@discobot Mine Bitcoin
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So here’s a question:
At what point does it become too difficult to create new Bitcoins and the supply becomes fixed? Barring huge leaps in processing power, it seems there has to come a point where trying to mine them simply takes too much time and power to be worth it.
Well, then the market takes care of itself with “rarity” I would suppose.
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There will be a maximum of 21 million Bitcoins to be made, and we’ve made about 17 million of them so far. An estimate of when we reach the end is about 2035 ish at current rates (it gets logarithmically hard towards the end, so mathematically the end date is 2140 but people will give up on the last couple or so). It was designed deliberately to do that and is behind some of the speculators gold fever.
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You know me too well, @AeroMechanical 
Discourse Math - plugin - Discourse Meta
I’ve just never enabled it.
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Call me insane but would spinning up some sort of Amazon AWS farm for an hour not be cheaper and more productive then a bank of 700 dollar GPU’s? Was it cheaper at one point in time?
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As @sobek sort of indicated earlier, that ship has sailed, in that the cost/value has shifted so it’s hard to make a profit that way. Ironically AWS is actually stuck in that they want to offer better instances with dedicated GPUs in them (for AI neural network calculations) but if they make the per-second price too low them the ‘manic miners’ jump on them and suck up all the free capacity. They’ve solved this by offering 16 GPU machines but with correspondingly large memory included with it (to price it out of the miners but still into the AI CNN guys).
There are outfits that offer specialized hosting for pure mining, but again, it really depends on what the value of the weirder altcoins (the ones that are easier to still make) does, and although that is tangentially linked to BTC price it is actually far more volatile.
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So…what I’ve learned from all this is that my idea of becoming a Bitcoin numismatist probably won’t work…because I use a Mac?
Regardless…
…perhaps Bitstamp philately?
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It’s such an awful waste of energy resources. I guess. I mean, I don’t know in the “big picture” how much electricity is being consumed…probably really is a drop of a drop in a bucket. But it just seems like a really odd way to make something valuable (this from a guy that thinks diamonds are ridiculous too though…so there’s that…)
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No, you’re preaching to the choir on this one, but that’s a whole separate rant…
And it’s actually far from a drop in the bucket - current estimates have currency miners at any time consuming enough electricity to power about 2 million American homes. Key word “American.”
And that’s only going up.
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I guess I have no real basis of comparison…or at least…it would be very complex to try to equate it to something I suppose. I mean, how much fuel, equipment, and environmental damage goes into mining gold? Obviously, the effort has to be equal to or less than the cost per ounce. It just blows my mind that we chase these things…but it’s the nature of the human experience I guess.
Give me a few hours, and I can crunch those numbers for you - it’s a slow day so far. Might I suggest we move this to the digital currency thread?
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The concept of worth is hard to comprehend…
Just look at the stock market.
It was designed to share risk and investment capital. You’re basically buying into a company, for the long run.
Not to sell, just a few hours later, because a rumour made the value of that stock jump a little.
But we humans have been known to even put a price tag on other human beings…
And then, as they say, you can’t buy happiness. But you can buy a PC, VR goggles and download DCS, which is pretty much the same thing… 
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Well, I guess I was really wrong then. The value of 1 bitcoin today is $50,815, up from my quote where I tried to mock it of $6,754 - I guess we can laugh now?
I worked out that if I had gone ahead with my 6 1080Ti ‘investment plan’ and Ethereum (using the links to the miner in the OP) back when I posted this in 2017 then I would have made about $6 million USD. Oops.
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Wow, really !? Need to ask my former coleagues. They invested in some cryptocurrencies back then. Maybe they are now my best friends
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Ok well since you seem to be able to determine the right answer even if by finding the wrong one first - when do we start the Mudspike “Get-rich-quick” mining pool? 
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Actually, if I had left the machines off but owned six 1080Ti’s today I probably would still have come out ahead. lol
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It all sounds like a ponzi scheme to me, or 17th century tulip trade.
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Things have value when people believe they have value.
Whether it will have more or less value in the future is a gamble that some may win and some may lose.
Some people swear that gold has “real” value, but you can’t eat, drink, or build a shelter with it. So it’s just as ephemeral as anything else. All you know is what it’s worth today, no one can predict tomorrow.
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Gold has a high “real” value for its use in building electronics. You might want to find another analogy.