People are fucking retarded if they're using their GPUs as space heaters and using that as part of their profitability equation. That means in spring, everyone is going to be super negative, everyone will sell their rigs (or hold them till next winter?), and the economy will bomb again. I wondered what was going on, but this is so asinine I don't even know what to think of it.
What's wrong with subsidize heating? You don't like free heat? It absolutely makes sense to mine for heat even if you're only breaking even on power costs...
Only short-termers sell rigs in the spring... It might only take a week of highly profitable mining to make hanging onto 30 cards worthwhile vs selling them. And if you've got large spaces or several buildings to keep warm during the winter, then you can save yourself thousands in heating costs.
Breaking even with power costs is not the same as making money, especially considering how much you could have if you sold your cards. They DO depreciate, which happened recently with the release of the 970/980 and AMDs price cuts to all their cards because of it. People that are using their GPUs as space heaters (and using that as part of their profitability equation) are just wrecking things for themselves and other people.
Slightly above breaking even with power costs is the minimum required to make money.. Sell cards? Why? Wrecking it for other people? LOLOLOLOLOL
Efficiency is hash/watt
That's one way of looking at it - you could also say that the most efficient miner is the one that's producing the most hashes... depends what matters to you... wattage won't necessarily matter to everyone's idea of mining efficiency.
Miners don't magically scale up, people buy them. People aren't going to buy them if they aren't remotely profitable. There are some (stupid) people that have been clinging to their hardware till winter to switch it on and use it as a space heater, but they'll die off in spring time. Otherwise it doesn't magically scale up. There is opportunity cost and if say a 280x was making a dollar a day, it'd still take a half a year of those prices to pay it off. As it stands right now, most people didn't get to pay off their loans from their mining hardware if they bought it last January or later (not nov or dec).
You call it stupid, I call it smart. All my hardware made ROI long ago (of course, after paying for the power), and is well in profit. Now it's the most efficient heater you could ever imagine (it pays for itself and then some!)
I don't think anyone would tell you it's a good time to get into crypto mining on GPUs right now.
Oh definitely, I can't see who would invest right now. But if you already have the GPUs, and you're keeping them for some reason (people will have various reasons), why not have free heat for the winter?