Ethereum has skyrocketed to almost $1700 in value over the past week, making Ethereum very profitable to mine once again. But due to the lack of graphics card supplies right now, Chinese miners are apparently turning to RTX 30 series laptops as a new way to mine the cryptocurrency, as seen in a series of pictures depicting a laptop mining farm.
Whether the miner purchased the laptops specifically for mining Ethereum or is just repurposing laptops from a business or school, such as an internet cafe, is unclear from the images and description, while they would otherwise be idle.
In another demonstration of how valuable Ethereum has become, a vlogger posted on Bilibili that she went to a local Starbucks in China with an RTX 3060 laptop (TDP unknown), and showed her payout from Ethereum mining for just two hours. She reports that with a strong memory overclock of +1000MHz an average hashing rate of 46MH/s was handled by her RTX 3060 mobile. She says she made $0.9 USD after two hours. That may not sound like much, but at Starbucks, it was enough for her to buy a coffee.
Now, stack together dozens or even hundreds of these laptops and have them mining 24/7, and you can get an idea of why Chinese miners are so eager to drive into the mining service every Ampere laptop they can find.
Sadly, if prices continue to increase for cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, miners will be back in full swing and ordering as much computing resources as they can. Now that it is almost impossible for average gamer or miner to get graphics cards, it leaves miners no choice but to look for alternate techniques to mine coins.
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