Does crypto mining using your laptop affect my GPU? We talk about crypto mining in this post and how it hurts your PC. A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, crypto, or coin is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.
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What is crypto mining?
Cryptomining is the process by which new tokens get put into circulation. The process begins when a transaction is submitted and authenticated. A block representing that transaction is created and sent to every node in the network. Nodes then validate this transaction. The update is sent across the network after the transaction is complete.
Crypto mining involves verifying blocks of transactions on the blockchain. Verification is done by computers that solve logic puzzles in pursuit of a number – a “nonce”. This process preferably requires “hashing” or computing power: more power potentially equals more cryptocurrency – the reward of this verification process. Mining, however, does not come cheap: Bitcoin energy consumption was the size of a small country in 2021. Mining cryptocurrencies can potentially be profitable for some, but it is a power-hungry process. Additionally, the required power can also go up.
How crypto mining hurts your PC
Crypto mining hurts your PC via overheating your GPU and CPU and overloading your power supply.
Mining cryptocurrencies on your PC is almost guaranteed to kill it very quickly as laptops are NOT designed for high-load continuous usage (using a laptop to control a USB-interface miner is OK as that does not put a significant load on the laptop).
There have been cases where people were mining cryptocurrency on their laptops and parts of their laptops melted due to the extreme heat caused by mining. Again, such mining puts a very significant load on a PC’s resource usage rendering other tasks dormant or slow.