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Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

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21–30 of 162 posts

Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

#21

I'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 excl…

I don't know... demand can drop instantly, maybe permanently, if the price crashes. Not the best long-term strategy...

Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

#23

I'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 excl…

If their hardware is sold out because of mining, all they have to do to serve the mining segment is make more of that hardware. There is no urgent need to undercut themselves.

Brief research suggests that the entirety of Etherium mining is roughly equivalent to 1 quarter of AMDs GPU sales. It seems gaming is the much bigger chunk of demand (Nvidia sells 3x what AMD sells, so annual gaming sales are roughly 10x the total Etherium spend).

Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

#24

Is 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 GPUs have largely been replaced by ASICs (although certain coins are still mineable with GPUs, like Ethereum[1], as discussed in the article).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-... [2]: https://www.bitmain.com/

If mining is profitable at all, why wouldn't a manufacturer of ASICs or GPUs run its own mining operation?

Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

#25
post #19

This 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 t…

A side business I run supplied them with components in 2016. Based on what I shipped them I'd say they deployed some where in the neighborhood of 18,000 graphics cards in 2016 and they were supposedly ramping up to go even bigger in 2017.

I don't have any insight into what they are currently up to because that scaling apparently involved hiring a eastern European engineer on the cheap to masquerade as a customer to try and obtain confidential hardware design details from me so he could rip off my product for them.

Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

#26

I'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 excl…

If their hardware is sold out because of mining, all they have to do to serve the mining segment is make more of that hardware. There is no urgent need to undercut themselves. Brief research suggests that the entirety of Etherium mining is roughly equivalent to 1 quarter of AMDs GPU sales. It seems gaming is the much bigger chunk of demand (Nvidia sells 3x what AMD sells, so annual gaming sales are roughly 10x the to…

Wasn't there a time few years ago when AMD overestimated the demand and then had 4 times the production capacity idle? It's not exactly cheap to build too.

Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

#27
These headlines are annoying and what I consider to be "fake news". -- EG They are blowing up some factoid or partial fact to make a false impression.

Here's the reality--

-- Ethereum is going to PoS soon. Even if it doesn't fully switchover it will decline in profitability for miners quite a bit.

-- Ethereum is down %50 in the past couple weeks. The GPU boom is over (for now) and supply should be loosening.

-- There are just not that many coins out there that are GPU mineable to support really massive operations, like a full 747 of GPUs. BTC is $45B and ETH is $18B market cap. As far as GPU mineable coins looking at the top hundred on CoinMarketCap I see about $2-$3B market cap for them all combined. You aren't going to take the hash power of securing ETH at $18B and dump it into ETC and ZEC without thinking twice, and if you do you aren't going to be shipping 27,000 GPUS in at a time 2 months before you have to jump from your big pond into those tiny ponds.

-- And if there were, the labor to bring that many machines up, even if you already have the physical and electrical capacity is weeks of work, unless you're employing a very large labor force which you are going to turn around and fire right after they've built your very cost intensive and valuable and hard to secure warehouse full of miners.

Reality is, the industry may be buying one 747 worth over the next several months but they are all getting them a few at at time and constrained by electrical and physical capacity and labor availability, and parts of everything else.

At even low scale these are non-trivial issues, when you start building 10 rigs at a time it is at least 10 times harder, 10 times more likely a part is out, etc etc.

Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

#28
post #11

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush

> It is even worse than Gold because you can't just hold when market crash.

Could you elaborate?

Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-... [2]: https://www.bitmain.com/

If mining is profitable at all, why wouldn't a manufacturer of ASICs or GPUs run its own mining operation?

Pain in the ass to run. Competition will torch your facility if you don't spend enough money and effort on security. You're going to need your own power plant, etc.

If you are the manufacturer, why not let the customer take the risk? You are planning and spending years ahead, why gamble more than you need on cryptocurrency price?

Re: Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-... [2]: https://www.bitmain.com/

If mining is profitable at all, why wouldn't a manufacturer of ASICs or GPUs run its own mining operation?

i wouldn't be surprised if they do.
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