[somehnrdr14726]

At some point nvidia would be better off mining with these gpus than selling them.

The oddest solution I can think of is gamers lease graphics cards at a low low price and nvidia mines on them in the off-hours. With a big enough operation they could force all the other miners into becoming resellers. It's free, distributed electricity and it gets the gamers off their backs.

(While I have your attention, I'm pretty sure proof of work is the paperclip maximizer sci fi warned us about.)

[sellyme]

> The oddest solution I can think of is gamers lease graphics cards at a low low price and nvidia mines on them in the off-hours.

This would be a complete non-starter in markets with high electricity costs or temperatures. Running a GTX 3090 at 100% load during the summer where I live would cost $140/month and will heat up my room to about 65°C.

[mseidl]

This is the other thing I don't understand.

I'm from Germany and our power is around 35 cents per khw.

Even using a 14th/s asic with bitcoin as high is it is now, you're losing lots of money. It uses 1,3 kilowatts.

The fact that the prices of the cards are so high in Germany now too... the 3080s are at 2000€ plus.

[sellyme]

> I'm from Germany and our power is around 35 cents per khw.

I don't know if this is a typo or just a slightly different way of writing it in German, but now I'm trying to work out exactly what a "kilohour watt" would be. I think it's just a millionth of a kilowatt hour? Definitely wouldn't want to be paying those prices!

I can't find anywhere genuinely using that unit, although it is mentioned in this 1979 9th grade Electrics curriculum as part of a True-or-False quiz at page 370: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED182438.pdf

Time to file it in my list of "technically correct but extremely annoying units" along with "5Mm" (5000km) and - mainly in the context of batteries - "10Ah" (10000mAh).

[mseidl]

It was a typo.

[zaarn]

Bitcoin is certainly not an option in Germany. Other mining operations may be borderline profitable, if you have a card already lying around.