ASUS GPUs Can Now Mine Cryptocurrency for its Users

By Debarun Gupta

Most people don’t believe it when they first hear about it, but professional gaming or “E-Sports” is a pretty big deal. The industry has proved to be lucrative enough that skilled gamers are earning millions of dollars winning global competitions and streaming gameplay videos online. In 2014, the video game industry was estimated to be worth over US$ 81.4 billion.

Although it’s always a bragging right to be an exceptionally skilled gamer who earns money competing, most of the gamers are what we call “casual gamers.” These are people who work 9-to-5 jobs or are students who sit down with their friends once in a while for a Counter-Strike LAN match or scoring a few goals together in Rocket League – people who play merely to have fun.

Taiwan-based tech giant ASUS has been catering to the needs of both the groups for a while and this time; the company has announced that its graphics cards (GPUs) can be used for mining cryptocurrency, in partnership with mining app Quantum Cloud, possibly giving the casual gamers a chance to earn money while gaming. Possibly being the operative term here.

The announcement explains that, by using the Quantum Cloud app, gamers whose rigs have ASUS GPUs will be able to “potentially earn a passive income” when their GPU is sitting idle. Quantum Clouds website explains that the app basically uses the processing power of these GPUs to generate profit for the platform and the owners of these GPUs (the gamers) will potentially be eligible for a “cut”.

Addressing privacy concerns, both companies have stated that the user doesn’t need a unique login to access these features, they only need to log in using their existing PayPal or WeChat account and collect their earnings.

However, just having an ASUS GPU at home doesn’t mean that one can start raking in cash at home. The volatility of the crypto market has effects here too.

ASUS hasn’t guaranteed profits, stating that “Earning rates may change based on the performance of the cryptocurrency market and cannot be guaranteed or influenced in any way by Quantumcloud” in the announcement.

Additionally, GPUs that can handle enough processing power to generate profits are at the higher end of the price range, but only earn a small fraction of their price through this method. In other words, you can’t run a business with this.

However, it seems that wasn’t the intention of the companies. Gaming’s fun for many people across the world and the prospect of making some money alongside it does give it all the more incentive to play.

Debarun Gupta

Debarun is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and writing when he’s not watching cat videos on YouTube.

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