[GTALUG] NOT: Re: From BTRFS to what?

Alvin Starr alvin at netvel.net
Wed Sep 6 09:06:41 EDT 2017


Wow. got into a bit of a snitfest with dhaval.giani over this one.

Now to the completely unrelated part.

I have been thinking about a project and I would like to bounce it off you.

A client came to me asking about helping him setup an Etherium mining 
server pool.

This got me thinking.

In its simplest sense the process is power in ..... ETH out.
The biggest cost is power then cooling to get rid of all the head from 
the GPU's.

What if you glue a GPU with very little extra hardware to the back of a 
solar panel.
Stick it out in the sun and let it calculate 8-10 hours a day.
Put a big heat sink on the GPU and it should be able to stay cool enough 
just from air cooling

Take a few thousand of these and set them out in a sunny place and you 
would have a coin generator.
Once the hardware is paid for then the operational cost would be close 
to 0 but for some glass cleaner and rags.

They would need to be networked together but it does not have to be high 
speed.
It could be a low power mesh to an edge that connects via something as 
simple as cell phone data.

Solar panels cost about $1/watt and there is no ongoing cost but power 
here costs about $0.08-0.16/KWH.
On the face of it there is a 3 year payback for the power but if you add 
in 30% extra power to run cooling and the building costs for housing the 
mining pool.


Am I crazy?

-- 
Alvin Starr                   ||   land:  (905)513-7688
Netvel Inc.                   ||   Cell:  (416)806-0133
alvin at netvel.net              ||



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