Fun Fact: Folding Banano is 157% more efficient than GPU mining right now

For the most time of last year I was single-GPU mining on a RX5700XT card. I didn't get this card for mining, but when I found out it could mine ETH in good profits despite the high electricity costs in germany I simply couldn't resist. Also the excessive heat was pretty neat during winter. With falling crypto prices and increased electricity costs however I had to stop at the start of last summer.

Fast forward half a year. It's winter again, the merge happened and GPU mining is terrible. My card could right now only make about 0.21$ per day, which isn't even close to cover electricity bills.

But then I remembered something I tried some time ago for fun. You can "mine Banano" with CPU+GPU. This isn't real mining, as you are actually just participating at Folding@Home (simulating proteins for medical research) to get a reward in Banano. So I turned it on for a test and after 24 hours I received a total of 111.01 BAN or 0.54$. This is 2.57x what I would have gotten from GPU mining, or 157% more Revenue!

My system uses 400W with CPU+GPU, so thanks to this reward I can "reduce" the efficient electricity costs by 0.056€/kWh. This can actually be enough to make it more economical than heating with gas because gas costs are right now near or above 0.20€ per kWh and also has worse efficiency in old buildings (losses from exhaust + pipes) than heating with electricity (where you generate the heat exactly where you need it).

I know it's not a lot and it won't cover my whole costs, but looks like I will fold some Banano this winter and it makes more sense than GPU mining currently! And at the same time I'm also supporting medical research.

Disclaimer: While all numbers in this post are accurate, Folding Banano gives dimishing returns. So this is only true for single GPU miner and not for mining farms.