On Mon, 29 Jan 2018 10:13:30 +0000 (GMT), "Dave Liquorice"
wrote:

On Sun, 28 Jan 2018 10:47:48 +0000, T i m wrote:

Where are they 'coming from', if you aren't actually paying for
them ?.

And has mining become more efficient as my mate had a fairly big
mining rig (10 video cards or summat) but it was costing more in
electricity than he was mining at the time?

I know there is some fairly hefty number crunching required, hence
the use of multiple GPUs. Do you need GPUs or is mining something
that could run on an basic PC that is on 24/7 (acting as a server)
that spends most of it's time doing basically nothing except using
electricity.

You could run it on anything but you wouldn't typically get the
processing power without using optimised kit.

Obviously it's not going to yield very much but the
lecky will be used anyway.

Quite. The thing is, if the CPU is working hard(er) it will typically
use more lekky than when idle so it's the law of diminishing returns.

If you wanted to actually make your otherwise idle server more
'useful' you could sign it onto one of the 'Community Grid' projects
and have it searching for cures for human illnesses or extra
terrestrials etc. ;-)

https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/discover.action

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_participate.php

I did wonder if bitcoin mining was just another community grid but
working for the dark web, cracking passwords or whatever?

Cheers, T i m

T i m wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

I really don't understand the people who buy e.g. 10 GPUs at £400 to
£800 each, when for £4,000 they could buy an ASIC miner with 250,000
times the hash power of one GPU.

In this case it was because he (my mate) was just ahead of that game
and such products didn't exist.

At which point he should either turn off the GPUs and give up, or join
the big boys and buy an ASIC miner, because their existence pushes the
difficulty factor up to compensate, so that bitcoins are still generated
at the rate of about 1800/day, just that his share of them goes down by
about 5 orders of magnitude compared to when he was only competing with
other GPU owners, and his power bill remains the same.

I suspect the reason why most "home miners" didn't give up was that at
the same time the ASICs started eating the GPUs breakfast, the BTC
exchange rate was ballooning, so earning fewer BTC/day still looked like
a lot of GBP/day ...

On Mon, 29 Jan 2018 11:34:18 +0000, Andy Burns
wrote:

T i m wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

I really don't understand the people who buy e.g. 10 GPUs at £400 to
£800 each, when for £4,000 they could buy an ASIC miner with 250,000
times the hash power of one GPU.

In this case it was because he (my mate) was just ahead of that game
and such products didn't exist.

At which point he should either turn off the GPUs and give up,

He did, a few of years ago. ;-)

or join
the big boys and buy an ASIC miner, because their existence pushes the
difficulty factor up to compensate, so that bitcoins are still generated
at the rate of about 1800/day, just that his share of them goes down by
about 5 orders of magnitude compared to when he was only competing with
other GPU owners, and his power bill remains the same.

Ok. I think he's moved onto other things now. ;-)

I suspect the reason why most "home miners" didn't give up was that at
the same time the ASICs started eating the GPUs breakfast, the BTC
exchange rate was ballooning, so earning fewer BTC/day still looked like
a lot of GBP/day ...

Ok.

Cheers, T i m

Thomas Prufer wrote:
On 29 Jan 2018 01:38:26 +0000 (GMT), Theo
wrote:

If he can heat exchange into the river, then he might be onto something.
Though the fish probably won't like him for that.

Actually, this will not heat the water: the power comes from the micro hydro, is
extracted, (slowing the river), and via various lossy generators etc., returned
to the river water as heat.

Wouldn't this energy have ended up as heat in the river water anyway?

Likely. But if you're watercooling GPUs through traditional watercoolers
then it'll come out a lot hotter than river water. So it depends how much
water you can use to cool, and how you mix it with the rest of the river.
If you squirt hot water into the river it'll harm the wildlife in the
vicinity, even if it'll cool down as it mixes downstream.

Theo

Vortex12 wrote:

All the publicity about the "Bitcoin Bubble" over Christmas got me thinking.

Maybe jezza should include BitCorbyn in his next manifesto?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/venezuela-says-its-cryptocurrency-raised-735-million-but-its-a-farce