Topic: Return of generating coins vs electricity used. (Read 2379 times)

That's funny, when I wrote my thesis a few years ago, it used to be the other way around. NVidia G80 (with CUDA) was the only GPU platform even decently supporting integer operations.
Then again, competition tends to change things. I guess they focused too much on double precision floating point support.

Do you perhaps have a reference for this? (that doesn't only involve bitcoin mining )

it's not only the cost of hardware, more of efficiency.

a nice indicator is the number of shader-units,
my latest Nvidia gtx260 has 216 (~36.000khs @default clock)
a ATI HD5850 has 1440 (~236.000khs @default clock).

i highly doubt, that even a new (and of course expensive) gtx580 having only 512 shader processors can beat a mid-class ATI card when it comes to mining, not to mention the mid-class card will need less power.

NVIDIA GPUs aren't as good at integer operations.

I'd wager that it's because Nvidia GPU's tend to cost more as compared to ATI GPU's.

What's the problem with NVIDIA GPUs compared to ATI?

Is the problem just that the current miner code is optimized for ATI, or is it something deeper?

The profit motive is only an excuse to spend $300 on a high-end gaming graphics card anyway.

I recently stopped producing bitcoin on my GPU which had about 26 Mhash together with CPU.
Unfortunately, the amount of generated coins didn't pay for for the electricity bill increase.

However NVIDIA GPU's are very cost-ineffective when it comes to generating bitcoins, i think that bitcoin generation of people with AMD Radeons 57xx, 58xx, 59xx, 6xxx surely pays for the bills at least (yet). But with the difficulty increasing in the current speed, they won't be able to earn even for the bills in just 2-3 months.

Tropics, but I'll move eventually. I would generate if the gpu stuff was easy to set up.

Do you think that you would generate during winter, or do you live in the tropics?

Electricity is included in my rent, so the marginal cost is zero, but I don't generate anymore anyway. A GPU would heat the place up and I don't have AC. Other people with my arrangement and different weather would be printing money.

You can reasonably expect that difficulty will continue to increase, at least through the winter in the Northern hemisphere.

Actually the cost of generating a bitcoin for me is well, well below the cost of the electricity. The electricity (at about $0.10/kW-h after taxes) is only costing about $80/month. The big cost for me was building a water cooled miner box with two overclocked Radeon HD 5970s. That's just over 1/3 paid off after a few weeks of running. Once it's paid off the bitcoins generated should be worth well more than the electricity. That is, unless difficulty continues to climb faster than the value of bitcoins vs. the US dollar.

There are several reason that go beyond the chance at a block reward.  First, many of those who contribute much in proof-of-work for the blockchain already have generated much coin in the past, and have an economic incentive to contribute to the security of the system in defense of their Bitcoin net worth.  Second, much generation has been, and can expected to continue to be, of incidental cost to the particular user.  To illustrate how this might work, consider the single young professional living in a cold climate, let's say Toronto Canada.  He has a job in a major city, but can only afford a small efficiency apartment.  He has no other option but to heat with electicity, as many small spaces only have electric baseboard heating.  Or perhaps building hot water heat, but his apartment is the one that is too cold in winter and he must add heat anyway.  So he has his high end gaming PC, since he is a geek and doesn't have anything better to do with a Saturday night, but the rest of the time he just lets it sit there crunching blocks.  He is paying for the heat, any bitcoins that he gets out of the deal is simply a bonus.  He doesn't lose anything by trying while he is not personally using the PC, except perhaps the peace and quiet of a non-spinning CPU fan.


Not for most people, but like above, it is for enough.  The cost of electric for me is about 7 cents a KW, so it's about break-even right now with a GPU client.  But I have access to natural gas, so no.

I have an interesting question that I've been thinking about.

I am going to say that the answer is probably along the lines of "because we want to"

But has anyone looked at the reason why someone would want to generate BTC, vs the expense of the electricity the PCs are sucking up?

The cost of one BTC I doubt equals the cost of the electricity used does it?