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

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

#151

Post by mrb »

Fej wrote: post #109
mrb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

You can't seriously be comparing those the entire rest of the world economy. Cryptocurrency doesn't even register as a drop in the metaphorical bucket.

That's not the comparison I'm making. Compare the ratio of energy spent over jobs created.

It makes sense to spend a few hundred megawatts on a system that created thousands of jobs.

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

#152

Post by kukabynd »

bdcravens wrote: post #120
ryanSrich wrote: post #41

Maybe this is an incredibly uneducated comment, but won't they have to buy those GPUs back when the price of ETH inevitability goes up again? This is all just FUD from August 1st, ICO instability, and lack of Ethereum use cases. All of these issues have resolutions planned. So one would be stupid to think Ethereum stays at $150 for even a year.

> when the price of ETH inevitability goes up again ETH has been around less than 2 years; it spent only 2 months over $150. I don't see how any analysis that it will rise is better than a coin flip.

It certainly will. With a number of participants in EEA and attention from governments like Russia and Singapore. Plus, eventual Casper update that does facilitate ETH staking as a decent form of position in the crypto market that will only grow down the road. It’s a long term approach but one has to believe in tech itself of course.

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

#153

Post by nulagrithom »

bogomipz wrote: post #87
DanBlake wrote: 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…

>" If you are located in the 'mining valley' of Washington where power is ~2c/kwh you are still getting healthy profits" Can you clarify what "mining valley" you are referring to? Is this Chelan County? If so I thought there was talk about a moratorium on new high load customers but maybe that never came to pass? See: http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-miners-public-utility-spar-o...

Not the parent commenter but yes, Chelan and Douglas counties have fantastically inexpensive kwh due to their hydroelectric plants.

The dams are owned by a public entity and the cheap power and plants are meant to be a boon to the local economy. Last I heard (directly from a city council member last year) there is a moratorium on high load customers due in part to all the mining operations that sprung up. Realistically, for the Public Utility District it's been much more profitable to sell the power to other states than it is to allow more mining operations to eat the cheap power.

There were high hopes for the data centers that sprouted up in neighboring Grant county, but they didn't bring anywhere near the number of local jobs that were expected (leaving a bunch of empty houses in Quincy). That in combination with the closure of the Alcoa aluminum plant (which purchased the _entirety_ of one of the smaller dam's output) and you shouldn't expect the moratorium to be lifted any time soon.

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

#154

Post by nulagrithom »

blairanderson wrote: post #139
DanBlake wrote: 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…

Where exactly is the mining valley? Very few articles showing up about it...

Wenatchee Valley. KWH are somewhere just above 2 cents. Lots of electric plants down the Columbia river, and Wenatchee has great 1 GBPS connectivity throughout.

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

#155

Post by snuxoll »

stouset wrote: post #131
flashman wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I doubt resale values on GPUs running at 100% for months on end is going to be high.

Miners don't want to push their GPU's that hard, a hardcore gamer may overvolt their card to get a more stable overclock but a miner will undervolt it to run it cooler and increase the life of the card.

I'd rather buy a used Fury X off a miner than a gamer.

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

#156

Post by Jabanga »

mrb wrote: post #148
nodamage wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cryptocurrency enthusiast would tell you that the energy consumed is not "wasted" because it is necessary to secure the block chain. Personally I find this argument unconvincing and somewhat tautological. 1) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this and 2) why should we assume that securing the block chain is a actually good use for the energy spent? Especially if you consider that the process of…

1) No there is no other way. (An alternative, proof-of-stake, is still an active research area. Even Ethereum abandoned the idea of completely switching away from proof-of-work because they realized PoS isn't completely workable.) 2) Because a permission-less censorship-resistant decentralized financial system has the potential to truly improve society, hence worth spending energy on it. I have presented multiple arg…

>Even Ethereum abandoned the idea of completely switching away from proof-of-work because they realized PoS isn't completely workable

No it didn't. I follow Ethereum development closely and I know for a fact that's absolutely untrue. I'm not sure why you're misleading people about this.

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

#157

Post by Capt-RogerOver »

nodamage wrote: post #146
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst inventions for consuming energy possible? Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, vehicles products they can create. Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cos…

A cryptocurrency enthusiast would tell you that the energy consumed is not "wasted" because it is necessary to secure the block chain. Personally I find this argument unconvincing and somewhat tautological. 1) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this and 2) why should we assume that securing the block chain is a actually good use for the energy spent? Especially if you consider that the process of…

If you knew the technical details of blockchains, you would not think that. And yes, the process IS much more than wasing massive amounts of energy.

> 1) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this

You are welcome to try. If you do come up with a less waisful solution you will be able to create your own altcoin and will make billions worth of dollars on it. Some very smart people have tried in the past and are still trying.

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

#158

Post by sharpneli »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #142
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst inventions for consuming energy possible? Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, vehicles products they can create. Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cos…

> So we've created an "industry" where you are essentially paid by comverting energy to waste. But with Ethereum, it's not waste. The miners are providing storage and compute, a la Amazon Web Services. It's not like Bitcoin, where the hashing is just there to verify the blockchain. In general, it's a valid concern... Do we really need to compute these things over and over to secure a fixed set of computations? But in…

The proof of work part is separate from running the contracts. So it still stands that the mining is only because it allows us to measure in a provable way that someone has thrown X amount of Joules in the gutters.

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

#159

Post by pheldagryph »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #142
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst inventions for consuming energy possible? Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, vehicles products they can create. Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cos…

> So we've created an "industry" where you are essentially paid by comverting energy to waste. But with Ethereum, it's not waste. The miners are providing storage and compute, a la Amazon Web Services. It's not like Bitcoin, where the hashing is just there to verify the blockchain. In general, it's a valid concern... Do we really need to compute these things over and over to secure a fixed set of computations? But in…

Surely some of it is a waste. Even for the latest, hottest cryptocurrency. The question is: how much energy is wasted versus the alternative, and does the utility justify it?

Depending on speculatively large future-values of cryptocurrencies is probably not the right way to evaluate the externalities, here.

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