OT ?? -- What it takes to mine one BitCoin

1630Boston

OT ?? -- What it takes to mine one BitCoin

https://youtu.be/5V_Ap0Iy_M0

mr1931S

Not for me.

Namvet69

Time and electricity. Peace Roy

ricko

Wow.... My question is this.... Why have some of these major computer companies not dedicated equipment to mining these bitcoins... With those resources, it would seem the total available (21 million) would be quickly reached. Cheers, RickO

1630Boston

It gets harder and harder to mine them and at some point it costs more than they are worth.
That's what I think anyway.

stownsin

A giant waste of time. You will find that the only place where this is now profitable are in countries where the price of electricity is MUCH lower. I have seen several videos on YouTube that compare the cost of "producing" one Bitcoin in say, Saudi Arabia to the US. While in Saudi, it may only cost $1500 to do it, you are looking at well over $30,000 in the US. You also need to consider the sheer wear and tear on your hardware that is running multiple graphics/video cards to do billions of computations each second in order to validate the Blockchain technology.

The people you see making money on this farce are speculators. They aren't mining. Well over 90% of the mining that can ever take place in relationship to Bitcoin has already been done, as there is a cap on how many can be created. As less Bitcoins remain to be created, the law of diminishing returns kicks in and you really are not seeing any semblance of profit.

Avoid avoid is all I can say. It isn't real and is purely speculative.

AUandAG

Interesting on how it's done. In ND I know of a couple of fellas that are using free electricity to mine Bitcoin. They have an oil well on their property that flares off natural gas (no way to get it to a pipeline at that location due to surrounding lakes). They take the gas and run one of those train car sized generators. They've been at it a couple of months now and so far no success that I know. They do have a lot invested in the computer parts....Generator was surplus and almost free (except of course getting it to the oil platform site). They have calculated a break even of one coin.
There are always people trying to figure out how to make a better mousetrap, 'eh?

bob

1630Boston

Something like this @AUandAG

Energy Giant Equinor to Cut Gas Flaring With Bitcoin Mining: Report

Publicly traded petroleum multinational Equinor is moving to significantly reduce natural gas flaring by mining cryptocurrency, according to screenshots from Equinor’s intranet received by Arcane Research Friday.

A new strategic partnership will see the firm implement Denver, Colo.-based Crusoe Energy Systems’ digital flare mitigation technology.
This converts waste natural gas that would be otherwise released into the atmosphere into electricity at the well site.
The operation will harness outflow at Equinor’s operations on the Bakken oilfield in North Dakota.
“Historically, industry’s options for reducing flaring have been limited to costly measures like new infrastructure development or shutting in production,” reads the memo shared internally at Equinor.
Crusoe’s digital flare mitigation “offers a win-win alternative for producers and investors alike,” it continued.
"Mining cryptocurrency requires a lot of electricity to power computers, while a valuable commodity is wasted, and carbon emissions are created when we flare," said Lionel Ribeiro, manager sustainability at Global Unconventionals at Equinor. "By connecting these inverse pains, we can satisfy both needs with no cost to market expense."
In December 2019, the originally bootstrapped Crusoe announced $70 million in funding for expansion of its innovative flaring solutions.
The round was led by Bain Capital and joined by Founders Fund, Winklevoss Capital and Polychain Capital.

Kurisu

Saw a cool post a month ago about someone in England I think who was using their mining rig's liquid cooling system to heat their house radiators. It was either with sodium solution or oil but a great idea to get some extra return if you're that hardcore.

Maywood

So Bitcoin has crashed to about $25k from a high of over $60k. I've watched a few videos that try to explain how everything works and about all that makes sense is that huge amounts of electricity and constant maintenance are required to sustain everything. Logically, there's a break even point, below that it seems it costs money to "mine" and the only profit is in the investment end which also evaporates. I can't envision this phenomenon as being sustainable and time seems ticking toward some kind of crash.

It's strange how everyone championing Bitcoin only a few months ago have disappeared.

LanceNewmanOCC

IF i am not mistaken, there are new way(s) to mine now and/or new channels. not really sure how to word it. just different.

the tech for all this stuff nft, crypto, mining etc IS moving forward , albeit seemingly slowly. the major pullback in values, idk, could help or hurt all this effort. sometimes hard times forces the innovation instead of prohibiting it.

idk about anyone else but the electric per kwh around here seems to have tripled from later year at this time. the power company says their new methods don't require actual reads (working in property management, i've learned to stay on top of the utility companies). either you watch your money or someone else will be happy to watch it for you. ><

anyone else in the midwest especially see big spikes in electric costs?

also, i wonder if a solar farm/wind (water) turbines can produce enough to sustainably run a crypto mining farm?

BStrauss3

@LanceNewmanOCC there are different coins that use proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work for their mining.

Proof of work means that people have to solve complex mathematical equations through essentially brute force. The more force you bring to the task, the more likely you are to prove the equation and win the prize (12.5 bitcoins). The prize decreases and the work required increases as you get to the eventual cap.

Proof of stake means you have to show you have something committed. The most common is large amounts of storage space. While disks are (relatively) cheap, proving the stake means reading/writing large amounts of data - such that just creating your plot (farming) will kill most low-cost solid-state drives. And of course, creating those drives had costs too.

The places in the US where it's economical to mine bitcoin are where there is cheap electricity - near the Columbia River power plants, or near large wind farms in West Texas. If they have to burn coal or oil or gas, the power isn't cheap enough for real mining pools.

LanceNewmanOCC

@BStrauss3 said:
@LanceNewmanOCC there are different coins that use proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work for their mining.

Proof of work means that people have to solve complex mathematical equations through essentially brute force. The more force you bring to the task, the more likely you are to prove the equation and win the prize (12.5 bitcoins). The prize decreases and the work required increases as you get to the eventual cap.

Proof of stake means you have to show you have something committed. The most common is large amounts of storage space. While disks are (relatively) cheap, proving the stake means reading/writing large amounts of data - such that just creating your plot (farming) will kill most low-cost solid-state drives. And of course, creating those drives had costs too.

.
proof of stake also has a little requirement, we, the users, have to "stake" money in order to do transactions, in the form of CPU, RAM and NET, (may be called different things on different chains) with cpu being the 98% requirement. the more users on a chain, the less computational time is allotted to everyone (have to stake more). there is more to it but that is the jist.

proof of work looks to equate to high "gas" fees and by high, i mean insane, at least for the really popular ones. what did it hit the other day, like $250 (there are a bunch of various tracking sites for all this stuff) per transaction and when it reaches that high, the chain actually starts failing. (i read one of my crypto updates about an eth nft release released during a high demand time and the whole thing failed and a ton of refunds had to be made to users trying to mint and probably missing out on some big $$$$ but there was like usual, more to it)

like your post.

silverpop

bitcoin has too many red flags for my comfort

fathom

Blockchain is not scalable if you care about the planet.

Maybe someday if non-carbon based energy sources are integrated into the power grid to a large degree. That is not currently foreseeable.

lkenefic

Seems to me that, in the long term, the only people making money are the producers of the mining machines and the electric company...

LanceNewmanOCC

@fathom said:
Blockchain is not scalable if you care about the planet.

Maybe someday if non-carbon based energy sources are integrated into the power grid to a large degree. That is not currently foreseeable.

obviously this should be paramount but the majority of tech we use today even w/o crypto/nft still is hard on the planet, or at least hard the way we do it.

innovation will certainly help us to proceed.

Nysoto

I like the old days of mining, if you had a gold pan and a mule you were good to go

lkenefic

@Nysoto said:
I like the old days of mining, if you had a gold pan and a mule you were good to go

True... but if that miner came up empty, the only person that made money was the one that sold the pan and the mule...

Dave99B

Mathematically interesting, but overall, still pure silliness IMO.

Dave

telephoto1

All this video shows is that Bitcoin has jumped the shark. The only people who made any real money on this got in on the ground floor.

Maywood

@telephoto1 said: All this video shows is that Bitcoin has jumped the shark. The only people who made any real money on this got in on the ground floor.

In this regard it's similar to the overwhelming majority of CPG varieties where the majority are just valuable to the searchers who find them.

telephoto1

@Maywood said:
@telephoto1 said: All this video shows is that Bitcoin has jumped the shark. The only people who made any real money on this got in on the ground floor.

In this regard it's similar to the overwhelming majority of CPG varieties where the majority are just valuable to the searchers who find them.

Right. Everyone wants to "make" one but no one wants to buy one.