[Discuss] Any miners?

David Johnson dave-gnhlug-list at davej.org
Sun Jun 18 17:35:21 EDT 2017


Recent article, however it doesn't get into the risks.  There is
clearly capital investment needed if you're going to be somewhat
serious about it.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/an-idiots-guide-to-building-an-ethereum-mining-rig

If it's worth it depends on both electricity cost (which is highly
variable by geo location worldwide), but also the payback of any
hardware purchased.  If the currency falls in value before you've paid
back your hardware investment after electricity cost you've lost money
and potentially lots of it.

My impression is the more people mine, the currency price will be
pushed back down to find an equilibrium so there's lots of risk if
you're making an investment.

The alternative strategy would be to use cloud based GPU instances on
demand when prices spike but not otherwise.  That way there is no
capital investment.  Now if cloud based GPU instances ever would be
cheap enough is a different question.





Neil Schelly writes:
> I have a coworker who makes money mining. His strategy is to mine for
> the alternative currencies that are still comparatively easy to mine
> than BitCoin. Whatever value he earns there gets exchanged for value
> in BitCoin. From what I gather, he makes a decently steady side income
> from it, though I haven't really probed for details. I suspect it's in
> the range of a few thousand dollars a month profit.
> -Neil
> 
> On Fri, Jun 16, 2017 at 8:46 PM, Lloyd Kvam <lkvam at venix.com> wrote:
> > Bitcoin did hit a peak value of $3,000 last week, so that would help the economics.
> >
> > My impression is that you need some edge in cost of bandwidth, electric power, or
> > computer hardware for this to be an attractive business. Just tracking the blockchain
> > can use enough resources to be annoying.
> >
> > An alternative approach would be to bet on bitcoins displacing gold: short gold and
> > buy bitcoins. Of course that does not let you play with hardware.
> >
> > On Fri, 2017-06-16 at 18:12 -0400, Bill Ricker wrote:
> >> Bitcoin initially did not require specialized hardware, but as new golden
> >> hashes get harder to find, mining costs more in electricity and
> >> depreciation without speciality gear (or a huge BITNET running for free).
> >> If scarcity drives up BTC value, maybe, but odds of finding one still
> >> declining as payoff increases. I haven't checked the calculation lately, it
> >> would be a good exercise: what would an AWS VPS mining cluster big enough
> >> to average 1 BTC mined per week cost to operate?
> >>
> >> Which if any of the alt-coins have legit upside is not yet clear, and the
> >> most likely of them already requires a cluster and has had its first major
> >> scam.
> >>
> >> / bill
> >>
> >> On Jun 16, 2017 5:58 PM, "Greg Rundlett (freephile)" <greg at freephile.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> >
> >> > My son is investigating crypto-currency mining and seems to think it's
> >> > incredibly lucrative.
> >> >
> >> > I've not delved into it at all.
> >> >
> >> > Comments? Anyone actually making money mining?
> >> >
> >> > From what I've previously gathered, I thought the amount of computational
> >> > power, expense and electricity just about squeezed out anybody but those
> >> > with super-specialized hardware.
> >> >


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