses.
- MaxBarraclough 5y agoCan't graphics cards still be used profitably to mine other cryptocurrencies though? I don't follow this stuff too closely but my understanding is that graphics card prices are a good indicator here, and that GPU-powered mining is still acting to drive up prices.
- josefresco 5y agoGPU mining is currently concentrated on ETH, which is changing (EIP 1559) mid-July (and then later this year). The GPU market will change (and already is) dramatically after that. Many are still in denial, hoping there will be "another coin" to mine. Or, they're just spreading false hope to give them time to dump their hardware.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoIs EIP 1559 expected to meaningfully affect mining profitability, especially for miners who already own the hardware?
- cinntaile 5y agoMining profitability hugely varies based on how much traffic there is on the ethereum network, since you have to pay higher fees to include your transaction in a block if there is a lot of demand. EIP 1559 changes the fee structure. It wants to burn the new basefee so miners don't profit from that, there is still a small tip part left though.
- elif 5y agoBasically, today fees make up ~40% of payout for miners. with EIP 1559, those fees will be reduced and also completely burned instead of given to miners. Instead, miners will receive "tips" from users trying to encourage faster block inclusion. No one knows how much "tips" will make up for the lost revenue, so it's kind of hard to mount a sizable resistance to the change, in the context of the obvious benefits it conveys to miners by making the currency healthier.
- josefresco 5y agoProfitability calculators typically rely on the current market rate of BTC. Even if they paid for electricity, they could make up for it by keeping their earnings in BTC/whatever. Whether that's a smart decision is another issue, but for some mining is like a startup in that you burn cash early in hopes of a big exit down the road. Edit: Several people have pointed out that you can just buy BTC or crypto directly. Besides the initial hardware cost (which requires cash up front) how do you generate income to buy crypto on a regular basis?
- scrollaway 5y agoIf you have cash, mining is unprofitable, and you want btc, there's a more profitable solution you're not seeing here.
- josefresco 5y ago> If you have cash This is key. You can't "just buy BTC directly" if you don't have cash. Even if you have cash for the initial purchase of crypto, you then have no recurring income. The startup model is again relevant here as you're trading a short term loss, for the potential of a long term gain. Similarly, why don't VC's just invest in profitable, stable companies?
- scrollaway 5y agoVery fair point.
- why_only_15 5y agoIf you have to pay $50k in electricity to mine a $40k bitcoin, it would be better to just turn off the mine and buy the bitcoin directly.
- mewwts 5y agoNot if you have all that money tied up in an old mining rig which has close to zero resale value.
- Black101 5y agoFree electricity is not a thing in your world?
- rideontime 5y agoOf course not. In what world is electricity free?
- Black101 5y agosolar panels are paid off?
- drewg123 5y agoIt seems like an ideal way to use excess energy in grid-tied solar setups where the energy company is not incentivized to buy excess power. Or for non-grid tied solar when your batteries are full.
- RobLach 5y agoAs opposed to storing it?
- drewg123 5y agoIdeally you'd store it, but if your system is sized for the short days of winter, you may have excess energy in the summer that you cannot store once your batteries are full.
- Ardon 5y agoIt seems to me like you’d be doing a lot more good if you used that excess power for something like carbon capture. Bitcoin is surely pretty far down the list of useful applications of that excess power.
- tablespoon 5y ago> It seems like an ideal way to use excess energy in grid-tied solar setups where the energy company is not incentivized to buy excess power. Or for non-grid tied solar when your batteries are full. The ideal way to use excess energy is to do almost anything else besides pointless proof-of-work computations (e.g some scientific distributed computing thing).
- bialpio 5y agoWould be way more profitable if they figured out some way to re-sell what electricity they stole...
- therein 5y agoYeah man, they should have just pushed those electrons back into the interconnect after they ran them through their miners.
- quickthrower2 5y agoWho buys stolen electricity? Bitcoin miners and weed growers ... at best! Selling this to homes would be even more illegal because of the negligence. Someone could get killed fucking around with that much power.
- bialpio 5y ago"$20 to fully charge your EV", "$5 to charge your phone" ? Installing fake solar panels & a net meter & selling the stolen energy back to the utility company? Just live off of stolen electricity to cut your monthly expenses by $100 a month, while also having to steal significantly less so that it could've gone unnoticed? IDK, but the whole thing makes me think of stealing a painting only to sell the frame to a recycling center. Yes, you're still ahead, but maybe there was a better way to profit from the crime?
- deanclatworthy 5y agoI doubt they are mining bitcoin, probably the police just making assumptions at this point. Also there is no way that this setup's electricity would cost that little in UK. The average cost of electricity bill for an average household is around £700 a year. If they paid, this would literally be thousands if not 10k+ a year in electricity bills.