
Ask HN: What is the market price of a day of CPU? - montrose
I&#x27;m curious about the economics of cryptocurrency mining on ordinary hardware. If there are any experts out there, I&#x27;d appreciate a back of the envelope estimate of the value of a day&#x27;s worth of the CPU of a random computer, say a 5 year old Mac laptop.
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gusmd
You could use a website like WhatToMine[0], together with an estimate of the
hashrate of the specific CPU you are looking at, to figure out how much money
you could generate with said CPU over a day of mining at 100%. Estimates can
be obtained from crowd-sourced websites like monerobenchmarks[1].

Focus on CryptoNote-based coins: Monero, Electroneum, Sumokoin are some of
them. These are still profitable with modern CPUs. Hashrate of a given CPU
will be the same over any CryptoNote-based cryptocurrency.

[0] [https://whattomine.com/](https://whattomine.com/) [1]
[http://monerobenchmarks.info/](http://monerobenchmarks.info/)

Edit: Just to add some real numbers. My home desktop is based on a Ryzen 1700.
It is currently overclocked @ 3.4 GHz. I can get mine around $1.60/day worth
of Electroneum at current prices. Estimated TDP is <80W (CPU alone), which at
SoCal electricity costs results in $0.30/day. Profit is then around $1.30 a
day.

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anonfunction
This is a good reply, and one thing to keep in mind is the profit is for
current prices. If they go up and you don't sell then that $1.30 a day could
be more like $1,300 a day in a few months or years.

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arithma
Check mining for Monero on a CPU. The economics still work for that
cryptocurrency (it's the one commonly found in Web Ads. maliciously)

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mattbillenstein
I'm not sure, but you can't compete with mining ASIC rigs using CPUs is my
general understanding.

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montrose
I believe that. But a day of ordinary CPU must have some value, however small,
and I'm curious what it is.

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anonfunction
There are too many variables at play, what CPU, what crypto, etc...

Why don't you run a miner on your computer and find out.

If you're paying for your energy and equipment it'll most likely be a negative
in terms of profit but would be a fun experiment and espouse a hacker ethos.

