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Comment by dieortin | Hacker News Reader

It’s not draining the GPU industry. No one buys GPUs for mining Bitcoin anymore, they use ASICs.

In the specific context of Bitcoin it may be true that the preference is for ASIC, but (1) some Bitcoin is still mined using GPU's and (2) there are several thousand active digital currencies, many of them favoring GPU's.

Grandparent's wider assertion is absolutely true, the GPU market is skewed by miners. Purchasing a 3000 series GPU is not easy right now.

Do you have a source for (1)?

I'm pretty sure GPU mining btc is inefficient even with free electricity (depreciation of the PC/GPU will outweigh benefits)

edit: was curious so checked the math

Using a 3060TI GPU (one of the most cost-efficient for performance gpu's available) would generate about $0.0002/day, or take ~5000 years to pay itself off even with free electricity

Doesn't bitcoin compute time go up with computational advances also? If so, any answer greater than a few years can be transposed to infinite time to cover costs.

I'm not sure about that...Search "best GPU mining 2021" on Google and you'll get several hits.

None of those seem to be about Bitcoin? For example https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/best-mining-gpu-in-2021 lists a "DaggerHashimoto" hashrate which would be for Etherium.

Most people mining use something like NiceHash, which rents out your hashpower to people who use it to mine the currently most efficient asset (usually ethereum/monero/doge+ltc)

Mining bitcoin with a GPU would take around 5000 years in the best case scenario to pay off _with free electricity_

Even as just ASICs there's something of a drain, Bitcoin ASICs consume fab production which means less remaining production capacity for GPUs.

This is an equilibrium that should eventually fix itself, but while Bitcoin and crypto mining is growing they are making a material dent in the global semiconductor economy.

Cryptoasset mining creates demand for custom chip fab (how different are mining rigs from SSL/TLS accelerator expansion cards), which is definitely not zero sum: more revenue = more opportunities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_supply

With insufficient demand, a market does not develop into a sustainable market. "Rule of three (economics)" says that markets are stable with 3 major competitors and many smaller competitors; nonlinearity and game theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(economics)

We've always had custom chip fab, but the prices used to be much higher. Proof of Work (and Proof of Research) incentivize microchip and software energy efficiency; whereas we had observed and been most concerned with doublings in transistor density.

FWIU, it's now more sustainable and profitable to mine rare earth elements from recycled electronics than actually digging real value out of the earth?

Compared to creating real value by digging for gold, how do we value financial services?

They're mining it with malware on CPUs, don't underestimate human stupidity when faced with large numbers of people...

They may be mining Montero but they definitely are not mining bitcoin

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