If you're talking about mining, setting up a mining farm with hundreds of GPUs isn't easy or cheap at all.

Did you miss the part about the GPU being stolen ?

Setting up a mining farm with hundreds of free stolen GPUs isn't easy or cheap at all. You still have to find power and cooling and buy a bunch of motherboards, power supplies, networking, shelves, etc.

(Likewise I suspect the weed is the cheapest part of a grow operation.)

> Setting up a mining farm with hundreds of free stolen GPUs isn't easy or cheap at all.

Still significantly cheaper than setting up a mining farm with hundreds of legally obtained GPUs.

That's not relevant, though. The question is whether "there's a safe and easy way to launder expensive hardware into currency". The fact that it's expensive now doesn't conflict with the fact that it could counterfactually be even more expensive.

North America is literally the best market for this, we have the most robust and efficient mining market and supply routes. One level of efficiency is that large scale mining operations allow for space leases and profit sharing at their data centers. If you wanted to fire off a message saying “I have a bunch of GPUs” they will give you a quote about their terms.

Several of these companies are publicly traded its really not that hard to get done.

Once you move past the Internet forums debating the existence of this market, try actually research this market its very fast paced and robust.

If you have the balls to roll a pallet of stolen GPUs into a colo, yeah that does sound like a great idea.

I mean you would just say they’re from a Kazakhstan or Chinese operation looking for a new home

Its not distinguishable, even for liability purposes and nobody cares, the battle for network control and resource share is far bigger than the worrying about this. I doubt people are going to try to register these gpus and be like “ruh roh this one didnt register”

You wouldn’t need to colocate this since bandwidth isn’t a big issue with mining. Power is a bigger issue since most home circuits can’t support maybe more than 3-4 high power workstations.

Seeds are cheap (~$10 USD/ea), whole ready to harvest plants are not (and hard-ish to estimate). If you grow inside the expensive part is the electricity. Indoor and outdoor both spend lots on labour for harvest/cure/trim processes (variable cost, hourly). Expensive equipment are things like CO2 extractors $XXX,XXX USD. So yea, seeds cheap, loads of other higher cost items to get ~$10/g flower on the shelf at your favourite retailer

Weed ops don't grow plants from seeds fwiw, unless they are trying to discover the next new varietal, as each seed is different from the next. Quality control at scale is accomplished using clones.

GPUs are the expensive part of a mining operation.

OpEx is always greater than CapEx. You don’t see mining farms moving to countries where GPUs are cheap, they go where electricity is cheap.

Because GPUs are small and easy to transport?

Apparently not. As they can be stolen en route.

You need to plug those GPUs into computers. You need to plug those computers somewhere as well.

It’s not going to the moon hard, but waaaaaaay harder than reselling it on Craigslist. And requires significant capital investment.

It'd be more efficient to just fence the cards. There are so many communities of flippers / eager buyers out there that it would take minutes to move an entire truckload of 30 series GPUs to buyers of all types.

You have to move low volume any high volume transaction will check for this now

Just like with setting up a weed farm. The cops need to follow spikes in power consumption that are out of the ordinary and they'll find you. However, growing weed may be illegal in most places, mining is not yet.

Cultivation of Cannabis Sativa with low THC is legal in 46 US states afaik with the 2018 farm bill. So you can say growing weed is legal in most places.

Right, except that me, and a large chunk of the world population, don't live in the US, so I was trying to draw a conclusion about the general global status on this.

The comment said it’s not easy or cheap to set up a mining farm.

You can likely recoup the initial cost somewhat quickly with that kind of hardware though.

It's almost as if you're confusing "cheap" with "free".

I'm not sure what you mean by "easy", but "stolen and available" is a lot easier than "legal but require waiting if available at all".

How expensive would it be to replace the cards in an existing farm with these?

The cards are what's expensive. PSUs are getting more expensive but by far the cards are the toughest thing to get. Just getting serviceable motherboards/CPUs/RAM is just about as easy now as it has always been.

Most multi-GPU farms run like 4-6 GPUs off a single machine. Although some specialized "BTC" motherboards have whacky scalper prices it's not hard to find other motherboards with OK multi-GPU support. You do not need a 'gamer' high performance motherboard to mine effectively. The only thing that really matters is being able to run as many GPUs as it's supposed to without bluescreening.

The power requirements are also not as high as you would expect from the typical power consumption of 30 series cards because it's overall more efficient to mine on much lower overall power consumption than you would get from a gaming workload. Mining just puts stress on different parts of the GPU than gaming and requires less power than a full throttle gaming workload. So you are able to run many more 3080s or what have you on a smaller PSU than you would be able to if you were using those 3080s overclocked and with a high power limit on gaming workloads. You just do not get that much extra hashpower if you go past certain levels of power consumption: it's easier / more efficient to just add another card.

With a PCIe switch, you can run almost (obviously there are PCIe addressing limits, just to name one) any amount of GPUs per machine.

Source: my workstation has 10 GPUs in it. Two are plugged into the mobo. 8 are plugged in via two PCIe switches.

I'm sure there are other shipments they can target

I think you overestimate sophistication of “let’s steal stuff from a truck” businesses.

Such cards are useless for mining, least of all in California where electricity isn't exactly cheap.

I make about $10-15 a day from mining with my RTX 3090, while my electricity costs are around $2 a day from mining. That's still very much a profitable endevour.

My video card has completely paid for itself almost double what I initially paid for it ($2K in cash from a seller on craigslist, back in January).

Might the card you bought have been stolen? Asking for nVidia

No, the seller emailed me a copy of his purchase order and receipt from Best Buy, so I'm fairly certain it's legit.

If you don't mind, I have a couple of questions. What do you mine? And why not use ASICs or dedicated hardware rather than GPUs?

I'm using NiceHash on Windows, since it automatically switches between mining the most profitable cryptos. It always seems to just mine Ethereum for the most part though.

The reason I mine this way (instead of with ASICs or dedicated hardware) is because this is all equipment that I would have bought anyways for gaming and/or programming work. I do a lot of gaming in 4K at 120 fps, and the RTX 3090 is pretty much the only video card that can actually pull that off.

Being able to toggle the gaming rig into mining mode whenever I'm not actively using it means that the equipment pays for itself. It's a lot easier to justify spending $6,000 on a gaming rig when that same gaming rig earns you over $100 a month worth of passive income!

Etherium and a bunch of other coins are purposefully ASIC resistant, you need a GPU to mine them.

But there are roads headed out of California

Electricity isn’t expensive everywhere. Let’s say you want to mine ETH. 3090 can do 125 MH/s. At peak load they consume about 360 watts. If you’re paying $.12/KWh (a little higher than national average) you’re making $276/day.

I think it's more like $276/month, according to: https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/eth?HashingP...

Heating season has begun in the north. The cost per kwh needs to be reduced by the equivalent cost to heat.

How much money do Russian oligarchs launder through UK Crown Dependecies and Panama every year?

Probably more than the entire market cap of Bitcoin.

Unlike motor vehicles, where you just clone the FOB signal, hop in, and then drive them to the docks.

I saw so many California license plates in SE Asia.

The easiest way is always to sell for cash at a lower price than market. Criminals are evil geniuses only in movies and complex plans have many more ways to fail than simple ones.

They’ll just be sold for 2x MSRP on eBay like every other GPU in existence right now

> Side-note: why is HN so anti-crypto?

A variety of reasons. Some think that crypto is a socially pernicious bubble that’ll get people hurt. Others still have to deal with the ransomware attacks that are only viable with crypto. Most of us are pissed off that crypto comes along and keeps ruining the price of hardware we want to buy. The environmentally minded are angry about the energy usage. A lot of us are sick and tired of the naked scamming and the dumb ideas that get floated on the subject.

> I feel that if most HNers would just build a crypto business (DeFi, arbitrage, NFTs, tokenomics, etc.), they'd basically be overnight millionaires.

Obviously not. That’s just not how anything around money works. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Just because someone got rich off a thing doesn’t mean everyone will; after all some people got rich in pyramid schemes too, doesn’t make it a good idea.

Even when there is legitimately easy money to be made, the rush of people trying to exploit the opportunity usually drives the per person profits down to $0. If someone claims that there are easy, guaranteed millions to be made, your alarm bells should be going off.

Furthermore, even this tiny whiff of “you’re just jealous you didn’t make millions flipping NFTs” is an ugly look.

Decades later, we’re still hearing “crypto is a bubble.” I’m still waiting for that to be true. I’m sorry there’s demand for popular hardware. That’s how markets work. Green dot / prepaid gift cards used to be (and still are) accepted as payment for many of these scams. This isn’t a crypto problem. The environmental claims are all FUD. None of them hold up to the slightest scrutiny. Getting scammed sucks, but that’s a social problem, not a crypto problem.

Decades later and I’m still waiting for a use case for crypto. I’ve yet to see a legal use case other than “number go up”. If something has no actual use case and still continues to rise in price, then that seems like a bubble to me.

> The environmental claims are all FUD.

This is hilariously unpersuasive. Not even a hint of an argument, just “please ignore the TWh behind the curtain”.

ETH is switching to proof-of-stake. Although the acronym is humorously "POS," it will solve the environmental concerns.

It’ll be great if they do that, but I’m not gonna hold my breath.

Meanwhile Etherium seems extremely bubbly to me too. At first smart contracts was the only thing that made any sense to me (bitcoin struck me as goldbug nonsense early on), but over the years it seems like it’s mostly used for gambling and making tokens. Nothing that couldn’t be done more efficiently and conveniently off the chain, especially since the oracle problem always looms large over any given hypothetical use case.

At least if they go to POS it’ll be less wasteful.

fast and low cost remittance is a pretty good use case

> Decades later, we're still hearing "crypto is a bubble." I'm still waiting for that to be true.

Decades? With an S? It's barely been 10 years since Bitcoin's public release and that's ignoring the fact that it wasn't particularly popular (and nowhere near as valuable) for another couple of years. Other cryptocurrencies wouldn't come into their own for another couple of years after Bitcoin, either.

For reference, the dot-com bubble began roughly in 1995 and had popped by 2003. Crypto, especially with the fact that it picked up in value an incredible amount in 2020, is a prime candidate for being a bubble.

> I'm sorry there's demand for popular hardware. That's how markets work.

And the actual demand is being exacerbated by the somewhat artificial demand crypto creates. It also likely means that if crypto is a bubble and it pops, there's going to be a glut of pre-owned crypto-abused graphics cards flooding the market. All of this is definitely a knock-on effect of cryptocurrencies booming.

> The environmental claims are all FUD. None of them hold up to the slightest scrutiny.

Would you like to back this claim up with anything? The way proof-of-work crypto works demands computation, which demands power. Imagine if somebody did take this entire pallet of GPUs and start mining cryptocurrency with it; that'd be a pretty good amount of power consumption. Tack on the fact that there are multiple cryptocurrencies and a lot more than just a trailer full of GPUs working on mining them around the world, plus the fact that those GPUs are unlikely to be as efficient as the latest, and you've got a lot of power consumption.

Obviously, I'm not doing the math here, but just thinking about the (apparently hypothetical) power consumption of something like Etherium or Bitcoin is enough to raise red flags in my mind.

> pre-owned crypto-abused graphics cards flooding the market.

This is the only part I disagree with.

Most miners undervolt their cards to minimize heat and lower cooling costs... I'm cool with the rest of your post.

Mining cards are probably fine to use for years and will probably destroy the markets if crypto explodes.

Yeah but that's not great either. Such a situation risks driving the manufacturers to the brink of bankruptcy.

Nvidia is selling GPUs without output capability to miners to avoid exactly that scenario already.

It's wild. HN of a decade ago was very much in favor of anything cypherpunk or otherwise wrestling control away of the Internet away from authorities and corporations. I guess those people "grew up"?

Or a decade of seeing crypto fail to deliver on any single promise soured people on the idea? Just a thought.

What promises and where did it fail? Things are just getting started.

It's cool to take power from authorities and corporations.

It's uncool to give power to those who already have it.

Crypto just takes power from banks, it gives it to other powerful groups and corporations. Due to the fact that you still need significant investments to keep it running, it's not actually any more democratic.

During 2016 and 2017 I worked for a very large principle trading firm. We traded crypto currencies a lot because one of the higher up traders was a true believer. I always giggled when people claimed with a straight face that crypto would destroy Wall Street; big financial firms were and still are all over crypto because they have the tools and money to handle such things.

Any idea that crypto would hurt traditional financial instituons (aside from maybe savings banks, which are generally the least noxious financial institutions around) was pure fantasy

How do you factor DeFi into this? Major existing players may continue to be so in such an ecosystem, but they don't have total control of it and retail gets to play too.

Well, you could make a lot of money also selling arms and procuring mercenaries.

You're seriously comparing flipping digital art to hiring hitmen? I don't really think that's fair.

The more apt comparison is probably gambling or the financial sector making money from speculation on obscure financial instruments and my guess would be people on HN are negative about it for the same reason most people in general are negative about these things. It doesn't have anything to do with innovation, it's just meta-gaming obscure markets so the nouveau riche can buy themselves sportscars.

I mean you said it yourself, not particularly bright people get filthy rich, why would actually bright people think that's cool

A lot of the crypto world is "morally dubious", let's say. To play in many of those sectors you mention you must be ready to live in very grey areas of the law, or even right outside of it.

The HN crowd is getting too old and too invested in the status quo. See also: future shock.

Yes, lovely incentives, indeed.

How can you launder shoes like that?

I don't agree with blaming crypto, but it's true that these are uniquely perfect things to steal.

Imagine being able to steal a printing press that makes bills that can't be linked back to a specific press, that's what they did

> Imagine being able to steal a printing press that makes bills that can't be linked back to a specific press, that's what they did

I don't know if you understand how crypto mining works, the electricy expense, the infrastructure expense, the actual expertise in setting up geth/mining nodes, etc.

I understand perfectly.

What I don't understand is why people who claim they know these things are acting like you can't make money off a free Ampere card.

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Like 99% of mining is initial capital, everyone knows that. GPUs alone don't make a farm but you realize the thieves are also motivated to not go to literal prison?

Figure that a fence for stolen goods with trackable serials is already taking a substantial cut if they try to sell.

Mining in an inefficient hacked together "farm" doesn't seem so crappy by comparison suddenly.

It's not like anyone is saying they have to do that, but it's a very unique property of what they stole

Likely you can lease a space in a mining center, bring your own GPUs

I guess we looked at the personal wins vs the global downsides and made our choice.

But plenty of folks here work for [insert-evil-mega-corp] which has all kinds of "global downsides". Unless you're a hermit (or Stallman), this argument won't really work. Crypto's here to stay whether you like it or not.

Well, enough people here are free software enthusiasts, working for SMBs or local startups instead of evil megacorps :)

These GPUs will be resold without a doubt. Moving pallets of GPUs and setting up a mining operation somewhere will be quickly noticed. Much better to sell these at markup on Craigslist.