Mining Developments That May Increase Access to Mining

[wry]

I have not mined Bitcoin since a short fling with Bitminter way back in the day.  As we all know, application specific integrated circuits (ASICS) have become a requirement for mining, at least for Bitcoin.  However I saw a couple of news stories that may make it more accessible and affordable.

The first one was that Asus is going to start allowing gamers with powerful GPUs to mine coins in a pool when their GPUs are not in use.  The article does not say what coins will be mined, but it seems like GPUs are still viable for many coins.  I recall people made a lot of money mining Etherium when it first came out.

The second one is that U.S. chip giant Intel has gotten a patent for low energy mining chips.  This surprised me because Intel is not that big on GPUs, they mostly do the integrated graphics chips while Nvidia and AMD do the dedicated graphics cards.  But maybe this is a way to make those integrated graphics more efficient or something.  So I'm at a loss for that one.

Anyway, I thought it was interested and worth asking if any of you mine or are thinking about it and if something like the Asus pool might be attractive?

Asus story:  https://www.coindesk.com/asus-allows-gamers-to-mine-crypto-with-their-idle-graphics-cards

Intel story:  https://www.coindesk.com/intel-just-won-a-patent-for-an-energy-efficient-bitcoin-miner