Wanted to ask, given the latest puzzle and last couple of solved puzzles are unprofitable to crack by renting from, say vast.ai or clore.ai, what do you guys think these people who cracked last couple of puzzles rented those 1000s of GPUs?
Current prices say they should spend around 1.5 million usd to crack 6.9 btc puzzle which is not at all profitable. So, how are they doing it? Stolen/hacked GPU compute?
Large scale GPU grids over long-term contracts, possibly interruptible instances for an even cheaper price. And obviously, very fast software and a bullet-proof distributed communication system to sync work.
If you think the puzzles are solvable by clicking "Rent" buttons and uploading some binaries to print BS on the terminal shell, too bad.
A mix of all that.
Private contracts with economies of scale.
Ability to restart on error without losing progress for interruptible instances.