I realized with dismay that if I were clever, I would have bought a miner five weeks ago and plugged it in. After all, I've got a hotel room whose power I'm not paying for, just sitting here idle. Talk me into buying one now.
Am I wrong in assuming that in order to actually get anything "mined" you would have to have a pretty powerful machine these days that would utilize a lot of electricity and put off a lot of heat? The hotel might notice.
The machine doesn't have to be much more powerful than a normal gaming PC, and bitcoin miners are optimized to reduce energy waste as much as possible. The problem is more that it takes a long time to mine a single bitcoin these days, and unless you routinely spend a lot of time in places where you wouldn't be paying for electricity, it's not really cost-effective to be mining bitcoins.
Mining bitcoins has always cost more in electricity than the value of the coins you were mining, but coins mined in the early days paid off when bitcoins went from being worth a few cents to being worth a few hundred dollars. Whether it's worth doing now depends on whether you expect the value of your bitcoins to increase enough to make it pay off.
If the only value in mining is made by bitcoin increasing, then you should never mine, since you could just buy bitcoins today then sell them later. I think most miners just hope one day the price will jump so high it will justify the electric use. Of course, by then, more efficient miners will have been created, so in general it seems like a pretty bad idea.
That's interesting, I have a friend that mines bitcoin and said he keeps the machine in his garage and it gets very hot. Also, the cops came to his house because of the power bill surge, they thought he was growing marijuana.
I found this hard to believe, but apparently it happens. Now I found something else hard to believe: Based on source and infographic.Also, the cops came to his house because of the power bill surge, they thought he was growing marijuana.
Indoor growers are estimated to consume about 1 percent of the nation's electricity
he was told by the police that it was a common occurrence. Also, they were very nice to him and genuinely interested in what this whole "Bitcoin" stuff was all about.
He replied. He says it's very hot. He used a bitman tech antminer fwiw.
Nope. At least I don't think so. I just texted him, we'll see if he replies. Now I'm curious
If you are part of a mining pool, you will be credited by your hashing power contribution. I think if you could get a cheap asic miner and free electricity, it might be worth your while in the long run. As bfv says, it all depends upon just how much BTC is worth, and how quickly it appreciates. kleinbl00, I don't think you'd turn a profit on anything but a free mining rig within 5 weeks. But I read about some brothers trying to sell water heaters that were heated by bitcoin miners. I think it'd be cool to get a raspberry pi and make a solar, wind, or tidal mining rig.
$5 for a Raspberry Pi Zero. I wonder if you can have it run on a solar panel and a battery, and turn on and off depending on the charge.