Bitcoin miners used specialised mining hardware that isn’t useful for anything but mining bitcoin.
And best of all, it becomes completely obsolete at around 6 months when better specialised hardware comes out. So the only thing the miners can do is stop and throw their hardware in the dump.
The larger miners are using something called an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Hobbyist retail miners use gpus. the big farms you see in new organization photos are using silicon explicitly built for btc mining and only btc mining. Or a handful of proof of work algorithms. But still specialized.
The functionality is burned into the silicon at the factory and cannot be changed. There are also specialized devices that can give you the benefits of an asic and can also be changed and reprogrammed. these are called field programmable gate arrays (fpgas). Large scale miners do not use gpus or fpgas due to cost and efficiency reasons.
I never said that these people are interested in profit. If you want to learn how bitcoin works from the perspective of a miner, then you mine bitcoin. Mining ETH won't tell you anything about what it's like to mine bitcoin.
After some thought: I think you may be confusing “bitcoin mining” as in using gpu to mine other crypto that gets auto-converted to bitcoin with actually mining bitcoin.
The former is popular on gpu, looks the same from the user perspective (to the point of users only needing a bitcoin wallet and receiving payouts only in bitcoin), but doesn’t actually mine any bitcoin underneath - just other cryptos that get transparently exchanged into btc.
Then you buy an usb mining dongle for $10 or mine on cpu.
I’ve met multiple people from the bitcoin mining and research community in my 10 years and I don’t remember a single person doing gpu mining since 2013.
edit: also, you can’t even find an up to date gpu bitcoin mining software novadays. I dare you to provide a link here if I’m mistaken
Can you honestly say that you have personally met every single person on this planet who is doing Bitcoin mining "for fun" or doing research, and that you have continued to meet all the new ones as they pop up?
I don’t doubt there is at least 1 GPU mining bitcoin. But it would be a less than pointless effort since the power would cost more than the bitcoins being mined by a long shot.
I'm sure you wouldn't be interested, but for people who are doing it for other reasons and do t really care about the return rate, why would you try to deny their existence?
No, there would be zero return rate. The amount a graphics card could even add to a pool would be negligible, and pools pay out when they 'win' a block, based on proof of partial solutions during that block, to prove the contributory hashrate. ASICs are so far beyond what a GPU can do that it is likely that a graphics card would never achieve even a single partial solution and therefore merit any fractional payout from a pool even.
So I'll say again, it's likely that a graphics card mining bitcoin right now would produce nothing. Ever.
I'd be looking for proof that these people exist before assuming that there are people who are wasting their time and energy on doing something that will never produce a single cent's worth of bitcoin, 'for fun'.
Maybe. But that doesn't mean that there aren't people out there trying.
Hell, Jeff Geerling is the kind of guy who would attach a GPU to his Raspberry Pi(s), just to prove that he could. And then turn around and do some Bitcoin mining on those rigs, again -- just to prove he could. And he'd get lots of hits on his YouTube channel for doing so.
And he's not the only one to try to do that sort of thing. Have you eliminated all the possible YouTube channel owners who might be inclined to pull this kind of stunt, just for publicity and traffic to their YouTube channel?
Right, but is he actually doing it? Or are you just supposing again that someone might?
> Have you eliminated...
I don't need to, that's not how evidence works. You're claiming this thing happens, it's up to you to prove that. Unless you can find any actual evidence of people still mining BTC on a GPU at this point, you're just grasping at straws to try and justify your position.
The original point was that bitcoin mining is not done on GPUs any more. This is true in the sense the original post was meant, because the industry moved on years ago and mining on GPUS is now entirely unproductive. It's also true philosophically - if you don't produce anything, can you really be said to be 'mining' anyway?
And even if you show that one person or a few people are still doing it "for fun", it doesn't really contradict or disprove the post you replied to.
I won't touch crypto with a 100 foot pole, I've said it many times. So many people ask me about this or that coin, about helium, about new protocols and decentralized Internets...
Yeah, no. Waiting for this massive crypto bubble to finally deflate so I can see if there's anything worth caring about in the mess that'll be left over.
And best of all, it becomes completely obsolete at around 6 months when better specialised hardware comes out. So the only thing the miners can do is stop and throw their hardware in the dump.