BTC mining is back to profitability?

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A couple years ago I built a mining rig with 5 GPU cards. I stopped running it because our electricity prices shot up after a change of provincial government removed the price cap, at the same time crypto prices dropped.

Today, it seems even with one unaccelerated GPU out of my old hardware collection, BTC is back to profitability.

Our electricity is $0.09 CAD/kwh right now.

Must be much more efficient with modern, overclocked and cooled cards?

Going to look at moving stuff around. My gaming computer is a compact unit with only one expansion slot, but I have another PC with a beefier power supply and more slots.

Other than money, why mine?

As a bonus, the machine is warming my hobby room. I would be paying to heat the place anyway, so that is like my heater subsidizing itself!

That's nothing. This guy grows tomatoes with his excess heat!

But also there is something truly educational about building a PC again after decades away from the field. You understand your machine better when you start from a blank slate.

There was a period at the beginning of the "PC as games machine" era, when we were upgrading from 286, to 386, to 486, etc, that there were savings to be had by doing your own work. Dell and co made that less true over time, to where their volume purchasing and the big box store price gouging made me give up.

Perhaps those days are back again?



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3 comments
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While not really profitable, if you are looking to generate heat you can always install BOINC and Gridcoin. At least all those graphics cards would be doing something useful. Gridcoin is only worth about 1.2 cents but you could at off set your costs a little anyway...

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Well strictly speaking Nicehash gets you paid in bitcoin, you don't actually mine BTC - they rent out your hashing power as part of a pool :)

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(Edited)

I actually think the 'build-your-own' PC times are back with a vengeance due to the popularity of gaming on PCs in the last few years. Back in the day, gaming on a PC was clunky and messy and the gameplay was never as good as on a console.
That's all changed these days and as I wander the local IT mall, there is a huge range of specialist gaming component shops, combining building PCS to a customer spec/budget (like in the old days!) and selling individual components for DIY upgrades.

Apple 2c....impressive as I have never actually seen one in the flesh! And like buses, you wait 20 years then see 2 in one shot!

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