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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

#331

Post by manquer »

my_ghola wrote: post #327
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…

I think mining should not be a way to profit. The rewards are so mining doesn't cost anything to miners. Bitcoin/Ethereum users should be compelled to mine because it means more security that no one controls the blockchain. I wonder if there's an algorithm that could deter people from building mining farms?

Not that difficult.. you can always choose problems with constant difficulty level or gradually increasing ones adjusted for expected increase in computing power.

However all cryptocurrencies are pyramid schemes . I.e. earlier you get in more you make. That's fastest way to grow and make it viral. However like any pyramid scheme it is unsustainable after some point

This is not necessarily the price point we think it should be valued at though. I and am sure many ppl never expected bitcoin to have mcap of 30$ billion . As difficult it is think today It may even grow another say 30x again to 900 billion or even more. However it will crash eventually like all pyramid schemes when growth flattens and new money - in the form of money spent in mining - stops coming in at the expected rate.

Another way to look at it, for mining to be even marginally profitable price needs to keep increasing for bit coin style algorithms. Either ppl will abandon the coin or price __has__ to increase

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

#332

Post by Zarath »

paulgb wrote: post #319
billmalarky wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't correct and is downright misleading. There are many possible scenarios. IE people will hold the Ether under the assumption that it will be more valuable in the future. If the supply of "sellers" goes down and the number of "buyers" stays constant, the price will continue to go up (ignoring new ETH being created for simplicity). As to how ETH could become valuable? Well if the network really does scale and…

It seems likely that more advanced currencies will continue to be developed. Why would ETH continue to hold value when a more advanced currency comes around, just as ETH has eaten into BTC mcap? It may not be an intentional Ponzi scheme, but it seems like a bubble economy.

Sure, once there are fewer low hanging fruit improvements to be made on existing currencies, something will eventually reach sufficient network effect that it will be very very difficult to usurp

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

#333

Post by nodamage »

ebcode wrote: post #212
canoebuilder wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Why isn't everyone using "our best available option"? What are the benefits of thousands of different systems keeping a record of every single transaction , and how is this not a hindrance to widespread use of our best available option? Crypto-currencies have utility and uses but they are rather niche and specialized. Crypto-currencies aren't a mass market system. And they're not structured in a way that they c…

One benefit of having a distributed ledger (your thousands of different systems) is that it decentralizes trust. With fiat currency, you have to trust the government (or private company, in the case of the U.S.A.) that issues it, not to print so much that they debase it. I have no trust in my government, or fellow private corporations, given what I've been through. Bitcoin, on the other hand, well, at least I can rea…

> Given a choice between trusting a person/corporation and trusting a mathematical equation, I would rather place my trust in the mathematics.

This comes across as incredibly naive. Just consider the whole Segwit2x controversy and think about exactly who controls the future of Bitcoin. You've just shifted your trust to a different group of people.

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

#334

Post by nodamage »

colordrops wrote: post #233
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) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this and No one has found a solution yet that is as secure as proof of work, so this point is moot until then. > 2) why should we assume that securing the block chain is a actually good use for the energy spent? Who is this "we" you speak of? The energy is being paid for and the market demand demonstrates that it is a good use.

"We" refers to society that you wish to convince to adopt Bitcoin as a currency. As has already been mentioned, the mere fact that people are willing to spend electricity on mining does not inherently demonstrate that it is a good use of such electricity.

Again, I find this defense to be incredibly tautological:

"This approach to securing a distributed ledger sure seems to waste a lot of electricity."

"But it's not wasteful because it secures the ledger..."

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

#335

Post by colordrops »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #258
colordrops wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this and No one has found a solution yet that is as secure as proof of work, so this point is moot until then. > 2) why should we assume that securing the block chain is a actually good use for the energy spent? Who is this "we" you speak of? The energy is being paid for and the market demand demonstrates that it is a good use.

> No one has found a solution yet that is as secure as proof of work, so this point is moot until then. The point isn't moot. The point is that maybe we should stop pushing this tech forward until a less wasteful securing process can be developed. > Who is this "we" you speak of? This comes up often, and the answer is usually the same: that "we" are the people who consider the society they live in as something to con…

> The point is that maybe we should stop pushing this tech forward until a less wasteful securing process can be developed.

We can't stop using hydrocarbons even though it may mean the end of civilization. To think that people will stop building cryptocurrencies due to environmental concerns is absurd in the extreme. It's like asking people to stop masturbating. It will NEVER happen. It's a fantasy. I'm not saying you aren't right - the energy expenditure is also absurd, but there is no way this will ever stop. People won't stop building and using them, and there's no way governments will make laws to ban them, so the conversation is honestly a bit naive and ridiculous.

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

#336

Post by nodamage »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #278
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…

> Especially if you consider that the process of "mining" is literally computing hashes over and over again until you find the right nonce that meets some arbitrary criteria, it's hard to see this process as anything except wasting massive amounts of energy. I think this wording obscures why the mining process gives the network trustworthiness. You are changing the nonce over and over again until the HASH of the bloc…

> You are changing the nonce over and over again until the HASH of the block meets some criteria. For example, your hash is below some value (it starts with a certain number of zeroes). This is important.

Yes I am aware of this, I simplified a bit so the sentence would read less awkwardly.

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

#337

Post by nodamage »

austenallred wrote: post #210
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…

Consider that the alternative is all of the banking infrastructure that exists. The energy that banks and their employees consume is orders of magnitude less efficient.

This seems like an absurd false equivalence given that the banking infrastructure provides a much larger scope of services than Bitcoin offers.

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

#338

Post by IanCal »

keredson wrote: post #325
IanCal wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not correct unless you factor in the hardware cost. If you changed graphics cards to use 0.1% of their current power, then miners would not immediately buy 1000 times more graphics cards.

you're right about the detail of his point (people won't buy 100x just because a 100x increase in efficiency), but the point he was trying to make is correct. given a fixed global investment, a 100x increase in efficiency won't reduce costs. it will just increase the difficulty level to compensate.

But it does have an impact on the energy use. If the energy efficiency goes up 100x and people aren't using 100x as many machines then the overall energy usage drops.

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

#339

Post by KVFinn »

IanCal wrote: post #338
keredson wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're right about the detail of his point (people won't buy 100x just because a 100x increase in efficiency), but the point he was trying to make is correct. given a fixed global investment, a 100x increase in efficiency won't reduce costs. it will just increase the difficulty level to compensate.

But it does have an impact on the energy use. If the energy efficiency goes up 100x and people aren't using 100x as many machines then the overall energy usage drops.

>But it does have an impact on the energy use. If the energy efficiency goes up 100x and people aren't using 100x as many machines then the overall energy usage drops.

If there really was an overnight 100x improvement there would be a lot of lag, but in the long run the cost is mostly the energy. So if efficiency slowly goes up 100x people will generally use 100x the computing power, and use the same overall energy.

There's some difference because of the ratio of silicon investment to wattage cost over time, but that's the overall shape of it.

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

#340

Post by PascLeRasc »

nsxwolf wrote: post #134

I see an ebay buy it now for four 8GB RX 480s for $360. $90 a piece seems pretty crazy low - does that mean there's a high likelyhood of hardware failure after these things were used for mining?

I found that in a few seconds too. Did you not read the six different sentences saying that they're being sold individually?
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