Why can’t you make money mining cryptocurrency?
It seems like a good idea right? Leave your computer on while it does millions of calculations per seconds to find hashes that have the right number of zero’s to qualify as a valid block and get rewarded with crypto-currency for your troubles. Turn your computer on and starting running a miner (cgminer or cudaminer) and pick a coin that doesn’t have a lot of competition, maybe smartcoin? You join a mining pool and start mining only to see that you new notebook computer can’t earn more than 25 to 50 cents a day, well that isn’t going to pay for the electricity now is it? So what about faster GPU’s, now that would make sense. You run out and buy a crossfire capable MSI machine, install two top of the line processors, such as the 280X and start mining…. It doesn’t take a lot of calculations based on manufacturing specs that you can earn $10 per day from mining with such a machine and it could pay for its electricity and pay for its host computer within 6 months. WRONG!!! After tweaking and tweaking you’ll find that this machine can only put out about half the speed and power the manufacturer states. Yes, you can reach the speeds they brag about, but if you leave your GPU running at those speeds for more than a minute or two than your GPU will overheat. In the end you have a machine that is only capable of earning $5 per day, maybe just enough to pay for the electricity it uses, but certainly not enough to ever make ANY money.
If you can’t make money at it than why are millions and possibly billions of dollars being spent on hardware to mine? It only takes 1 machine to realize that it isn’t profitable. Some organizations like banks and governments are probably doing it to keep “We the people” from having any crypto-currency. They do love their flawed system that even they can’t maintain anymore. The other possibility is that this is a modern ponzi scheme, get investors and banks to fund your server farm, and cut you a payroll, even though the end product is intrinsically worthless. It seems highly likely that this scheme was invented by the hardware companies to sell their product and inform the masses that GPU’s can do fast calculations. Take your pick, there are a ton of theories floating around but what started in the basements of hackers has been picked up by the global market, not because of its security, but because of the huge opportunity for fraud that it creates.
I do like cryptocurrency, but it’s probably best we just let the fraudsters do the mining because there is no money to be made in it by honest people.
