I was amused to read that scientists looking for extra-terrestrial life are missing computer hardware. One team of radio astronomers said that the cost of Graphics processing units (GPU) went up and ate their contingency budget. GPUs are in short supply as crypto-currency enthusiasts put all their horsepower into mining. GPUs are built for vector processing.
It’s safe to say that the cost of mining Bitcoin today with a home based workstation is very unlikely to pay off – the cost of electricity would outweigh the rewards of mining, even in countries with low power costs. I suspect DIY miners are into Litecoin and Ethereum.
Nvidia said that retailers should make arrangements to make sure gamers’ demands were met. Can the gamers out there tell me whether the game consoles (Xbox, PS4) have increased in price? Is anyone using his game machine in its spare time to mine coins?
I’ve fancied a strategy for DIY folk to use the cloud for their work, for example Amazon AWS provides EC2 compute-optimized GPU instances. Of course you have to do your calculations to make sure your cloud costs are less than your coins.
You can read the news article here.
