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Comment by caogecym | Hacker News Reader

Are serious miners using consumer grade graphic card for mining today? I thought they’d customize their own GPU solution and that the used GPUs because of bubble burst would not be usable for consumers.

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Yes, for certain coins with GPU-optimised mining, like etherium (ASICs have long since obseleted GPUs for bitcoin-type mining). Reason being customised GPUs don't really save any significant cost but their resale value is basically nil, while they can resell consumer cards once they stop making money on the mining (they are usually still relevant by that point, though most savvy buyers will try to avoid old mining cards because they've been run pretty heavily already and are more likely to fail).

ASICs are much more efficient than GPUs wrt to power consumption and that translates to less heat production, space, and operation costs.

As cryptocurrencies pop up like flies, has ASIC design -> production started streamlining more?

It was my impression before BTC that ASICs weren't particularly frequent, since FPGAs existed for a lot of applications, but mining has the pressing need for absolute performance and tuning and iteration that it would accelerate that space.

During the crypto bubble the miners often used regular gpus, sometimes with firmware modification for undervolting that were easily reversible. But we are not in a crypto bubble now, I'm not sure where gp is coming from with that comment.

> But we are not in a crypto bubble now

In the last year bitcoin is over 200%. Litecoin is almost over 100% (in fact, since April it is over 200%). I have no horse in this race, but I am not sure I would call it "not a bubble".

Hasn't these shifted to mostly ASIC?

I think you meant to reply to another comment.

It's a bubble with some room to go even higher. Obviously it's going to pop one day but not today.

I meant this as "No GPU cyrpto mining bubble as no gpu mining takes place". Bitcoin and Litecoin are not mined with GPUs anymore.

I was under the impression that no one bought GPUs for mining anymore in general, as it's a waste of money compared to specialized hardware. During the last crypto bubble I noticed a lot of regular people building mining PCs, this time I noticed nothing of that sort. However, https://www.notebookcheck.net/New-financial-analysis-suggest... suggests I might have been wrong about that.

But there was a BTC halvening in May 2020 roughly doubling the amount of computing power required to mine same amount of coin. But I am not an expert on the mining economy so I have no idea if GPU mining is still a lucrative business.

Did you mean my original comment? I've tracked prices. Also google "GPU shortage" and you'll see articles like clockwork for the last few years, but here's a specific example of a GTX 1060 w/ $249 MSRP that averaged > $350 new & used over it's life, with sharp increases in 2017 after which the price practically never dipped below 125% MSRP: https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B01IEKYD5U

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