What are your thoughts on using Unity to create a cryptocurrency miner for modern game consoles? I know the idea has been brought up before a long time back during the bitcoin boom and the idea was deemed impractical because at the time GPU’s were on their way out for mining in favor of ASICs so a Unity miner wouldn’t have been helpful at all. But now that GPU and even CPU mining have made a comeback with other cryptocurrencies like Monero, and with graphics card prices rising through the roof as a result, there’s only one place left people can get relatively powerful graphics cards at consistent cheap prices, and that is game consoles like the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro.
In the case of the Xbox One X, the consensus is that it’s GPU is pretty close to the RX 580 and GTX 1070 which puts the Xbox One X right in mining territory. I’m not too sure about PS4 development, but the Xbox One and Xbox One X both allow you to enable developer mode on it and deploy your own games and apps to it. Recently, an update was made that allowed these developer mode apps and games to use the full power of the Xbox One X. AS FAR AS I KNOW, only browser based javascript mining is possible on consoles right now which is CPU based. There’s no UWP or native app for the Xbox One that can do GPU mining. So this would be a great opportunity to create a miner in Unity.
Now someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but if a miner were to be made in Unity, it would completely take advantage of the GPU right? As in would a straight port of a C# CPU Miner use the GPU instead since this is in managed code? Or am I totally mistaken and a GPU miner in Unity would still need GPU specific code? I’ve been doing a lot of research into this lately and if anybody wants to weigh in and offer any insight that’d be great.
It’s a complete waste of time in my opinion. You’re far better off purchasing a mining motherboard (like this nineteen slot board), a budget processor, budget memory, and as many GPUs as you can fit on it than you are buying the equivalent number of consoles.
My understanding is that the “consensus” is based solely on the technical specifications of the hardware. If it were possible to know the performance of hardware with only that information we wouldn’t be pointing people towards benchmarks when they ask for info on a card. You simply can’t tell properly without them.
Why would I waste my console’s limited power to mine a pitiful amount of some flash in the pan cryptocurrency when I could use it to play games instead?
Not true anymore, have you seen the prices of GPU’s these days because of crypto miners? A GTX 1070 is almost $1000 on newegg now with lower cards like the 1060 and even 1050 on the rise. And the Xbox One X is pretty close to a 1070 so at $499 that’s really great value and a lot cheaper than paying almost a thousand dollars.
Well I highly doubt you’re using it to play games 24/7. When you’re at work, school, sleeping, etc, you could just let the console run and mine cryptocurrency. Especially now that some cryptocurrencies like Monero are very CPU and GPU friendly, it makes mining with a game console pretty practical. Especially if you can do GPU mining.
This is a BAD thing. Cryptocurrencies are a waste of electricity, the resources required to produce electricity, and they drive up the prices of hardware, effectively pricing people out of gaming hardware that is used for gaming.
Except no? This would significantly shorten the lifespan of the console by having it under full load all the time and it’d still be a waste of time because cashing out of crypto is an ordeal and a half.
Do you seriously believe that console hardware would retain that pricing if it were suddenly used for mining? This kind of logic is the exact reason we’re paying through the nose for hardware that we should be able to afford. People like you are the reason we can’t have nice things.
I actually don’t think it would affect the price of consoles much. The difference between consoles and PC’s is that the price of consoles is always subsidized by the manufacturers. In fact, console manufacturers aren’t really concerned with making a profit off the hardware. Not to mention Microsoft and Sony don’t pay retail prices for the graphics card either. They keep the prices low and sell consoles at a loss to entice people to buy Xbox Live and PSN subscriptions which leads to more revenue streams like microtransactions, etc. That’s where the money is at for consoles, not the hardware itself. So as long as people are paying for their xbox live subscriptions, it’ll keep the price of consoles steady. The Xbox 360 was sold at a loss for almost its entire lifetime. Nintendo consoles for example are always in high demand and often out of stock, yet aside from scalpers on ebay, the price doesn’t drastically increase. I do believe that console gaming would be largely unaffected by an increase in cryptomining.
And in the end, this is just a hypothetical discussion for opinions and theories. No need to be dramatic about it. I’ve yet to purchase any hardware specifically for cryptomining. It’s only something I do with spare processing power I already have, in this case a GTX 660 and GT 740. I’ve had 0 impact on the GPU market for the past couple generations of GPU’s.
Well in my case, since getting an Xbox One X, I’ve never touched my original xbox one since then. It’s just collecting dust and I’m sure there are many others who have more than one xbox. Might as well put it to good use. And if anything, this might help the PC GPU market a bit by shifting some of the burden to consoles where prices won’t fluctuate much if at all.
You’re working on the false assumption that the manufacturer would be able to keep the retailer supplied with enough consoles to ensure that the public would never purchase the hardware for a price other than what they approve.
Do you remember the launch of the Nintendo Wii? How about the price? The shortage? What about how people were purchasing the consoles only to immediately sell them on eBay for at least double the original price? Because I do.
No need to snap at me, this entire question is just purely hypothetical. It’s just a discussion, not a request or demand for help in building a console miner. And perhaps selling my old xbox would be somewhat profitable, but I also prefer to have a spare xbox. I almost never sell my old consoles when upgrading. Part of the reason is for collection purposes, and other reasons is just in case something happens to the newer console I have another console to fall back on. But for the moment, since I don’t need to fall back on that console and since it’s still relatively new as far as console generations go, might as well put it to good use.
Yes I literally mentioned that in my reply to you. I said “aside from scalpers on ebay” the price of consoles remained the same. And by price, I mean the MSRP. In this case, not only have the prices of 3rd party sellers for GPU’s gone up, but also the MSRP has been inflated too. Even during those Wii shortages, and the NES Classic, and the Switch, the MSRP stayed the same and if there was stock available at a retail store, you’d get it at the retail price.
Yes, if there was stock available. That’s the key problem though. Retailers only received a very small quantity with every shipment and it was almost always sold out within a very short period of time. If consoles were to become the new norm for mining this exact problem would repeat itself only this time it would be far worse.
Outside of the very brief periods of restocking the scalpers would become the only available source of the hardware.
I find it so interesting when people sign up here then show up years later to make their first or second post.
I feel like people are getting a bit too caught up with their opinion on this idea’s effect rather than whether it would work or not. I hate the effect of crypto on the market, but that’s not what this thread was intended to be about. Give it a shot OP, it’d be interesting to find out.
A lot of people believe that Nintendo purposefully does that to drive demand actually and that there’s no reason Nintendo shouldn’t be able to meet demand for their consoles. Despite being just as popular, you rarely ever see Microsoft or Sony consoles run out of stock like Nintendo systems, especially well into a console generation like right now. Of course I don’t pretend to know what capacity Microsoft or Sony’s manufacturing partners have in filling increased demand. Supposedly this current generation of consoles is the best selling in the entire history of consoles so they’ve had no trouble filling that increased demand so far.
And even if console mining became possible, I doubt it’d become a new norm. Microsoft and Sony would probably see a spike in sales, but it wouldn’t replace PC GPU’s or ASICs. I read in another thread that Unity has a lot of overhead and would greatly reduce the efficiency of GPU mining. Since it’s not possible to install native homebrew on an Xbox One, I can’t imagine companies buying up Xbox’s in the tens of thousands and setting up data centers. Cause it’s mostly these mining companies that are driving up the prices of GPU’s, not home hobbyists.
That makes me smile, but Microsoft is anything but benevolent–they’re a business. I don’t know how much they’d care.
However as far as this thread is concerned, the OP has stated he wants it for his own console. If it’s jailbroken or something (I have no idea if the Xbox One has been broken, I know the PS4 has been), he can probably put his own “homebrew” type apps on it himself.
You don’t see them being used for mining either. After all who would normally need more than one unit per person?
Check out this image of a mining cluster. There are more GPUs in that collection than most retailers keep stocked. Imagine if those were consoles instead of GPUs. Do you still believe they would maintain stock?
Well to answer your curiosity, I signed up because I was taking Unity courses in college and had a couple questions to ask at the time, but after I was done the course, I didn’t come back here very often. But lately with all the buzz around cryptocurrency and rising GPU prices, I wanted to understand why because I’ve been out of the loop on cryptocurrencies for years and thought GPU mining was supposed to be dead in favor of ASICs. So that’s why I’m back, just on pure technical curiosity.
I highly doubt they’d allow that to be submitted to the Windows or Xbox stores as an actual app for the public. If I did attempt to build a miner, I’m quite positive it’d have to be a personal project to sideload onto my Xbox and that’s as far as it’d ever get unless I released the source code and let other people sideload onto their xbox at their heart’s content.
Yeah I know there are huge datacenters of GPU’s for mining, but consoles, especially powered by a managed game engine, might not be efficient enough to meet their demands and thus, it’ll mostly remain with hobbyists.
The Xbox One let’s you switch to dev mode where you can sideload your own UWP or Unity apps/games. It’s pretty close to homebrew but not exactly the same as full homebrew on a console that’s fully modded/jailbroken. It still has its limits.
Mining rigs are often powered by budget processors because the actual processing is entirely on the GPU. Only way managed code would be problematic is if the actual processing were taking place on the CPU.
