Setting up a mining farm with hundreds of free stolen GPUs isn't easy or cheap at all. You still have to find power and cooling and buy a bunch of motherboards, power supplies, networking, shelves, etc.
(Likewise I suspect the weed is the cheapest part of a grow operation.)
That's not relevant, though. The question is whether "there's a safe and easy way to launder expensive hardware into currency". The fact that it's expensive now doesn't conflict with the fact that it could counterfactually be even more expensive.
North America is literally the best market for this, we have the most robust and efficient mining market and supply routes. One level of efficiency is that large scale mining operations allow for space leases and profit sharing at their data centers. If you wanted to fire off a message saying “I have a bunch of GPUs” they will give you a quote about their terms.
Several of these companies are publicly traded its really not that hard to get done.
Once you move past the Internet forums debating the existence of this market, try actually research this market its very fast paced and robust.
I mean you would just say they’re from a Kazakhstan or Chinese operation looking for a new home
Its not distinguishable, even for liability purposes and nobody cares, the battle for network control and resource share is far bigger than the worrying about this. I doubt people are going to try to register these gpus and be like “ruh roh this one didnt register”
You wouldn’t need to colocate this since bandwidth isn’t a big issue with mining. Power is a bigger issue since most home circuits can’t support maybe more than 3-4 high power workstations.
Seeds are cheap (~$10 USD/ea), whole ready to harvest plants are not (and hard-ish to estimate). If you grow inside the expensive part is the electricity. Indoor and outdoor both spend lots on labour for harvest/cure/trim processes (variable cost, hourly). Expensive equipment are things like CO2 extractors $XXX,XXX USD. So yea, seeds cheap, loads of other higher cost items to get ~$10/g flower on the shelf at your favourite retailer
Weed ops don't grow plants from seeds fwiw, unless they are trying to discover the next new varietal, as each seed is different from the next. Quality control at scale is accomplished using clones.
It'd be more efficient to just fence the cards. There are so many communities of flippers / eager buyers out there that it would take minutes to move an entire truckload of 30 series GPUs to buyers of all types.
Just like with setting up a weed farm. The cops need to follow spikes in power consumption that are out of the ordinary and they'll find you. However, growing weed may be illegal in most places, mining is not yet.
Cultivation of Cannabis Sativa with low THC is legal in 46 US states afaik with the 2018 farm bill. So you can say growing weed is legal in most places.
Right, except that me, and a large chunk of the world population, don't live in the US, so I was trying to draw a conclusion about the general global status on this.
The cards are what's expensive. PSUs are getting more expensive but by far the cards are the toughest thing to get. Just getting serviceable motherboards/CPUs/RAM is just about as easy now as it has always been.
Most multi-GPU farms run like 4-6 GPUs off a single machine. Although some specialized "BTC" motherboards have whacky scalper prices it's not hard to find other motherboards with OK multi-GPU support. You do not need a 'gamer' high performance motherboard to mine effectively. The only thing that really matters is being able to run as many GPUs as it's supposed to without bluescreening.
The power requirements are also not as high as you would expect from the typical power consumption of 30 series cards because it's overall more efficient to mine on much lower overall power consumption than you would get from a gaming workload. Mining just puts stress on different parts of the GPU than gaming and requires less power than a full throttle gaming workload. So you are able to run many more 3080s or what have you on a smaller PSU than you would be able to if you were using those 3080s overclocked and with a high power limit on gaming workloads. You just do not get that much extra hashpower if you go past certain levels of power consumption: it's easier / more efficient to just add another card.
