The value of the cryptocurrency has increased so much that it is now profitable to bulk buy laptops for mining.
Since late November the value of Ethereum (ETH) has tripled. This cryptocurrency is the most popular one among GPU miners. We have heard many stories where miners in China are queuing up to NVIDIA board partner factories in hopes to buy graphics cards in bulk. Some AIBs agree to sell cards directly to them because those clients pay more (usually 1/3 more than any distributor) and they get limited or no warranty at all.
In China, a new way of mining is slowly becoming popular. The latest GeForce RTX 30 laptops have only just launched earlier this month, which certainly did not go unnoticed by GPU miners. Apparently, people are now mass buying laptops with graphics cards such as RTX 3070 to literally stack them on the shelves to mine Ethereum. The price of the RTX 3070 laptop isn’t the lowest, which means that miners are paying more and still making a profit. It just seems surreal that NVIDIA has not enforced any rules that would prevent such a thing. Let alone, why is even GPU mining possible on laptop GPUs in the first place. This of course, along with Chinese New Year, will likely affect the availability of RTX 30 laptops.
Mining Ethereum while sipping coffee for free
To demonstrate how ridiculous the value of ETH has become, a Bilibili content creator ‘Fish Pond F2pool’ has made a video (purely for entertainment) to show how easy is to make cryptocurrency on a laptop equipped with a just-released RTX 3060 graphics card.
While sipping coffee at Starbucks the creator has a laptop plugged into the wall socket. It takes 2 hours to mine 0.00053 ETH which equals 0.89 USD, apparently enough to pay for the coffee.