I ran a very small mining operation at home back in the day and it definitely was all about trying to optimize everything.
Today, I don't think mining is economically viable without running a data center, but I still mine in the winter and turn my computer into a space heater for my home office. It definitely doesn't cover the power cost but it does offset a small portion of it.

Not affiliated in any way but Nicehash is what I use now since it (mostly) runs out of the box with minimal configuration.

As a side note, don't mine on laptops - you won't get enough heat to keep a room warm and you might end up with something failing from overheating.

[–] Beowulf@unilem.org 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, I knew it wouldn't be cost effective since my old rig had an AMD RX580 8gb, but if I could play games and already have a space heater, I may as well mine crypto to heat up the whole house. Nowadays I'm just using Folding@Home during the winter

[–] infernalaudit@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

That makes sense. CPUs and GPUs convert most of their energy use into heat. May as well do something slightly useful with that.
No idea what the numbers are now, but last winter, I think my 3080Ti cost ~$2/day to run and generated ~$1/day in crypto.

[–] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you are doing folding@home you can earn !gridcoin@lemmy.ml and Curecoin at the same time for your folding. Helps w the electric bill :). Gridcoin also rewards !boinc@sopuli.xyz so you can do other medical & space research as well if you get bored of folding.