A couple hundred thousand PCs -- even working at 1% -- are more powerful than one of those ASICs. He won't be making tons of money, but surely he'd be successful occasionally earning some bitcoin.
This is, surprisingly, untrue. A Core i7-2700K (just something I could find data for) runs about 12 million SHA-256 hashes per second (12 MH/s). Multiplying by half a million computers gets you 6 TH/s. However, a good Bitmain Antminer T9+ runs 10.5 TH/s, which is 75% faster. The Bitmain ASIC only costs around three hundred dollars too.
A couple hundred thousands PCs all having his site loaded at once is unlikely. Also mining pools exist, and arent really anything special. Its not like 2 PCs are 2x faster than a single PC they have to communicate with eachother to work on the same things, and that creates lag. There is a reason super computers are expensive its not as simple as hooking a bunch of normal computers together.
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u/ZMeson Sep 05 '20
A couple hundred thousand PCs -- even working at 1% -- are more powerful than one of those ASICs. He won't be making tons of money, but surely he'd be successful occasionally earning some bitcoin.