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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

#241

Post by h1d »

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…

What else do you suggest to waste to keep a competition? The effort must be entirely conflicting against anyone's interest besides the mining or else it will be an unfair competition.

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

#242

Post by h1d »

angus-prune wrote: post #219
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…

It is worth comparing this against the cost of minting money. A brief search showed that the US mint used 694,462.4 gigajoules in 2011[1] (~0.2Twh). The US is ~25% of world GDP, so lets times this by 4 for a naive cost of minting across the whole world. This gives a cost of ~1Twh annually for minting the entire world's supply of money, with a total Gross world product of ~$80 trillion[2]. Bitcoin is using ~1.3Twh[3]…

Please add all the energy banks, vaults, transportation and payment channels use where Bitcoin does it by itself.

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

#243

Post by PacketPaul »

sand500 wrote: post #88
nodesocket wrote: post #86

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?

The purpose (and only purpose) of the company is to increase shareholder value. That is done via dividend and stock price appreciation. Buying the stock of a company increases demand of that stock and hopefully share price.

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

#244

Post by monort »

cwyers wrote: post #169
Capt-RogerOver wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pas…

There's already a less wasteful solution, it's called fiat money.

Bank Of America Tower requires around 8 megawatt. And it's only one skyscraper.

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

#245

Post by h1d »

snuxoll wrote: post #155
stouset wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gamers might play 3 hours a day but miners run 24...

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

#246

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by sand500 »

PacketPaul wrote: post #243
sand500 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The purpose (and only purpose) of the company is to increase shareholder value. That is done via dividend and stock price appreciation. Buying the stock of a company increases demand of that stock and hopefully share price.

Sounds like all the electricity spent on buying and selling stocks isn't doing any good for the planet either.

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

#248

Post by freddref »

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 might not be able to avoid proof of work, but we could make the work useful in some other way.

Primecoin is an example of this, where the mining process produces prime numbers which can be useful for.. something?

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

#249

Post by verytrivial »

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…

> Call me naive

I'd call you principled. The people scrambling for free money are treating the cost to the rest of the world as an externality. They'll chime in here to say "But what about other terrible system X?", but that, I'm afraid, does not absolve them. You're all terrible!

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

#250

Post by notahacker »

a_imho wrote: post #195
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read your arguments and unfortunately most don't hold water. > 1. Miners currently use approximately only 0.0012% of the energy consumed by the world. This doesn't change the fact that you're using energy. The second argument is basically the same, just extrapolating into the future. > 3. Mining would be a waste if there was another more efficient way to implement a Bitcoin-like currency without proof-of-work. This…

1. Miners currently use approximately only 0.0012% of the energy consumed by the world. Actually if that number is accurate, is quite shocking.

As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, cryptocurrencies are [over]valued with a market cap of ~$70bn (from https://coinmarketcap.com/) of which BTC itself constitutes just under half.

World broad money supply is estimated around $80 trillion (not including many other stores of wealth and financial instruments which are not money). So the first conclusion one could draw is that cryptocurrency is also a surprisingly high proportion of currencies in circulation, at around 0.1% (treating cryptocurrencies as equivalent to broad money and exchange values as accurate)

A second would be that cryptocurrencies which apparently use 1% of their capital value in energy per annum to function even at low transaction volumes are unlikely to be a viable long term solution to the problem of exchange.

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