It’s always interesting to know the (side) hustles people are running that, in their opinion, provides recurring revenue that is either a good source or passive income or their main source of income.
You use the electricity, you pay for it. Why are you implying an ethics issue with that? Someone wasting the same amount of electricity to play games 10 hours a day is doing anything better?
As I said, I'm not placing any value judgment myself. There has been some debate around the energy consumption of crypto mining. Some are arguing that there is some environmental impact to that. I'm simply asking what this person's thoughts on it are.
IMO the source of electricity matters. Generally we should aim to reduce carbon emissions, so if your electricity comes from a coal power plant, then there is greater consequence for the usage compared to renewable energy usage.
Its true you may not get to choose your household electricity source. But that doesn't give you free pass to start consuming as many kilowatts as you want. We make choices with what we consume. You don't get to buy clothes made from slave labour and claim you had nothing to do with it.
I don't get to leave my car idling 24/7, burning gasoline and spitting out toxic fumes. It can't be morally justified with "well I paid for it, mind your own business, go lobby the government to make a law against leaving my car on 24/7".
Musk and others spread fud about energy usage and I'm sure that made lots of people to guilt trip themselves when they turn on the light in their bedrooms or use computer.
I'm pretty immune to fuds and clickbaits, thus mining never was an issue for me.
Crypto mining also bolsters an economy for criminals - I'd argue that speculation and criminal enterprises are the only two real use cases for cryptocurrency.
Anyone who thinks the environmental impact of crypto is the only ethical problem hasn't dug deep enough.
Say a possible way to extract gold is to run a hose outside your window and let it wash away the dirt. Sometimes flakes of gold are found after enough dirt has washed away.
It's true that many other people use water in other ways. I'm sure industry uses a lot of water.
Is it only the use of energy that's OK or is it other natural resources like fresh water too? Fresh water is much more renewable than some forms of energy so it's a curious distinction.
I'm very unfamiliar with this, but is there additional ongoing costs in terms of extra energy consumption? Do you know if this rig is changing your monthly energy costs?
What kind of depreciation do you get on crypto mining hardware though? Will that setup still be profitable in x months, when better performing hardware exists?
The hardware pays for itself with current conditions remain constant (which is never the case!) in about 8 months.
It uses high end graphics cards RTX 3060Ti and RTX 3080 that shouldn't go to zero resale value even in a year or two.
Mining for the same coin typically produces less and less of that coin due to difficulty increase.
However difficulty increase for the same coin typically associated with it's price increase as well.
So to derive most benefits from mining it's better to mine solid coins (like ETH right now) and hold them.
I currently mining non-ETH coin that increased in price 30% in a week by itself.
So this helps to make this venture more beneficial.
And then I use dedicated mining OS (HiveOS) that allows to control the whole thing fully remotely and in fact switch mining to more profitable coins dynamically.
Curious to know where you are running your mining rig? in your house/apartment or you rented some other place? Also is there any limit on how much electricity you can use in apartment/House?
The are sites that pre-estimate your profits given specific hardware.
GPU's are hard to get indeed - but everyone has it's own ways.
If you're willing to pay 50-100% above retail - you can get powerful GPU's from eBay at any time.
Current project is to complete the rig that generates profits equal to my monthly mortgage payments.
Well on a way. And it's lots of fun - i never assembled computer before :)
To summarise: Currently $10k investment in crypto mining generates about $1k/mo profit. You can proportionally scale it to desired outcome.