[wmf]

Setting up a mining farm with hundreds of free stolen GPUs isn't easy or cheap at all. You still have to find power and cooling and buy a bunch of motherboards, power supplies, networking, shelves, etc.

(Likewise I suspect the weed is the cheapest part of a grow operation.)

[hh3k0]

> Setting up a mining farm with hundreds of free stolen GPUs isn't easy or cheap at all.

Still significantly cheaper than setting up a mining farm with hundreds of legally obtained GPUs.

[thewakalix]

That's not relevant, though. The question is whether "there's a safe and easy way to launder expensive hardware into currency". The fact that it's expensive now doesn't conflict with the fact that it could counterfactually be even more expensive.

[vmception]

North America is literally the best market for this, we have the most robust and efficient mining market and supply routes. One level of efficiency is that large scale mining operations allow for space leases and profit sharing at their data centers. If you wanted to fire off a message saying “I have a bunch of GPUs” they will give you a quote about their terms.

Several of these companies are publicly traded its really not that hard to get done.

Once you move past the Internet forums debating the existence of this market, try actually research this market its very fast paced and robust.

[wmf]

If you have the balls to roll a pallet of stolen GPUs into a colo, yeah that does sound like a great idea.

[vmception]

I mean you would just say they’re from a Kazakhstan or Chinese operation looking for a new home

Its not distinguishable, even for liability purposes and nobody cares, the battle for network control and resource share is far bigger than the worrying about this. I doubt people are going to try to register these gpus and be like “ruh roh this one didnt register”

[chrischen]

You wouldn’t need to colocate this since bandwidth isn’t a big issue with mining. Power is a bigger issue since most home circuits can’t support maybe more than 3-4 high power workstations.

[openthc]

Seeds are cheap (~$10 USD/ea), whole ready to harvest plants are not (and hard-ish to estimate). If you grow inside the expensive part is the electricity. Indoor and outdoor both spend lots on labour for harvest/cure/trim processes (variable cost, hourly). Expensive equipment are things like CO2 extractors $XXX,XXX USD. So yea, seeds cheap, loads of other higher cost items to get ~$10/g flower on the shelf at your favourite retailer

[waych]

Weed ops don't grow plants from seeds fwiw, unless they are trying to discover the next new varietal, as each seed is different from the next. Quality control at scale is accomplished using clones.

[mechanical_bear]

GPUs are the expensive part of a mining operation.