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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

#341

Post by Taek »

abalone wrote: post #318
soVeryTired wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tu Quoque

More like false equivalence. What makes the cryptocurrency carbon footprint particularly wasteful is that, if we're being honest, its primary use is currency speculation.

Primary use today, sure. But cryptocurrency has more practical application every year, and there are a lot of compelling reasons to believe that major economic players will switch to decentralized currency (not private blockchains, the public ones) in the next 10-20 years.

If during the dotcom bubble internet startups had required something similar (provable waste), people would have said the same thing you are. But here we see that the internet clearly was a trillion dollar industry, just that most dotcom startups were too early and poorly managed speculative vehicles.

Decentralized cryptocurrency will be a trillion dollar industry, and that's trillions in annual recurring revenue I'm talking about, not trillions in total market cap. It's just today we've seen the speculation get ahead of the technology.

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

#343

Post by colordrops »

cwyers wrote: post #311
colordrops wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiat money doesn't serve the same purpose as Bitcoin and in some ways is the opposite. Why are there so many trite unthoughtful comments being made about cryotocurrencies? I'm guessing people are turned off by all the scam coins and are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm turned off by watching a bunch of people who haven't learned basic lessons about banking trying to reinvent it, badly. Anyone who spent a few days learning about how banks do security could have understood that what these exchanges like Mt. Gox were doing was frightfully vulnerable, and anyone unwilling to spend at least a few days learning about banking security has no business running a currency exchange. But i…

Do you realize that exchanges and cryptocurrencies are not even close to the same thing? In fact most exchanges deal in fiat as well, so you should also be shitting on fiat at the same time based on your logic.

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

#344

Post by ebcode »

kahnpro wrote: post #253
ebcode wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's incredibly foolish to think you're only trusting mathematics. All you've done is shift your trust to the authoring process of the Bitcoin clients and to the majority of the miners. Authoring and distributing the clients, and determining the majority of clients and the majority of mining power, is still a social and political problem driven by human greed.

>It's incredibly foolish to think you're only trusting mathematics.

Thanks for pointing that out. I suppose I'm guilty of "idealizing" my argument. Still, if the Bitcoin client could somehow be "written in stone", and everyone knew the protocols and source code could not be modified, I think it would be a safer bet to place my trust in a globally distributed network of selfish individuals, than to place it in a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires.

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

#345

Post by solidsnack9000 »

jameskegel wrote: post #103
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the worth of ETH and USD denominated in ISK. ETH in ISK = 16524.55 USD in ISK = 103.42 ETH / USD (1 * ETH) / (1 * USD) # Multiplicative identity 16524.55 ISK / 103.42 ISK # Expand to ISK 16524.55 / 103.42 # Cancellation of units 159.78 # Division

...is this an Eve Online reference? If so, although unexpected, I appreciate it.

EVE Online was built in Iceland. It is no coincidence that the "InterStellar Kredit" and the "ÍSlensk Króna" have the same currency symbol. Iceland at one time had great aspirations in the banking sector...

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

#346

Post by colordrops »

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]…

Does this account for the energy that goes into the mining, and transportation, and processing of the ore before it gets to the mint?

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

#347

Post by CyberDildonics »

MereInterest wrote: post #326
CyberDildonics wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your application. You are thinking about this from the view of someone who spends money on common every day items with a credit card. Money is used for much more than that. One example is the ability to go to another country and take money out of an ATM with bitcoin. Suddenly cash and available money is more ubiquitous and you can use your money without permission. Many people don't realize the value of…

Ubiquity and the inability to correct the record are two different properties. As it is, I already can take money out of an ATM in a different country, with my ATM card. Yes, there is a fee applied. No, I don't consider that a large downside, as currency exchanges are the price a society pays in order to avoid getting into Greece's current situation, where the currency can't be adjusted to help the economy.

> I already can take money out of an ATM in a different country, with my ATM card

With a fee applied AND if your bank lets you.

> No, I don't consider that a large downside, as currency exchanges are the price a society pays in order to avoid getting into Greece's current situation, where the currency can't be adjusted to help the economy.

Greece's government spent more money than they took in by a large margin for many decades. Not being able to print money is not the fundamental cause of their problems and has nothing to do with crypto-currencies.

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

#348

Post by CyberDildonics »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #330
CyberDildonics wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are biological weapons being used to mass murder people a natural extrapolation of ransomware?

We're not that far yet, but the potential is there. The closest thing are the current bitcoin-powered dark markets, where people buy various kinds of drugs (of various levels of harm and legality), including custom-made chemicals .

I have news for you, people already buy custom made chemicals from China all the time. It doesn't take darknet markets. The potential is there for lots of horrific actions. They aren't avoided by a government making them impossible, people generally don't want to hurt other people, nor do they want to face the consequences of doing so.

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

#349

Post by mrb »

MereInterest wrote: post #321
mrb wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jobs created is a complete misdirection. Productive jobs created is the correct measure. I could pay thousands of people to repeatedly dig holes and fill them in, and it would be an utter waste. I don't believe that Bitcoin serves a useful purpose, and so until convinced otherwise, I consider Bitcoin jobs as less useful than the hole-digging jobs. At least the hole-diggers don't waste electricity in the process.

Bitcoin does serve a useful purpose! It is perhaps not obvious to someone like you who don't seem to be a user. Or if you can't imagine how Bitcoin can help improve the world, you are probably only considering your little bubble, and not thinking about the other 7 billion human beings who are much less fortunate than you, economically, professionally, politically, financially.

Overall, Bitcoin reduces friction, enables transactions that would not otherwise take place, and protects people from losing their cash/savings in various situations. Here are just a few examples of problems of the existing financial system that Bitcoin solves:

- Credit card being denied while in a foreign country because the system accidentally tagged it as fraudulent

- Merchants unable to sell online and accept credit cards due to their market segment encountering high CC fraud

- Person unable to quickly and cheaply send remittance to family in foreign country

- Countries confiscating savings accounts of citizens (eg. Cyprus in 2014)

- Countries running their currency to the ground (Venezuela in 2017, Zimbabwe hyperinflation, USSR collapse, etc)

- DEA stealing innocent people carrying cash thanks to civil forfeiture laws (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/07/dea-asset-forfeitur... http://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-from-...)

- Bitcoin helping Chinese bypass GFW censorship (https://www.larrysalibra.com/hop-over-the-great-firewall-wit...)

- Paypal freezing for months the account of someone asking for donations for an expensive medical treatment (quite a few news stories about similar situations)

I could go on and on.

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

#350

Post by BoiledCabbage »

jasonlingx wrote: post #282
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…

Energy used = mining reward * (1 - mining profit margin) / unit cost of energy Where mining reward = (mining block reward + transaction costs + mining premium) I use "mining premium" to refer to the premium people are willing to pay to mine, i.e. as a hobby, research, or to evade taxes or capital controls. I think when considering efficiency, we can disregard these costs - i.e. energy spent evading taxes is really an…

This formula which I haven't gone through in detail enough to see if I completely agree, directly support the point of waste.

As society lowers the cost of energy, we would expect even more energy to be wasted with all other variables remaining equal.

Halve the cost of energy and now you've doubled the amount of energy spent.

If the cost all energy worldwide improved dropped by a factor of 100, society should explode with new technology. Instead this formula says we'll just spend 100x as much of it mining.

At least with mining gold as technology improves, you gain efficiency in gold extracted per joule. Crypto mining works exactly reverse. The better technology gets, the more wasteful it has to become to compensate.

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