Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150 • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by narrator » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:17 AM UTC

RexetBlell wrote: post #167

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…

Proof of work (mining) is needed to be able to come to consensus on the next block in the chain. A better and more efficient algorithm is being developed. Ethereum is switching from proof of work to proof of stake in the next year or two, so there will not be any mining any more, which should reduce the cost of deciding what the next block is. Read more about it here: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-St…

Proof of stake comes with its own set of problems.

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

#172

Post by stOneskull » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:21 AM UTC

strictnein wrote: post #110

I sold my hardware last week. GTX 1060s, a 1080, an AMD R9 290X, some other stuff. Unless I'm missing something, there's no huge flood of video cards on ebay. There's maybe ~20% more than there was a week ago. All told, for the in demand mining hardware, you're only talking about a couple thousand cards.

it's a made-up article.

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

#173

Post by acchow » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:31 AM UTC

dx034 wrote: post #170

leroman wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know how it compares but for "classic" finance to work it needs many workers who use energy, who need buildings to cost energy, who need cooling etc.. The work being done by the miners is not apples to apples comparison with OracleDB sitting behind IBM Websphere server (or what ever) inside a banks data center / cloud. I do hope that in the future somebody comes up with a better scheme..

[1] has a chart comparing Bitcoin energy consumption to that of the Visa payment network. Bitcoin is magnitudes higher. [1] http://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

This is only Visa's datacenter costs. What about all the employees working at banks to support all these credit card holders? What about all the physical snail mail being carried around by actual vehicles and driven by humans? What about the entire debt collection system?

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

#174

Post by meric » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:38 AM UTC

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…

We could be mining gold instead with the energy.

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

#175

Post by dawnerd » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:38 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #149

mjevans wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe people will actually develop things that //require// generic algorithms, and multiple diversity of them so that it /forces/ generic hardware proliferation.

I think he just wants the video card to play games. Gamers have suffered from low supply of graphics cards because of the mining fad. With that dying down, they should be able to buy a card now.

Kinda, I needed a new card to power two 4k monitors for my office setup. Needed it that day, so amazon was out of the question. All the local stores had 1060s for basically what 1080s run at. Ended up just buying a 1080 for a few bucks more, because why not. Apparently the 1060s are really good for ethereum...

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

#176

Post by trophycase » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:40 AM UTC

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…

They most definitely have not abandoned Proof of Stake

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

#177

Post by dvfjsdhgfv » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:48 AM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #135

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…

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…

You're not naive but realistic.

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

#178

Post by dmichulke » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:50 AM UTC

leroman wrote: post #164

kushankpoddar wrote: post #161

There is a point of view out there that Europe's higher than average reliance on renewables has bumped up electricity prices there and contributed in making the place less competitive for industries. You can see that argument in action when European miners are losing out to others due to high power costs.

If this is really the case (I am not informed enough), is that so bad in the face of global warming?

Generally speaking, any slowdown in economic activity will lead to a slowdown in global warming. The question is always: is the new equilibrium better or worse for all involved? (Think of the unemployed)

I think a better metric would be $GDP / ton CO2 to see who's efficient and who's not. Unfortunately, GDP numbers are not really standardized, at least countrys' individual way of calculation GDP varies greatly.

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

#179

Post by dvfjsdhgfv » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:52 AM UTC

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…

It would be true in an ideal world, but in practice governments of different countries can and do regulate what can and cannot be done with bitcoins. Most of this is based on fear of losing control.

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

#180

Post by lightedman » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 6:52 AM UTC

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…

You haven't done your research, because ETH did not abandon PoS, and permission-less distributed databases have existed since the 70s and failed then for the same reason all these will fail now - you simply cannot scale and keep it distributed, it all ends up getting centralized to a few key points because of the cost to maintain the exponentially-growing distributed infrastructure.