On 26 January 2017 at 12:43, Cannaerts, Jan <jan.cannae...@socmut.be> wrote: > z/Series machines are not geared towards floating point operations the way > commodity GPUs, FPGAs, or purposely built BitCoin miners are. So you surely > would spend more money on electricity powering the machine than you'd gain > through mining BitCoins, as is already the case for GPUs.
Bitcoin mining, except just possibly with special purpose hardware, can no longer be done at a profit unless your electricity is free. This could be solar PV (but will you pay off the capital cost?), or somewhere where hydroelectricity is heavily subsidized as a nighttime heating fuel, and so on. But of course there are other kinds of "free". Perhaps your office lease has electricity included, and says nothing about what you use it for. And of course there are all kinds of botnets and such out there that mine using their victims' compute power/electricity. But regardless, mining is slowly but surely on its way out as a direct money maker, by design. Five years ago you could make a little money using a simple GPU in a desktop PC; now that's impossible. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
