Bitcoin Forum

Hi Guys,

Noob here. I have 2 old ETH mining rigs (5 cards +6 cards - 4GB). Now, I cannot use ETH mining as cards need to be upgraded. So thinking to run Bicoin core for validation purpose. Is it profitable to run validator at home. I have free internet and free electricity at my office.

How does the rawards works for validators?

There are no "validators" in the BTC network. There's just mining and full nodes, out of which the latter are not incentivized. Closest you can get is mining, which requires expensive hardware that needs regular upgrades.

Validating is something specific to Proof-of-Stake blockchains. Bitcoin is using Proof-of-Work. If you want to read more about this, check this link out (https://www.exodus.com/blog/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake/).

What is this https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/ (https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/)? If I run this on windows 10 will Incentivized?

That is the Bitcoin's original client, it acts as a full node and a wallet. No, there's no incentive in a form of coin rewards.

If you want mining rewards, these are the examples of the "expensive hardware" kevin mentioned:
https://whattomine.com/coins/1-btc-sha-256 (https://whattomine.com/coins/1-btc-sha-256) - Below the page (under "Mining Hardware").
Their prices are in the manufacturer's page, average power consumption is in that page.

As said, there are no validators. At least, not same like in Ethereum. In Bitcoin, when you provide your CPU/GPU power on a pool, you're helping that pool to find a block that its hash is below a certain target. If the pool you're working to, successfully finds such block, you're getting rewarded analogously for the work you provided.

Here's a nice site to learn how it works: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/mining
And one of my previous posts explaining how mining works: Re: How does a bitcoin look like? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5329877.msg56758047#msg56758047)