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I managed a Bitcoin mining operation a long time ago. We made machines that made 50% of their BTC in the first month of their operation, and the remaining 50% o
by bseidensticker 4y ago
I managed a Bitcoin mining operation a long time ago. We made machines that made 50% of their BTC in the first month of their operation, and the remaining 50% over the next 5 months. After that they cost more to run than they produced.
The accountants wouldn't believe us when we told them that the machines were worthless after only 6 months.
- chucknthem 4y agoHow long ago was this? The rate of improvement on ASICS as well as new entrants to mining hasn't been this intense in a long time.
- bseidensticker 4y ago2013
- chucknthem 4y agoThat makes sense, 2013 was when ASICs were getting popular and started dominating mining. The industry has slowed down significantly since. Presumably they've implemented most of the low hanging fruit optimizations. Antminers from 3+ years ago are still profitable in a lot of areas with <=$0.1/kWh electricity.
- Dmitriysz 4y agoThis makes sense. In the earlier days of bitcoin we’ve seen substantial improvements in mining every 3-6 months. We’re talking about significant 100x-1,000x improvements in efficiency and profitability. To stay competitive, these improvements in efficiency made it necessary for miners to upgrade mining equipment every 3-6 months. Because of its closeness to silicon fabrication and cheap energy, China emerged as the de facto place to set up these mining farms. Those previous 100x-1,000x improvements are no longer possible. The development of mining hardware caught up with Moore’s law. This is the observation that transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. It would be fair to assume ~2x improvements in mining every ~2 years. This would mean that mining equipment would now have a longer shelf life, and no longer be obsolete in a few months.
- amelius 4y agoWorthless? Did you use ASICs?
- andy81 4y agoBitcoin mining is almost entirely ASICs. GPUs aren't much good at the algorithm used.
- Snowworm 4y agoWow. I can't delete comments in hacker news. That's so stupid. Anyway, I was getting downvoted for a stupid opinion FYI.
- jagger27 4y agoGPUs haven't been viable for Bitcoin mining for over a decade.
- amelius 4y agoPerhaps the ASICs should be designed so that they are a little more general-purpose then. Perhaps capable of mining for the next cryptocoin on the block?
- RL_Quine 4y agoThat would make them less efficient for no reason.
- cortesoft 4y agoUmmm a more general purpose version would just be a GPU. The point is that it has to be specific purpose to be efficient.
- tromp 4y agoIt would be more like an FPGA, which is what ASICs replaced in bitcoin mining evolution.
- yuvadam 4y agoWorthless? People still mine on S9s released in 2017.
- threeseed 4y agoReplace worthless with unprofitable. And we don't know if it's unique to his situation or for any miner at a certain scale.
- rtkwe 4y agoYou can mine on worse machines if you have lower power costs or are valuing the BTC higher than the electricity costs (ie you're long/bullish on BTC or you're doing it somewhat altruistically or alternatively not doing the math on how much it's costing.)
- redox99 4y agoIf you're bullish on BTC you will still get more BTC by buying them than mining them at a loss.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y agoMiners might be happy to pay a premium to get non-KYC coins
- redox99 4y agoTrue, there might be tax reasons too even if they don't care about KYC. Although most miners will know people who they can trade face to face with if they don't care about taxes and don't want KYC.
- 8note 4y agoSounds... sketchy? I'm not sure how that would assuage the risk adverse accountant
- 4y ago
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- pelasaco 4y agoWell, I managed as well some hardware and in the long run, they paid themselves. I started to mine with FPGA and then with asicminers. I mined in total, 23 BTCs. Then I stopped and kept the BTCs, (sold some), sold my hardware via ebay (which helped to return almost all my investment). I then got the BTCs doubled when bitcoin cash was created, which I sold well enough too. So when I read this whole "it doesn't worth to mine, etc", i think that is relative. It worked well, even for me, running it in Germany.