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Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

overclock3d.net

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Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#92
post #30
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's 385 / month revenue? On a setup that's what, $3400 to buy, for seven 1070s? Seems like asking for 10 months to cover capex is a bit thin, given the price instability.

Miners shouldn't be meaningfully exposed since they can sell off their ETH as soon as they mine it (deposit it to an exchange address and sell off every few minutes via an API, or something like that). And while ETH might crash enough to make it no longer profitable and risking your capex, you can switch your GPU to mine whatever is most profitable, so you're more diversified than it looks and insulated from the inst…

Resale value on the GPUs is also worth monitoring. While it remains high enough, you can discount much of the capital cost because you'll get a high fraction back if you decide to sell the cards.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#93
post #14
post #7

Just took a quick look at this. If you are located in the 'mining valley' of Washington where power is ~2c/kwh you are still getting healthy profits. A computer with 7 GTX 1070 graphics cards should produce ~230 mh/s and draw 1 kw. This would cost approximately $30/month in power factoring in kw demand + cooling. The above setup will currently generate $385/month in ETH. So basically for miners who are in the right s…

But that's 385 / month revenue? On a setup that's what, $3400 to buy, for seven 1070s? Seems like asking for 10 months to cover capex is a bit thin, given the price instability.

GPUs don't depreciate that fast.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I can attest to learning this lesson personally in 2012.

lol, sorry, but how long until your landlord contacted you? What was the conversation like? I'd would have said, sorry running servers for my internet business.

And your landlord would have said they're renting you living space, not office space. Of course, you could always offer to put a meter on the servers, and pay them the difference.

It's somewhat disheartening that you've founded two businesses, yet you're looking to the letter instead of the spirit of the agreement.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the energy expended in crypto currency mining less valuable than that expended by the traditional financial sector?

With general stocks though at least you're investing in companies which make products, hire people, and hopefully stimulate the overall economy. A few Chinese guys in an old apartment building wasting power and compute/GPU resources... Not so much.

You are wrong. The cryptocurrency industry is also made of real companies hiring real people. For example as of Sep 2015 there were 729 Bitcoin companies employing thousands of people: https://venturescannerinsights.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/the-...

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#96
post #63

All I can think of is the careless environmental impact of all that dirty electricity consumption. For, let's be honest, a mostly speculative activity. One cryptocurrency crashes, another gets hyped up, and the computational cycle repeats. When will it end.

Is the energy expended in crypto currency mining less valuable than that expended by the traditional financial sector?

Of course it's much less valuable. The crypto currencies are intentionally difficult to mine, wasting vast amounts of energy. A small mining company could probably process all of Visa's transactions which outnumber transactions on bitcoin by at least an order of magnitude.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#97
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With general stocks though at least you're investing in companies which make products, hire people, and hopefully stimulate the overall economy. A few Chinese guys in an old apartment building wasting power and compute/GPU resources... Not so much.

How does investing in a stock benefit a company unless you are buying from that company directly?

By supporting the share price when they want to have a secondary offering.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#98
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The network collectively determines the difficulty based on how much compute power is being used. Specifically, it adjusts the difficulty up or down based on whether blocks are being found (relative to a constant expected duration) too quickly or too slowly respectively, which ensures the time taken to find blocks stays within a small interval. The specifics of how Bitcoin does it can be found here: https://en.bitcoi…

How does "the network" decide this? And what's stopping me from setting the constant to something lower in my own mining code? Does it follow that if most people in the network are duped into a ridiculously high difficulty, that it will be impossible to mine more BTC?

The difficulty calculation is built into the software.

Solutions to the meaningless problem that must be solved to "win" a block are rejected if they don't match the network difficulty, so setting it low on your computer just wastes your computation entirely.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#99
post #51
post #7

Just took a quick look at this. If you are located in the 'mining valley' of Washington where power is ~2c/kwh you are still getting healthy profits. A computer with 7 GTX 1070 graphics cards should produce ~230 mh/s and draw 1 kw. This would cost approximately $30/month in power factoring in kw demand + cooling. The above setup will currently generate $385/month in ETH. So basically for miners who are in the right s…

You forgot to tell people about risk of rising difficulty. It's not 385$ a month forever, if difficulty will go up (as it steady goes up every month) you will mine less. And you can't get 230 MH/s with 7x GTX 1070 with 1kw of power draw. More like 215 MH/s and with around 1.2 kw. I know because I have mining rigs with 7x GTX 1070s.

People constantly seem to get into mining by looking at the calculator at CryptoCompare without reading the last bit which states that "Block reward is fixed at 5 ETH and future block reward reductions are not taken into account."

Using CryptoCompare and assuming your 230MH/s of mining ability will net you $470 a month (at current ETH of $165.47) people assume they make $5,640 a year. That sounds great!

If, however, you use something like MyCryptoBuddy's calculator, which takes into account pool fees and difficulty increase, you realize you're only going to make $1,553 in a year. Which is a rather paltry return if you shell out for 7 GTX 1070s.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#100
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On a setup that's what, $3400 to buy, for seven 1070s? Well you can always resell them on the used market after stopping the mining operation and get a decent chunk of the money back...

Or just, you know, buy ETH with money right now.

That would have got you in trouble a week ago.
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