Can Crypto Mining Damage Laptop: Notebooks and mining cryptocurrencies don’t mix. Even a gaming notebook doesn’t have the hardware to run 24/7 as the activity demands.

Using it as a mining rig is a good way to damage the hardware — and it still won’t be able to mine well.

Whether you are mining Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other cryptocurrency that uses “proof-of-work”, “mining” works a bit like guessing the combination of a lock. In a three-space lock, you would definitely get the right combination in 1,000 tries, because there are only 1,000 number combinations between 000 and 999.

Add one digit and that list of combinations increases by order of magnitude with 10,000 possibilities.

Now imagine an encrypted puzzle with billions or trillions of possible combinations and you have to try again and again until you get it right. This is mining: a computationally trivial transaction check accompanied by a brute-force guessing game, where whoever has the fastest computer has the best chance of getting to the right number first. The reward for winning is cryptocurrency.

GPUs are the best-performing computer component in mining today’s popular cryptocurrencies and will run full steam ahead to process these numbers. The process will generate heat, pushing all the components that support the GPU to their limits.

This isn’t necessarily an issue for desktop GPUs. A GPU used for mining can still have a good lifespan if it is properly cooled. However, a notebook is very different from mining equipment.

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Most notebooks, even high-end notebooks for gaming and creative professional work, aren’t designed to run at full capacity 24/7. Instead, they boost performance as needed and keep heat and power levels as low as possible for the rest of the time.

Even heavy workloads like playing a AAA game for hours don’t lock your computer’s CPU and GPU to 100%. Instead, the load is dynamic, offering small opportunities to dump heat.

Video editing and even encoding video projects also do not meet the sustained load of cryptocurrency mining. Instead, it’s more like a stress test for your components: the kind of thing you can do for 24 hours to make sure everything is working properly and never again.

There are notebooks designed as number-crunching workstations, but these computers are better described as “portable” rather than mobile computers. Some of these workstation notebooks have socketed desktop CPUs, which are designed to suck power from an outlet and really push those thermal limits. Unless you own one of these behemoths, your laptop is probably not built to handle the stress of mining.

Modern notebooks no longer have many moving parts. Mechanical hard drives and optical drives are rapidly going downhill from there, but computers still use spinning fans to move air through the system and carry heat with it.

The faster and faster your fans spin, the sooner they will crash and need to be replaced. Replacing a desktop case or processor fan is fairly trivial, but notebooks don’t use off-the-shelf cooling components. So don’t expect to replace them so easily.

Modern notebooks dynamically adjust fan speeds to match the thermal load, with some even turning them off when the system is only under a light load. If you are mining cryptocurrency, they will be collapsing in the end.

While most of your electronics will probably work fine as long as they stay within a safe temperature range, one component that may not handle heat well is your notebook battery. Li-ion batteries should operate between -20°C and 60°C, depending on the specific application and manufacturer’s recommendation. If exposed to temperatures higher than this, they can degrade and have their lifespan reduced due to an effect known as thermal aging.

In 2018, They cite research showing that lithium batteries subjected to 75°C for a few days show severe degradation. While this doesn’t mean that sustained high temperatures on your notebook will drain your batteries quickly, it’s worth remembering that components like the GPU can reach temperatures close to 100°C, especially on a notebook where the line between “safe” and “very hot” ” is very thin.

Setting aside the fact that using your laptop as a crypto mining device can stress you out early on, laptops just aren’t excellent mining systems. Your device will begin to degrade to the point where the cooling system can no longer keep temperatures under control. Also, notebooks are not energy efficient in mining.

The notebook that is fast enough to mine anything will likely use more electricity than the little money it makes — unless you are using electricity from your place of work or school. Please do not do it.

There’s a reason miners use ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) or specific GPU models with the right balance of power, cost, and performance. Mining margins are already very thin, so using something as unsuitable for mining as a laptop just doesn’t make sense.

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