Bitcoin miners used specialised mining hardware that isn’t useful for anything but mining bitcoin.

And best of all, it becomes completely obsolete at around 6 months when better specialised hardware comes out. So the only thing the miners can do is stop and throw their hardware in the dump.

Imagine if their hardware had other use, what would happen?

The non-miners that need to use that hardware would suffer because of increased demand

They use graphics cards.

The larger miners are using something called an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Hobbyist retail miners use gpus. the big farms you see in new organization photos are using silicon explicitly built for btc mining and only btc mining. Or a handful of proof of work algorithms. But still specialized.

The functionality is burned into the silicon at the factory and cannot be changed. There are also specialized devices that can give you the benefits of an asic and can also be changed and reprogrammed. these are called field programmable gate arrays (fpgas). Large scale miners do not use gpus or fpgas due to cost and efficiency reasons.

Not quite. Bitcoin is mined with ASICs by anyone mining it. GPU mining is for other coins where the PoW algorithm needs more RAM.

Bitcoin mining hasn’t been done on gpus in a decade.

It has, in fact it's being done right this minute on GPUs.

But not on GPUs in bulk for a decade, that is likely a true statement.

GPU miners use software that mines the most profitable coin at a given moment. Bitcoin was not the most profitable one to mine in almost a decade now.

Unless someone launched a miner ten years ago, before the advent of protocol switching software, they do not mine Bitcoin.

Here is a list of profitability of coin mining on GPU. Bitcoin is not even on a list. https://whattomine.com/coins

I never said that these people are interested in profit. If you want to learn how bitcoin works from the perspective of a miner, then you mine bitcoin. Mining ETH won't tell you anything about what it's like to mine bitcoin.

After some thought: I think you may be confusing “bitcoin mining” as in using gpu to mine other crypto that gets auto-converted to bitcoin with actually mining bitcoin.

The former is popular on gpu, looks the same from the user perspective (to the point of users only needing a bitcoin wallet and receiving payouts only in bitcoin), but doesn’t actually mine any bitcoin underneath - just other cryptos that get transparently exchanged into btc.

Then you buy an usb mining dongle for $10 or mine on cpu.

I’ve met multiple people from the bitcoin mining and research community in my 10 years and I don’t remember a single person doing gpu mining since 2013.

edit: also, you can’t even find an up to date gpu bitcoin mining software novadays. I dare you to provide a link here if I’m mistaken

Can you honestly say that you have personally met every single person on this planet who is doing Bitcoin mining "for fun" or doing research, and that you have continued to meet all the new ones as they pop up?

Didn't think so.

Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

I don’t doubt there is at least 1 GPU mining bitcoin. But it would be a less than pointless effort since the power would cost more than the bitcoins being mined by a long shot.

Still a useful learning experience, and if the GPU is free and the power is free, then the low return rate would still make sense.

I imagine there are more than a few dorms where this kind of thing is going on.

For learning why bother with a very inefficient GPU, just mine with the CPU or better with pen and paper: https://hackaday.com/2014/09/29/mining-bitcoins-with-pencil-...

Because you want to? You want to see how the GPU works with bitcoin?

Install a program, sing up on pool. Run it for few minutes or days get disappointed and stop? Wonder if there is any pools anymore even...

It really wasn't anyway practical or fun experience.

There would be no return rate.

Not much, but still not zero.

I'm sure you wouldn't be interested, but for people who are doing it for other reasons and do t really care about the return rate, why would you try to deny their existence?

No, there would be zero return rate. The amount a graphics card could even add to a pool would be negligible, and pools pay out when they 'win' a block, based on proof of partial solutions during that block, to prove the contributory hashrate. ASICs are so far beyond what a GPU can do that it is likely that a graphics card would never achieve even a single partial solution and therefore merit any fractional payout from a pool even.

So I'll say again, it's likely that a graphics card mining bitcoin right now would produce nothing. Ever.

I'd be looking for proof that these people exist before assuming that there are people who are wasting their time and energy on doing something that will never produce a single cent's worth of bitcoin, 'for fun'.

Maybe. But that doesn't mean that there aren't people out there trying.

Hell, Jeff Geerling is the kind of guy who would attach a GPU to his Raspberry Pi(s), just to prove that he could. And then turn around and do some Bitcoin mining on those rigs, again -- just to prove he could. And he'd get lots of hits on his YouTube channel for doing so.

And he's not the only one to try to do that sort of thing. Have you eliminated all the possible YouTube channel owners who might be inclined to pull this kind of stunt, just for publicity and traffic to their YouTube channel?

> Hell, Jeff Geerling is the kind of guy ...

Right, but is he actually doing it? Or are you just supposing again that someone might?

> Have you eliminated...

I don't need to, that's not how evidence works. You're claiming this thing happens, it's up to you to prove that. Unless you can find any actual evidence of people still mining BTC on a GPU at this point, you're just grasping at straws to try and justify your position.

The original point was that bitcoin mining is not done on GPUs any more. This is true in the sense the original post was meant, because the industry moved on years ago and mining on GPUS is now entirely unproductive. It's also true philosophically - if you don't produce anything, can you really be said to be 'mining' anyway?

And even if you show that one person or a few people are still doing it "for fun", it doesn't really contradict or disprove the post you replied to.

I won't touch crypto with a 100 foot pole, I've said it many times. So many people ask me about this or that coin, about helium, about new protocols and decentralized Internets...

Yeah, no. Waiting for this massive crypto bubble to finally deflate so I can see if there's anything worth caring about in the mess that'll be left over.

Perhaps for “fun”, no serious miner is using GPUs. It’s like comparing panning for gold vs a fully mechanised gold mining operation.

Oh, absolutely agreed.

But there are still some people in this world who are panning for gold.

You’re thinking of eth.

not for bitcoin (in any relevant degree)

for some other crypto currencies small and mid-sized miners do use graphic cards but large sized ones still use custom chips

for some other all miners use graphic cards

and for some no one uses graphics cards

Do you doubt that it’s most, or doubt that it’s many/any?