Mullvad gives you a discount if you pay with crypto, and monero is supposed to be the private crypto. What is the best way to get Monero? I’m in Canada

https://mullvad.net/en/pricing

    • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      Right, but taxing a CPU, PC Bus, and PC memory takes more electricity than doing the same amount of “work” on a GPU with longer, more specialized pathways, allowing more work on a single cycle, but less flexibility on the type of work. So if it takes 1hr fully taxing a CPU, PC bus, etc, vs 1 hour fully taxing a GPU and its integrated memory and bus, the one using the GPU is going to take more electricity. Also, you can chain GPUs which can’t be done the same with CPUs since GPUs all have their own discrete bus and memory on a single card. Problem became that GPU production couldn’t keep up with demand so they became more expensive for the hardware, but overall, the cost of electricity vs value of the blocks combined with producing fewer blocks on a CPU once the chains reach a similar complexity as a competing cryptocurrency, means that overall you’re more likely to make more profit from GPU based mining than CPU based mining.

      It’s a complex calculation to figure out and many people mine without realizing the money they’re spending on electricity, home cooling, and parts wear is more than they’re making on the crypyo.

      • swelter_spark@reddthat.com
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        1 day ago

        You sound like you know a lot about it. Have you done Monero mining? I looked into it and figured I’d be losing a little bit due to electricity costs, but it might be worth it anyway. No worse than the exchange rate between two currencies.

        • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          23 hours ago

          The issue with any crypto mining is that you can’t uaually do it casually. You are generally competing with others to return the result first in order to get paid for a block. If you mine too slowly, you’ll never actually complete any blocks. If you mine too fast, you use a lot of energy. The only way I found it economical for an average person over the long term is if it’s not a popular coin, but popular enough to have some value or you generate a lot of excess power from solar and your power company either doesn’t buy it or the rate is miserably low. There are short term scenarios where it can work, but much like the stock market, you need to be paying very close attention to profit margins, power rates, crypto price, current local temperature, etc.