If you can't beat them, join them. The current rates are like $4-5 per day for a gtx 1080/1080ti on nicehash. Super simple installation and you can set it to run whenever idle.
https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator
Just think of it like a really slow but never ending rebate. And if enough people do it, we'll even have a chance of lowering the overall profitability.
I live in an apartment where electricity is free (bill is included), so I'm curious if mining with a single GPU is worth it. I have Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and nicehash is saying I can make £52 a month with it. If that means running the GPU at full power 247 it would probably give up the ghost sooner than it pays for itself, not to mention it would be loud as fuck with fans at 100%.
Install an overclocking app like MSI Afterburner. Set a power limit of around 80%.
The 1060 6GB won't be worth $500 forever - in about a year, I'm guessing Nvidia and AMD will have stepped up their production and the price will have halved or less.
With ample air flow, you should be fine. Running a card at constant temperature (which is what mining would do), is better than ramping it up and down.
You'd probably make closer to £70 with your CPU thrown in, but it's all a gamble.
I believe this exactly is the thin line that delineates people who make the world a better place and those who don't really care and their aim is to just live a nice life. If anybody is wondering where all this global warming and pollution came from, it's just from that: you calculate the net result, you know what using that electricity means, but you choose to ignore that. Maybe you even rationalize that you contribution is too small to mean anything. When millions have that attitude, the whole Earth suffers.
People don't suddenly use enough more coal because you use less to make your choice meaningless.
Further scale provides efficiency. If only 1/10 as many people use gas powered cars then gas stations become harder to find pushing more people to electric cars. Similarly as more people go off grid staying on grid becomes more expensive pushing ever more solar adoption.
Just bought a GPU at a ridiculous markup. Sold my old one on eBay to make some of it back, but still had to spend way more money than I should have. Fuck cryptocurrencies.
Cryptocurrencies: designed to be deflationary, but in reality lead to stagflation in GPU capabilities, crowding out useful applications of GPUs for high performance computing, deep learning, virtual reality, etc. Yay.
Long-term might not be so bad, though, as it padded Nvidia and AMD's bottom line and thus might indirectly help them make better GPUs in the future.
There are some pretty horrible abuses of economic terms in crypto, but to talk about "stagflation" in a single tiny product class might be the worst I've seen this year.
Abuse of term as it's only applying to a small product class? Certainly. :) But I wasn't unclear, was I? Shorthand for prices going up without significant growth/improvement.
We're used to the opposite in computer technology. It really is odd that price/performance has stagnated or even worsened for years.
I was so frustrated when I came out of PC literacy retirement to upgrade and found that $300 doesn't get me much further than my old HD 7870 After this many years I was expecting 2-3x performance boost.
I was 50/50 on putting it there. I decided that putting a PayPal address would be more evil than this. I also didn't expect this to get anything other than downvotes.
TX fees are insanely low right now, the average transaction should cost about $0.80 USD worth of bitcoin (and closer to $0.40 USD worth if you use a segwit address).
It's all relative. "Insanely low" compared to a month ago, sure. They're still insanely high when compared to any other crytpcurrency, or Bitcoin itself before it was allowed to hit the block size cap.
Even litecoin (average of $0.30) and ethereum (average of around $0.10) have TX fees that aren't "insanely low" compared to bitcoin right now. And "bitcoin before it was "allowed" to hit the cap", of course tx fees would be low... Bitcoin was never designed to scale like that, fees are a core part, and "bidding" to get in a block was always a core part of bitcoin, it wasn't until the last year or so that it started showing due to usage.
The fact is that there aren't any cryptocurrencies that are well tested and widely distributed that can handle any significant usage cheaply and quickly. There are some very promising options, but none that are fully ready for primetime in my opinion.
Still, I wasn't trying to start up the argument about transaction fees again, just pointing out that they are at a 12 month low right now in bitcoin. And the comment that was implying transaction fees are really high right now is outright false.
That graph is average paid in USD per transaction. A transaction from an exchange with 300 inputs and 500 outputs is going to be paying a magnitude or 2 more than a simple 1 input 2 output transaction. But in your graph they are all lumped and averaged together.
It's like me saying "The cost of electricity is lower than ever" then you show a graph showing the average electricity bill is $800, but don't include the information that it includes the aluminum forge down the street...
The correct graph to look for is "satoshi per byte that will get you into the next transaction". And while i'm sure you can find dates and times in the past year where it's been technically cheaper, the reality is that right now it's about as cheap as you can get to transact in bitcoin (5 sat/byte fees are going in the next block currently, it generally doesn't go much lower because many miners won't include fees below that). That hasn't reliably happened since early 2017.
Miners are buying directly from the factory floor (for both GPUs and PSUs) or from a retailer the minute a shipment comes in. Fry's told me they have a list of people they call the minute a shipment comes in due to the demand.
I'm guessing the price on Newegg is past what a miner would pay for a card.
Does anyone know a website showing good graphs about hardware price development? For example, I'd like to see how the price of a GTX 970 developed over the past year or so.
Camel Camel Camel[0] has good price history, but it's for Amazon products only. It's on a per product basis, so all of the individual variants will have their own graph.
Just think of it like a really slow but never ending rebate. And if enough people do it, we'll even have a chance of lowering the overall profitability.