ASIC mining took over GPU mining in efficiency ages ago and wouldn't make sense.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
121 points (96.9% liked)
Showerthoughts
41916 readers
604 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Efficiency wouldn't matter if customers pay for the power while you pocket the Bitcoin.
This reminds me of huge affair of Bitcoin miner stealing power from Supreme Administrative Court in Poland. They literally had huge bitcoin mining operation in the court building while taxpayers were paying for electricity bill
Simple. Just have the court rule that the court is constitutionally MANDATED to mine Bitcoin on the government's dime! 😂
When everyone else is using ASIC at terahashes/s and you are only doing mega or gigahashs per second the chances of your pool getting the next coin is still low.
Every video card that’s plugged into an AI data center starts losing money the second it’s powered on. It might actually be more profitable to mine crypto.
Profitable is a stretch. Arguably them running with no workload will mean the card lives longer overall compared to mining which has known to cause hardware burnout in GPUs.
I didn't say profitable. I said more profitable. As in losing less money.
Well that’s not exactly true, most GPU cards in mining operations are voltage underclocked and run at a stable rate. It’s much harder on a card to run in a typical desktop scenario with constant voltage changes and power on / off cycles.
That being said, there is a difference between a large scale mining operation that are maximizing profits to jimmy bob wanna be techbro trying to start one up
(And honestly, fuck both of those)
https://www.pcworld.com/article/395149/should-you-buy-a-used-mining-gpu.html
I’m not up on ROI for non-asic mining anymore, but I’d be interested to know if this would be economical for these centres. When I used to mine ethereum on 27 Rx 580 8GB, I had to flash them with different bios to get them to be profitable.
Then the heat. I had them in a separate building on 60A panel and turning on the lights was a 50/50 that the breaker would trip.
Would running crypto on GPUs geared for AI be worth the extra power draw?
I haven't done the math, but you are forgetting the massive tax breaks for "job creation" and subsidizing the energy cost across the population around you. That's gotta help the profitability
Doubtful. Crypto mining is insanely optimized. Hardware value depreciation alone would kill profitability. We're talking 20k chips having to compete with $200 consumer GPUs
Is Bitcoin still a thing?
Why a quarter
The Bitcoin network adjusts its difficulty based on the amount of computing power available so that the discover rate is relatively constant, around every ten minutes.
Adding more compute power without an increase in regular currency value per Bitcoin will just make it less likely to break even.
Not saying it couldn't happen, but the odds of it making enough money at scale and without asic mining gear seems unlikely.
I don't know about other cryptocurrencies though - they might have different designs that are more amenable to clandestine shenanigans.