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ASICS were already emerging in 2011...they just weren't off the shelf products...you had to build them yourself. The early "off the shelf" ASIC miners were just an evolution of home built ASIC miners...for years ASIC miners were just an SBC with a load of janky boards with ASICs soldered on. Even if you had the money to buy an off the shelf miner, you'd still be behind the early miners who were taking the off the shelf kit and jacking it up with extra chips etc...so if you bought a 1TH Antminer S2 and just set it off mining, you could be your ass there were miners out there with the same kit doing 1.5-2TH/s with just a bit of soldering to add more hashing power...the kit really was that flexible...the Antminer S2 was run using a Beaglebone Black ffs...they weren't sophisticated bits of kit...they were like hobbyist grade bits of kit. It was a bit like how 3D printers evolved. In the early days of 3D printing, the printers essentially came as kits. You built them yourself and they were very easy to modify and improve...and now we've reached the Bambu Labs Carbon. It just works out of the box, and it is quite difficult to modify it. It's similar with mining, which is likely why the difficulty was all over the place...people were finding new ways to squeeze more performance out of their kit all the time or add more performance to it cheap.
Yeah something is up, maybe fix the dbcache settings as I've ran an SBC that will sync in 6 hours lol.
> Believe it or not, there are a significant number of people who are actually “in it for the tech”. Oh I absolutely believe that, I used to run a Bitcoin node and now run nodes for Ethereum and Optimism, hoping to spin one up for Gnosis at some point when I get another SBC sorted. I'm also currently doing the 'Ethereum Protocol Fellowship Study Group', a course on how the L1 works. Definitely appreciate being 'in it for the tech'! But nodes don't cost anything (really) to run, and they don't add security to the network. I don't have any idea how much hashrate comes from hobby miners, just doing it for fun or for altruistic reasons, but I would guess that for Bitcoin it's not very much? Monero seems to have retained a more cypherpunk community, who may well be up for mining at a loss just to ensure the network stays secure for them to use. Bitcoin on the other hand appears to have lost the majority of the technically minded and intellectually curious community over the years so I'd be surprised if many do any more than buy on an exchange and wait for number to go up.
> Let’s be fair here, you need storage and networking, a bit of labor etc. - so probably a couple of hundreds a month. I mentioned the Rock 5b SBC in particular because that's what I use. It does need storage, I use a 2TB SSD, so I think all in, with a case and heatsinks etc it cost about £450. In terms of labour, if you've got experience with using Linux there is very little, probably a couple of hours of actual work to get it set up, and a few minutes every month or so to check everything is ticking along nicely, update clients etc. It would only be *"a couple hundreds a month"* if you just counted the first 3 months! > Only the big validators, early eth adopters really profit from eth. Small fish are just getting milked. This is just not true, a single validator will give you profit, big validators earn exactly the same % in rewards.
Buy a Rock Pi 5b/Raspberry Pi 4/Orange Pi/whatever SBC and a 2TB SSD. Learn to set up a node on your preferred chain(s). Learn to connect your wallet application to your node to allow you to connect to the chain and post your transactions directly. Learn to query the chain's state to check balances without needing to trust a 3rd party. Learn to interact with smart contracts without requiring the front end. Learn to play on testnets and try deploying your own simple smart contracts. If you follow those steps then you'll end up with more knowledge about crypto than 99% of the people posting here. This knowledge will help you see through the marketing bullshit that the majority of people fall for and end up losing money to. It'll help you understand actually useful alpha when you see it, and therefore make far better investment choices in the future. In my opinion that's the most valuable way to spend $350. And if you get bored of crypto you can just repurpose the hardware into a home automation project, NAS media box or whatever else. Or just ignore me and listen to the shills who will just suggest you buy the token they hold bags of.
It's a massive SGA expense primarily due to inflated stock based compensation. Their operations actually converted 361m of that 674m into gross profit. Posting losses also allows tax deferment which can be a benefit in the long run. Not sure what the other commenter means by being 'evaluated' at the top of a bull run unless he's talking about SBC being extra high for employees because of it.