3 ms·
The damping effect is that part of your costs are the hardware, space, depreciation etc. leaving that stuff idle costs money - so it makes sense to mine in t
by londons_explore 6mo ago
The damping effect is that part of your costs are the hardware, space, depreciation etc. leaving that stuff idle costs money - so it makes sense to mine in the less profitable periods too.
- paulddraper 6mo agoYes though AFAIK electricity is a large %
- cykros 6mo agoThe larger it is, the less likely your mining set up is actually all that solid. The best miners are doing so with near free electricity, either with things like subsidized solar, or energy acquired from things like nat gas that'd otherwise get flared, or hydroelectric power that exists too far from civilization to have a demand otherwise. If your miner is plugged into the grid, you're probably doing it wrong.
- beloch 6mo agoCrypto-miners are switching to AI token farming when bitcoin is low. They have compute that's both installed and powered, so why not do what pays better?
- londons_explore 6mo agoFor bitcoin at least, you need totally different silicon. I guess you could share the power supply and cooling infra, but I am dubious the savings are enough to have half your silicon idle all the time.
- xingped 6mo agoWhat the hell is AI token farming?
- largbae 6mo agoI think they mean serving inference workloads
- scheme271 6mo agoHow does that work? Isn't most bitcoin mining done on custom ASICs? I didn't think that the ASIC could be repurposed for inference.
- packetlost 6mo agoThe biggest cost is the power which is often on multi year contracts. The hardware is comparatively cheap
- idiotsecant 6mo agoThat's wildly inaccurate. The cost in enormous both on the inference side and the mining side and has short lifetimes if you want SOTA.
- 0xack 6mo agoTraining ASICs (like Google’s TPUs) can generally run inference too, since inference is a subset of training computations. TPUs are widely used for both. Mining ASICs (Bitcoin, etc.) cannot be repurposed…they’re hardwired for a single hash algorithm and lack matrix math needed for neural networks.
- throwup238 6mo agoThat depends on each miner's energy costs, so long as (variable cost of energy - revenue from coins) < fixed costs. It's still negative cashflow either way, but the monthly losses have to be weighed against the cost of going insolvent and losing the hardware.