Cryptomining

Aside from gaming and creative applications, there’s one other role to which graphics cards are uniquely well suited: cryptomining, the process by which individuals can generate bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies.

The reason why graphics cards are so good at this job isn’t hard to understand. To earn bitcoins, you need to solve a complex “hashing” problem. There’s no known way to do this quickly: you just have to guess a number, apply a mathematical transformation and see if the right answer comes out. The difficulty level goes up and down depending on how quickly the last answer was found; at the time of writing, it was at around 25,000,000,000,000, meaning each guess has a chance of approximately one in 25 trillion of being correct. If you’re using a CPU to do your hashing, you can try a lot of numbers pretty quickly: the 24-core Intel Core i9-10920X can test more than 5,320 hashes per second. But that’s nothing compared to…

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APC (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 2022

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