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Once ASICs become mainstream, GPU mining will no longer be profitable.
by lifeformed 14y ago
Once ASICs become mainstream, GPU mining will no longer be profitable.
- ninjin 14y agoIt depends on who is paying for the power though, as far as I know there are still botnets doing CPU/GPU mining on a large scale.
- SkyMarshal 14y agoGPU miners may migrate to Litecoin then for that reason. Going to be an interesting next few years in the cryptocurrency space.
- mike-cardwell 14y agoGPU miners have much less of an advantage over CPU miners when mining litecoin; It was designed to be memory intensive as well as cpu intensive (scrypt).
- SkyMarshal 14y agoRight, but whether a CPU miner is better for LTC or not is only relevant when you're choosing what kind of miner to buy. For those who already have GPU miners they bought for BTC, that are now becoming obsolete to FPGA and ASIC miners, the pertinent comparison is how to get the best ROI on their GPU miner - continue with BTC, switch to LTC, or just shut it off.
- mctx 14y agoThe Avalon ASIC can perform 68,000 Mhash/s which is ~110x more powerful than a 7970 GPU (at ~600 Mhash/s) at around 3x the cost. It's obviously better value for an individual to buy an ASIC than a bunch of GPUS, but I think you could still earn a few coins if you've got thousands of gamers with spare GPU cycles.
- muyuu 14y agoIf you can buy one. The problem with ASICs is that, once they get under the profit curve, they have no other usage. I can very reliably expect a 7970 to be useful for a few years at least. An Avalon, if I manage to get it, may or may not pay for itself before difficulty makes it unprofitable to run. And then it's completely useless. Lots of hypothesis and conjectures.
- lifeformed 14y agoCould you repurpose them for password cracking?
- muyuu 14y agoNope. FPGAs yes, ASICs no. They are just machines or iteratively calculating sha-256( sha-256( something ) ) and they are hard-wired to that.