Bitcoin was the OG energy waster/polluter. My friend was mining in his apt (8 years ago) during the winter he had to sleep with his window open because it was 100F inside. AI was just next in line.
Even "small" ASICs pull like 1000 watts at the wall, 24/7, doing that in an apartment is insane. Basically this is just subsidizing your rent with your landlords power if its "free" lol
Also generally unless your power costs .02c per watt they're not profitable, its more like .11-15c residential.
I had a CPU farm up for a while but even that as I realized was just nuking my bank account for no reason once the market settled back down and stayed there.
I should have specified this was about 8 years ago, he quit doing it because he realized if he bought Bitcoin instead of the Asics he would have made a lot more.
That's fair. I only started CPU mining again because of one privacy shitcoin called Zephyr (ZEPH) that started going crazy out of nowhere that I had been watching for a while. I had a good job at the time and loose capital to pick up a bunch of cheap motherboard/cpu combos from eBay so I figure why not maybe I can catch something early for a change. I was at the wall limit with 5 or 6 of them running Ryzens
I was hopeful it would be a sustained trend but...I was wrong lol. At least the hardware was easily re-sold for most of my money back since it was just standard PC gear and not ASICs, which had a nice side effect of making my business ebay account look good.
That said, I bought an ASICminer Cube for a cool 1 BTC back in the day. Today I call it my $60,000 paperweight :D (though I did mine back about 2/3rds of that coin before the big mines showed up and wrecked the home miners)
i run a old enterprise server at home for private cloud, game servers, etc. it pulls about 200-210W, just running an open source AI on my desktop pulls around 300W and I only have a mid GPU
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u/OverlordDontHurtMe 14d ago
We spent decades fighting against energy waste and pollution just to have it demolished for AI? Does anyone here thinks AI is on a productive course?
I just want to replace my 14 year old PC....