This is a gold rush[1]. People that were early in BitCoin already cashed, now profit is made on exchanges and by hardware suppliers. It is even worse than Gold because you can't just hold when market crash.
Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards
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Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Miners use AMD cards because they have better integer performance, unless I'm mistaken.
I thought they use AMD cards because they consume less power
Those two statements are basically equivalent when it comes to mining. cost/hash/second is the metric you optimize for. AMD cards can do the integer operations required with less power (and faster!)
Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards
#13This is a gold rush[1]. People that were early in BitCoin already cashed, now profit is made on exchanges and by hardware suppliers. It is even worse than Gold because you can't just hold when market crash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush
Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards
#14The article title makes Genesis Mining sound like a bunch of amateurs, but they are a fairly large private company. Ordering express bulk freight for any company of this size doesn't sound so crazy.
But it's feels so good to make fun of crypto guys. Right guys?
Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards
#15The 747 is needed because it's filled fore-to-aft with cards? Or just because it sounds good in an article? A ticketed courier could deliver a large number of cards just as quick, if not quicker.
Or just because it sounds good in an article?
That one hyperbole quote generated at least a half-dozen different articles in this media genre, most of which have been posted multiple times on HN over the past 4 days.
Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought they use AMD cards because they consume less power
NVidia actually consumes less power in most games. But AMD cards use less power with integer performance.
This is the reason, Nvidia is good for floating point. Which is why people use them for deep learning.
Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards
#17Is this the real story behind nVidia's insane stock spike over the last year?
Mining with GPUs hasn't been profitable since around 2014. GPUs have largely been replaced by ASICs (although certain coins are still mineable with GPUs, like Ethereum[1], as discussed in the article). Bitmain[2] is (AFAIK) the manufacturer of ASICs for mining.
[1]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59zdjq/an-idiots-...
Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards
#18Imagine all these people wasting time, energy and power, the last of which is a crime against the environment and an affront to good sense at a time of global concern.
But when it comes to money, greed and self interest always triumph and there will be dozens stretching logic and apologism as far as it can go.
'Proof of work' has to the most hare-brained, wasteful, anti-environment scheme ever thought of. Responsible people should not just be wasting electricity in this manner.
Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards
#19This just sounds grandiose but really, renting a 747-400F is not such a big deal. This http://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-air... article gives a figure of 24-27000 USD an hour. You need it how long? Ten hours? Twelve?
Using a random card Amazon gives us a box size of 13.4 x 9.5 x 3.1 about 400 cubic inches. Say http://www.cargolux.com/our-expertise/cargo-equipment/aircra... we have 21 347 ft^3 that is some 36 887 616 cubic inches which means some 92 000 such boxes give or take.
There are inefficiencies etc so let's say it's 30 000 cards. Say at 300 USD each. That's a cool ten million bucks. The plane likely costs less than half a mil. It's not a biggie.
But do they really? https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmemza/cryptocurr... says "Enigma started with an installation of about 700 GPUs and now consists of several larger buildings," Schindler told me in an email. "Obviously at this size the operation draws attention from the hardware manufacturers directly and we have agreements with them." Compared to that I have some doubts they need to fly thirty thousand cards in. Maybe they rented a pallet in a 747F...
Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards
#20I'm consistently surprised at how tepid AMD's embrace of mining has been. If I was them and noticed that my product was literally sold out everywhere because of mining, I would embrace it, open a mining division, and immediately get to work trying to create specialized hardware optimized for mining.
The fact that they seem to be pretending that this use case does not exist and stubbornly declare themselves to be exclusively a gaming company is baffling to me.