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A comment on Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year. Parent comment

Re:Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of... by michaelt on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @06:29PM (#29656807)
> Hardware for mining cryptocurrency is self-financing in a relatively short period of time when the electricity is "free"

No it isn't. I know because I looked into it.

Assuming the price of bitcoin doesn't rise or fall, a cutting edge bit of dedicated bitcoin mining hardware will pay for itself in 3 years if operated continuously on free electricity, and will be effectively obsolete in 5 years, as difficulty increases and rewards drop.

So if you only operate the hardware 50% of the time it'll be obsolete before it's paid for itself.

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Re:Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of... by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @07:35PM (#29657336)
That's because you're using Bitcoin, for which custom ASICs are a thousand times more power efficient than commodity hardware and so commodity hardware is useless, but custom ASICs are stupid expensive.

What you want is a cryptocurrency that ASICs are no better at than CPUs or GPUs, so can use an ordinary CPU or GPU that will pay for itself more quickly because most of the mining cost is electricity instead of hardware. (Hint: the hardware you want in this case has the best performance/$, not necessarily the best performance/watt.)

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Re:Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of... by _1tan on Thursday December 23, 2021 @12:12AM (#29658886)
Which cryptocurrency would work for example? Monero?
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Re:Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of... by AnthonyMouse on Thursday December 23, 2021 @01:50AM (#29659355)
The returns from CPU mining are really low. The advantage is you can use your existing PC(s) and not buy anything.

Tom's Hardware did a list for GPUs:

https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-mining-gpus-ben...

"Which cryptocurrency" will also vary over time since the prices are all over the place, but that's the other advantage of not-ASICs. You can switch to whichever one pays better this month.

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