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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

> The CMP version is a straight-to-landfill product. As soon as it stops being profitable for mining it will have zero resale value, and become e-waste.

Like literally every other piece of Bitcoin or crypto mining technology. It’s straight to the landfill every 6 months.

Bitcoin generates 100 GRAMS of ewaste for every transaction. Every 2 transactions consumes as much energy as driving a Tesla from SF to NY [edit for clarity: round trip] and as much ewaste as throwing your phone out the window along the way.

Don’t hate the player; hate the game. Nvidia is maximizing shareholder value as per their charter, creating differentiated product offerings for different segments. Quadro, RTX, CMP. It’s all segmentation, and better, likely binning. I wonder if CMP products are just failed RTX and Quadro parts they’re offloading. For every card Nvidia doesn’t sell, Ant will sell 2 ASIC miners.

Time to push back on proof of waste, and end the economic incentive.

View on HN

I checked your numbers against [0]. Road distance NY -> SF = 2900 miles [1]. Model S mileage is 290Wh/mi [2]. That is 840kW for Tesla against 657kW for a single transaction. This is all order-of-magnitude stuff but... wow.

[0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

[1] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=road%20distance%20san%...

[2] https://www.zeviecars.com/browse-cars/tesla-model-s

kWhr, not kW. It's also 1/2 to 3/4th the electricity used in a month by a typical US household.

kWh, if we're going to be pedantic, which I approve of. :)

It bugs me that even quality newspapers frequently mistake power (watt (W)) for energy (joules (J) or watt-hour (Wh, often with the usual metric prefixes)).

Yeah the distance thing was ball parked, based on the last time I ran the numbers. To your point, I accidentally omitted to say “round trip from SF to NY” - I also used the great circle distance (2586mi) and ballparked a phone at 200g, roughly the weight of an iPhone.

Thank you for going through the numbers and adding the sources. I was on my phone and meant to circle back.

Can someone explain how transactions are not insanely cost prohibitive for Bitcoin with power consumption figures like those? Those numbers would suggest something like >20 USD. Is it because most transactions in practice actually happen internally on exchanges that avoid putting every individual transaction on the blockchain?

I have limited knowledge of Bitcoin so maybe not quite "explain like I'm five"... but close. :)

The whole point of Bitcoin mining is to produce a block, which contains a bunch of transactions. The Bitcoin network dictates that each block's SHA256 hash starts with a certain number of zeroes, so the only way to achieve this is to brute force the block data until you find the "winning" block which hashes to a number of zeroes.

Once someone finds a winning block, they're rewarded with a number of Bitcoin. This subsidies the cost that goes into mining that block. However the reward halves after every 210k blocks, so as the reward goes down, miners will prefer to only include transactions with high fee. Eventually the true cost of mining will reflect in the transaction fee.

And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions. Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy used to process a transaction goes down tenfold.

> And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions. Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy used to process a transaction goes down tenfold.

Oh, it could be somewhat improved. Then it'd be "only" 65 kilowatt hours, compared to ~1 watt-hour for conventional payment networks.

(And, this assumes that the increase in bitcoin price doesn't cause more mining).

>Then it'd be "only" 65 kilowatt hours, compared to ~1 watt-hour for conventional payment networks.

Sure, and? You get other benefits, those might not be relevant for you in which case keep using conventional payment networks. But if things like counterparty risk of your payment processor come into your calculations, even $10 dollars a transaction migth be a good deal.

The entire point of this subthread you're responding to is that the cost of transactions is so energy intensive that those "other benefits" are null and void.

It's called an externality. It doesn't matter if you'd pay $10 for it if the cost imposed is too great. There are a lot of things people would absolutely pay for that we don't allow, because of that. Dumb weird fantasies about decentralization or counterparty risk or whatever don't actually matter if the energy cost is that high. It's just not important enough. Sorry.

> It's called an externality. It doesn't matter if you'd pay $10 for it if the cost imposed is too great

The cost imposed is proportional to the fee, since the fee has to pay for the electricity used to mine the transaction. And $10 of electricity is just... not a lot to worry about.

If you believe the electricity consumption in general has huge externalities, you have bigger problems than mining, and once you address those the mining cost/diffiuclty will adjust

> The cost imposed is proportional to the fee, since the fee has to pay for the electricity used to mine the transaction.

No. Miners get rewards for mining blocks, which pay for 80%. Transaction fees don't pay for the electricity used in a transaction: not even close.

> If you believe the electricity consumption in general has huge externalities

Well, sure, I believe that electricity is artificially cheap. I also believe that spending $50+ of electricity per transaction done is absolutely nuts. And that amount is steadily increasing...

Hm, OK, I was wrong about the ratio of fees to reward. Good news is that reward is going to halve every 4 years so in 12 years it's probably going to be much more even.

Sorry, but even if we significantly improve things such that a transaction "only" takes the equivalent of a few days of my electricity use.. that's not so great. There's better ways to do this that don't require mining.

Indeed, from a decentralization perspective, mining is looking worse than proof of stake, etc.

Thank you! That was a really helpful response.

That makes a lot more sense that many transactions are included within a block. So effective transaction fees are likely in the few cents USD range.

I've read that one issue with the latency of Bitcoin transactions is that many of the large miners from China have network issues. Would raising the block size to 10-100MB cause significant latency issues for transactions even if one could fit a lot more transactions into a single block?

> Would raising the block size to 10-100MB cause significant latency issues for transactions even if one could fit a lot more transactions into a single block?

There are two ways to understand your question so I'll just answer both of them:

Fitting more transactions in a block leads to faster confirmation, and potentially lower fee. When a transaction gets into a block, the network confirms that the transaction is valid and can't be reversed. Right now each block can only fit ~2k transactions, and since a block can only be generated every 10 minutes, the mempool (backlog of unconfirmed transaction) is rather huge. This site shows how big it is: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/. Miners are incentivized to only select transaction with high fee into the next block, which in turn incentivizes users to pay more fee to get their transaction to confirm faster. With bigger blocks, more transactions get confirmed quicker, which leads to lower fee.

Bigger blocks however mean miners with slow internet connection are at a disadvantage. When a miner finds a winning block, they broadcast the block to as many nodes in the network as possible. After a while, a majority of nodes accepts that winning block, and the miner is eligible for the mining reward. If A finds the winning block 10 seconds after B, but A is able to propagate their block quicker than B, then it's possible that A's block is accepted and not B'. In reality, it's possible that B might still win the race, but the rule is: faster propagation => more chance of being accepted.

That is roughly what transaction costs are. In some camps this prohibits the technology ever becoming a widespread method of payment. If we’re going for decentralised currency and 10 exchanges control all the low fee movement stuff...

Oh that’s inflation.

The cost is socialized across the block reward. So long as there’s more new money coming in than block reward paying electric bills on the way out, the cost of a transaction is socialized efficiently.

Elon’s $1.5B investment only lasted a total of 4 weeks. It’s already gone. It’s in the hands of Chinese coal produces now.

«Can someone explain how transactions are not insanely cost prohibitive»

Because the comments above yours are misleading. Transactions don't consume mining energy. Miners expend the same amount of energy regardless if they are validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block.

That’s some high class mental gymnastics though. Because if you divide the energy spent across the number of transactions you land back where you started. And if the energy was burned for 0 transaction capacity then the underlying would be worthless. Secure but worthless. So it doesn’t take much inference to realize that the value is in transactbility.

You’ll have to explain to me why when mining a block of transactions, it doesn’t make sense to break that down on a per transaction basis with division.

If the number of transactions in a block ever changes I’ll change my divisor. Until then the proof is on you isn’t it?

«it doesn’t make sense to break that down on a per transaction basis with division»

Because the division result is meaningless as it just reflects how full a block was, not the cost of a transaction. Again: miners expend the same amount of energy regardless if they are validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block. Exactly the same amount. And whatever math you might be doing doesn't account for batched transactions (1 tx, N outputs), lighting transactions, or off-chain transaction (think tx within a platform like an exchange).

> Again: miners expend the same amount of energy regardless if they are validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block.

For one that’s horrifyingly wasteful - you say it like it’s a good thing but it’s really not. And two, I’m describing the network as it exists today. That’s not dishonest; there’s no plan to increase the quantity of transactions per block. If it ever changes we can run the numbers again. But saying it’s a bad way to run the numbers is like saying there’s no cap on the number of bitcoins because the core team could just change the cap. Ok, and if they do, we’ll run the math again.

«For one that’s horrifyingly wasteful - you say it like it’s a good thing but it’s really not. »

It is a great thing: it means Bitcoin can scale without increasing energy consumption. See, that's my problem with the way you phrased your post. You misrepresent the system. You imply transactions consume energy when they don't.

> It is a great thing: it means Bitcoin can scale without increasing energy consumption. See, that's my problem with the way you phrased your post. You misrepresent the system. You imply transactions consume energy when they don't.

You pretend they don’t but they obviously do! You’re green washing one of the biggest environmental tragedies since CFCs.

It could in theory scale past where it’s at but the core team won’t let it making your argument no more useful than my unlimited coins argument. In what way exactly is it different? Yes if we pretend it’s efficient, it is. But only in our imaginations.

Even if they did increase block size fundamental inefficiencies mean even at maximum scaling it can’t hold a candle to visa or even a raspberry pi running MySQL.

Not really. It means Bitcoin _currently_ scales negatively on market cap rather than transactions. Considering that bitcoin seems to be advertised primarily as a store of value and that there is little effort to push adoption for transactions, that is a very bad thing : it means that, in case of success, bitcoin performance per transaction will become worse.

In the long term, if transactions count doesn't rise fast, we will also see significant issues, either with transaction fees going to absurd amounts, effectively banning btc as a payment medium, or with the miner pool decreasing to counts where decentralization becomes inexistent.

> Miners expend the same amount of energy regardless if they are validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block.

This ignores the transaction fees. Even though they are only 10-20% of the total fees a miner collects, 10-20% of a round-trip from SF to NYC is still a lot of energy.

So essentially it only gets worse from these numbers, because right now every block is full so every transaction is consuming the least amount of energy it can if you process less transactions the energy cost just keeps going up.

Also the defense of "the energy is spent securing the blockchain" is missing the point, the blockchain isn't a good unto itself it's only useful as a log of transactions and you only need new blocks when there's transactions and if there are no transactions Bitcoin is basically dead.

Bitcoin's energy consumption has been stable for nearly four years.

Perhaps this is the cost of running a secure system.

> Don’t hate the player; hate the game.

Fuck that. I can hate the game, and the players who decide to play it.

There's zero chance of ending the economic incentives of cryptocurrency mining without (global) government intervention. Instead, the best effort the US government has provided is increasing SUPPORT for it.

Apple took a unique, aggressive, and still-controversial stance for privacy. This position has easily cost them a double-digit percent of their revenue; the amount of money they could generate from selling out their billion+ users, who are generally above-average income, in the same vein Google does, is unfathomable. I don't like Apple as a company, but I still feel its important to give them recognition for how industry-leading they were, and still are, in pushing for Privacy.

There are ethics which can transcend corporate interest, even when considering negative PR. There are some things companies just don't do. The excuse of "optimizing shareholder profit" and "hate the game" is bullshit; it moves the onus of responsibility off of companies who are fully capable of acting more ethically by blaming some Invisible Hand as if they had no choice in the matter.

That's bullshit. Jensen Huang had a choice. He made it. End of story. You want to shift some blame onto Ant and the miners themselves; that's all fair game for Round 2. But at this time, we're still on Round 1.

Its reasonable for Nvidia to stand by and do nothing. Graphics cards are, after all, general purpose computing hardware. Even after they've outlived a useful life in a mining farm, those miners may attempt to extract an ROI by reselling them in secondary markets. Not ideal, but certainly better than Nvidia's plan for the future.

Nvidia's plan is to, instead, support miners directly, while intentionally tiering consumer hardware, then positioning the entire move as somehow "Standing By Gamers". A dystopian science-fiction author legitimately could not write a more canonically evil storyline. I would change this position if Nvidia walks back, cancels the CMP line, and continues forward with driver limitations on the RTX 3060 with public plans to move to in-silicon ethereum mining protection on future cards; I think that's reasonable, given its fair to assume that the "ship has already sailed" on Ampere. Until then, fuck Nvidia; I'm not touching anything their hands are involved in.

No. It's time to push back on Bitcoin.

It is disgraceful to watch people such as Elon Musk and most of the VCs put money ahead of the environment.

Given the energy requirements and how it's kind of morphed into this beast of greed, I'm inclined to agree....but how to pull this off?

Fiat bans cannot really work well against just doing math. Taxation schemes/financial regs tamping down on bitcoin speculation, what you can spend it on? By design I don't think you can just pump money into bitcoin in order to "deflate" its value without similarly consuming a lot of energy?

Perhaps a simple ban on converting fiat -> to bitcoin would go a long way? It wouldn't be absolute, black markets are a thing, but there are costs to participate in a black market, which costs will rise over time as good old physical cash declines.

It's definitely not this simple.

How would you execute an exchange ban politically? Any politicians who did this would be responsible for instantly vaporizing tons of value owned by an increasingly non negligible fraction of the population that spans a broad spectrum of political affiliation.

An exchange ban also wouldn't stop bitcoin, because the network would still continue running and anyone cutoff and stuck with bitcoin can still use it as a medium of exchange, and it could kick off its development as a direct unit of account. An exchange ban might even make using bitcoin as currency even easier, because if it's not legally exchangeable for fiat, how do you tax cap gains on it?

Stopping bitcoin is a REALLY hard problem. It would require a massive coordinated crack down by every government on the planet. And then you're left with a prisoner's dilemma. What happens if China or Russia publicly go along with such a ban, but secretly keep supporting it and buy up coins for themselves, preparing for a day when it will be the global reserve currency that dethrones the dollar? It's a similar game theory problem to why we will likely never live in a world without nuclear weapons.

The reason this will probably never happen is because every government will think through this game theory, and realize the risk of being on the wrong side of a potentially ineffective ban and hamstringing your nation's citizens and companies from participating and developing on the new global financial system, is greater than the cost of just capitulating and adapting to live with it.

I don't really want to see politicians giving bitcoin holders too much weight when making decisions about how the economy should function.

Anyone who owns Bitcoin is gambling. There was never a guarantee that value would go up, or that the government squash the idea entirely.

If we as a society decide that Bitcoin is too dangerous, current holders should accept Bitcoin for what it was: a bad investment.

There are more people who already own some bitcoin than you'd probably want to believe. Many of them believe bitcoin is on balance a good thing.

There are at least a couple of bitcoiners currently in Congress, including the new Senator of Wyoming who is publicly all aboard the idea that bitcoin is an important, long term store of value that the US needs to jump on board with.

How many politicians do you think already hold some bitcoin quietly, just in case?

Is there way to mandate energy limits or possibly compute limits on hardware/software in the US? But that may also be a slippery slope...

Same way Nigeria is/did, and India is/did. You give folks 6 months to cash out and you tell the exchanges to board up their windows.

> It’s straight to the landfill every 6 months.

Isn't that a trend that has mostly ended or is about to end now? It looks like that was mostly caused by nm process improvements for ASIC chips in the past. With 7/5nm ASIC chips it seems like it should now progress as fast/slowly as the nm process capabilities of chip manufacturers in general.

Not pro-BTC, but this seem very much like faulty interpolation based on a past trend.

I was wondering the exact same thing a couple days ago, would be great if a more knowledgable person could confirm this

Technology continues to advance - I don’t think there is enough evidence to say that we have hit a fundamental limit on computer/asic power/speed performance yet.

3nm will hit in 2024, but until then there will always be advances in chip design. It’s not just about speed, it’s also about thermals, power consumption and manufacture price to work out the TCO of mining.

> 3nm will hit in 2024, but until then there will always be advances in chip design.

I'm not an expert on chip design, but I would have assumed that there isn't a lot of room for improvements of ASIC mining chips, given that they are probably a straightforward implementation of the hashing algo used in Bitcoin (and that a few thousand+ times), in contrast to CPU design which is more dependent on other computing/hardware trends.

Well even without chip design, for instance if you decrease unit cost, that also has the impact of changing the mining landscape because many more ASIC miners can enter the game.

Also remember an ASIC miner will generally use more than it costs in electricity each year, so a relatively small improvement in hashes / watt makes a big difference to overall profitability.

CPU design is more complex, but also has more people working in the space and has been going for longer. I just get sceptical if someone says this is as good as it is going to get because history shows usually those predictions end up being wrong. As a child I thought Super Mario 64 was as good as computer graphics were ever going to get...

> for instance if you decrease unit cost

That doesn't diminish the hashing power of the equipment you already bought though (and the topic was obsolete equipment).

> so a relatively small improvement in hashes / watt makes a big difference to overall profitability

Yeah, that's a fair point.

> I just get sceptical if someone says this is as good as it is going to get

And I'm skeptical if people blindly extrapolate past trends, assuming that they will continue to hold. I wasn't saying that it won't get better from here on out, just that the extreme growth that was mostly fueled by quickly going through the existing nm process steps can't be sustained, and that from now on it will follow the same slowish pace as all chip miniaturization.

> That doesn't diminish the hashing power of the equipment you already bought though (and the topic was obsolete equipment).

It means even more equipment to go obsolete when improvements come through - and more equipment deployed does not equal more bitcoins generated, so it is an issue of more hardware that will ultimately end up in landfill / being scrapped.

> And I'm skeptical if people blindly extrapolate past trends

Well I'm also sceptical of people who blindly assume progress won't be made. To quote someone in 2014 predicting what would happen to ASIC design...

> As an emerging field of IC design, bitcoin mining ASICs have experienced rapid evolution over the past two years. However, they cannot keep evolving and developing at the current rate.

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-can-longer-ignore-mo...

Well, still, try see how profitable your 3 year old ASIC miner is today...

No matter how much faster and more efficient the mining becomes, the hash rate will adjust. It’s a self balancing system.

> Like literally every other piece of Bitcoin or crypto mining technology.

I don't get this comparison because Nvidia isn't a Bitcoin mining technology company. Or at least they weren't until a week ago. When someone deems it not profitable to mine on a set of 50 GPUs they purchased, they can resell those to gamers. But these mining cards are just e-waste.

> Don’t hate the player; hate the game.

Games don't exist without players.

> When someone deems it not profitable to mine on a set of 50 GPUs they purchased, they can resell those to gamers.

Except they can't. GPUs used for mining are trash - too much heat and stress continuously.

Think about the average load on a consumer card used normally - maybe a daily 4 hour gaming binge max?

Meanwhile a mining card is running near 100% capacity 24/7, probably without enough cooling.

Assuming the crypto bubble pops catastrophically and never recovers, yes we'll be left with a lot of worthless ASICs and GPUs, but also a ton of newly freed energy sources and chip manufacturing facilities, the development of which will have been funded or subsidized by the crypto speculative craze.

A world with more access to energy and cheaper silicon chips is probably necessary to address the immense challenges civilization is facing.

I have an exactly opposite experience - already got a second card from friends using them for mining when it was not good enough for them. Good price and both still working just fine for gaming. :)

Lots of professional mining operations will actually undervolt the cards to get them to run more effeciently, decreasing electricity and cooling costs overall. Also there's less thermal stress due to them running constantly, so you don't get the physical stresses of fluctuation between hot/cold cycles.

> Games don't exist without players.

Of course they do. Just because a game isn't being played doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Or at least, the rules do.

In a world of 7 billion humans, all you need is 2 to be the first movers and start playing. If the game is rewarding to the players, then it will continue to attract more players and grow until the size of the network of players itself becomes a huge part of the value of playing.

Games are just a protocol. And if the protocol is useful and better than other protocols, or has some first/second mover advantage, then the network using the protocol will grow until it saturates the addressable nodes.

Just give miners a 10 year tax break for using clean energy and they'll build a whole new green powergrid. At no cost to you, taxpayers, or anyone else. But no! Let's dispense with any rationality and just BAN TECHNOLOGY.

It's rather strange to see so many luddites on HN advocating to ban technology they dislike.

First, they came for the miners. You'll be cancelled someday too.

100 grams per transaction. Wow. That's sounds insane, but here's a reference: https://cen.acs.org/environment/sustainability/Bitcoin-poses...

On the other hand if you were a person who needed to make a transaction in person because you can’t use banks for that (I.e. mafia) you would take that ride and probably spend even more energy commuting several people (arms, team of people) for a sufficiently large transaction.

In the Wild West you would need maybe several horses each in order to exchange a certain amount of gold. What does the carbon usage be here?

Bitcoin solves that problem in software, which is magnificent. For the same carbon footprint.

One can easily hate both, no?

> Time to push back on proof of waste, and end the economic incentive.

That won’t stop Nvidia having a near monopoly on high end GPU. They use this to jack up the price of machine learning cards as well.

> They use this to jack up the price

The Titan RTX is ~$2,500, which is incredibly well-priced considering that a 100G dual NIC is going to cost you $1,250.

No one mines bitcoin on GPU's anymore, since 8? years.

[citation needed]

Here ya go: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

And here: https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-c...

What needs a citation is the comment I replied to, SSLy's assertion that:

> No one mines bitcoin on GPU's anymore, since 8? years.

Which cryptocurrency of the day is mined does not matter to the argument.

Yeah this just isn't true. Given the rally in coin prices GPU mining has come back to the black if you have cheap/free access to electricity.

With a 3080 you can make over $12/day in BTC and the electricity costs required are less than $2 in a majority of the US [0].

[0] https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-rtx...

Btc mining only works on asics. You can mine ethereum on gpu’s.

NiceHash rents your hash rate to buyers, you mine ethereum, while they pay your rewards in btc.

If you want ethereum directly, you can mine for a pool like ethermine or flexpool.

The link directly contradicts this. Pooled mining with BTC (ETH too, but also BTC) on a GPU is something you can do and make a modest amount of money right now, to the tune of around $5/day at current prices.

There's a profitability floor on hashes/KWh. When coin's price goes as sky-high as it has been, it pushed GPU mining back into the black. This is likely a temporary state of affairs; either the network difficulty will increase to where only ASICs can break through, or the price will decline.

The link shows paying in btc because they don’t give you what you mine. You rent your hash rate and people bid on it with btc. You’re not mining btc directly. I use NiceHash at the moment. Your gpu mines ethereum (or whatever the most profitable coin is as NiceHash has a profit switcher.)

Could you explain to me why someone would offer their hashing power on NiceHash vs. just directly working for a pool?

The main cases I image are:

1. The miner doesn't want to deal with price fluctuations and wants to prevent arbitrage risk

2. It might be more profitable to outsource smallish coins that have to buy hashing power to stabilize their network (though that would probably also be covered by the profit switcher)

3. Money laundering <--- Which I assume is the biggest portion

I honestly don't understand who's buying the hash power on the other side. I think people start with Nicehash because it's PnP and easy to use. From there you can look at Minerstat which mines directly on pools and offers features like triggers and fancy graphs.

Setting up a miner yourself doesn't take much work but it won't have profit switching or extra cloud features that Nicehash or Minerstat have.

Weirdly I can somewhat answer this as I’ve just got into NiceHash since this Friday night, mainly as a learning experience more than a money making endeavour. I have a load of my own company PCs with GPUs like 1080s and 2070s we used to rent for VR usage at events that have basically been sitting in boxes, idle for the last 12 months due to COVID. No idea how I ended up down the mining rabbit hole on a Friday night, maybe a comment here...

Anyway, I now have six machines set up in my (previously... freezing cold garage), generating around £20 to £25 day total, after electricity costs. I’m on a metered power supply that is much cheaper at nighttime.

The benefits of NiceHash are:

- super simple set up. Literally an installer, it benchmarks the machine and gets to work in minutes. They have their own OS as well. That’s a rabbit hole for a few evenings this week to have some fun with.

- mobile app for monitoring all your rigs - temperatures, profitability, etc.

- pretty decent web front end for tracking progress, crypto prices, rig stats, etc.

- automatic switching between the most profitable algorithms in real-time. If the market are paying money for a specific currency/algo, it will swap to where the money can be made quickly and automatically without you needing to be involved.

- easy to disable specific algorithms that don’t work well. First day it kept jumping to KawPow, but for me this was really poor for profitability on my hardware, so it’s literally a click to disable that algorithm in their software.

I guess it just works, is largely set and forget, but offers lots of tweaking, monitoring for those with the desire to do that. Is it the most efficient or profitable? I’m starting to think not, but I’m still at the bottom of the curve for all of this, however, NiceHash has provided the perfect springboard into a new (to me) world.

BTW, I am fairly anti crypto in general. I’m kind of doing this as a learning experience while I have some free hours to burn each week on learning about something I feel I should know a lot more about while having a bit of fun in the process.

Thanks for explaining! I would have assumed that there are some cross-coin mining pools out there that have a similarly good UX, where you would end up with the mined coins directly, but it kind of makes sense that it exists on that abstraction level.

There's other mining software and native OS's out there, like minerstat that you can seperately link to NiceHash or other pools, that abstract it all a level further, swapping between pools based on profitablity and probably over a year offer a better pay out, but I've not started diving into that yet. Minerstat charge 1.65eu per worker/per month after the first rig, but seem to offer a lot more options/flexibility (more stats, more pools, etc.).

>Btc mining only works on asics.

No, you can mine Bitcoin on your GPU or CPU. It will work.

Yes it will work. But it will be so slow that you won't ever do anything useful with it, so in practice it doesn't work.

Go mine Ethereum or Monero instead.

They said it didn't work. That's all.

I was just correcting that. Bitcoin isn't unable to be run on GPUs or CPUs.

I think that's important to point out.

Bitcoin transactions use almost no power. Bitcoin SECURITY uses an immense amount of power, in order to make a 51% attack difficult.

I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying its not the transactions that use power.

I am sick and tired of this bullshit logic, about how much energy per transaction Bitcoin uses. Bitcoin's blocksize is being forcibly kept low. It can easily be increased 100 MB, if not more, without causing any serious issues. That will increase the number of transactions per second to a thousand. Plus, comparing a Bitcoin transaction to a traditional transaction is like comparing apples and oranges. A Bitcoin transaction is completely different as it is irreversible. That energy consumption is the price we pay to make sure our transactions remain irreversible.

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