I never said that these people are interested in profit. If you want to learn how bitcoin works from the perspective of a miner, then you mine bitcoin. Mining ETH won't tell you anything about what it's like to mine bitcoin.
After some thought: I think you may be confusing “bitcoin mining” as in using gpu to mine other crypto that gets auto-converted to bitcoin with actually mining bitcoin.
The former is popular on gpu, looks the same from the user perspective (to the point of users only needing a bitcoin wallet and receiving payouts only in bitcoin), but doesn’t actually mine any bitcoin underneath - just other cryptos that get transparently exchanged into btc.
Then you buy an usb mining dongle for $10 or mine on cpu.
I’ve met multiple people from the bitcoin mining and research community in my 10 years and I don’t remember a single person doing gpu mining since 2013.
edit: also, you can’t even find an up to date gpu bitcoin mining software novadays. I dare you to provide a link here if I’m mistaken
Can you honestly say that you have personally met every single person on this planet who is doing Bitcoin mining "for fun" or doing research, and that you have continued to meet all the new ones as they pop up?
