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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

#31

Post by strictnein »

brndnmtthws wrote: post #17
aphextron wrote: post #2

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 GPUs have largely been replaced by ASICs (although certain coins are still mineable with GPUs, like Ethereum[1], as discussed in the article).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/

Mining for Ethereum is entirely GPU based. Mining for Bitcoin/Litecoin is entirely ASIC based now.

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

#32

Post by literallycancer »

throw2016 wrote: post #18

Imagine 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…

Why don't you do the calculation, and come back when you figure out just how tiny fraction of the whole energy spending this represents.

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

#34

Post by rothbardrand »

Chyzwar wrote: 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

People who bought at the absolute peak of the last market, where it was for only an hour or so, are now up %2700 on that purchase in 4 years.

You can hold and you can dollar cost average, and if you weren't buying with the intention of holding for 5 or more years you weren't really investing you were speculating and if you're speculating you should be hedged or have a strategy that can handle a dynamic market.

I know people who were early in bitcoin and they are still HODLing and using their BTC wealth to invest in other things like ETH and startups.

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

#35

Post by fnovd »

placeybordeaux wrote: post #28
Chyzwar wrote: 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?

What good are your altcoins when the developers/miners give up on the project? A bar of gold is always a bar of gold, no matter what the price of gold is.

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

#36

Post by rothbardrand »

klodolph wrote: post #4
aphextron wrote: post #2

Is this the real story behind nVidia's insane stock spike over the last year?

Miners use AMD cards because they have better integer performance, unless I'm mistaken.

It depends on what you are mining, and your cost modeling. For instance, NVIDIA cards have better memory bandwidth and both dagger-hashimoto and equihash are memory hard algorithms, and NVIDIA cards have better expected resale value (though this will vary based on your expected sales channel.)

AMD is generally more popular among hobbyist miners, I think, because early on they had a performance advantage in Ethereum and hobbyists tend to follow each other like a herd because they have limited time to do experimentation and exploration (and this is not a criticism of them, they have day jobs and it takes a lot of effort to even get miners going, let alone optimize them across multiple parameters.)

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

#37

Post by jdavis703 »

abiox wrote: post #33

must be nice having the resources to buy that many gpus. do they make money mining these days? seems like the average person barely breaks even after paying the home electric bill.

If you can get wholesale electric rates (I'm assuming if you're paying millions to buy and ship graphics cards you know what you're doing), then the power companies in California will pay you to burn electricity when the sun is at the highest [0].

[0]: https://qz.com/953614/california-produced-so-much-power-from...

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

#40

Post by rothbardrand »

literallycancer wrote: post #32
throw2016 wrote: post #18

Imagine 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…

Why don't you do the calculation, and come back when you figure out just how tiny fraction of the whole energy spending this represents.

He also needs to do the calculation for credit cards, the banking industry and central banks, for comparison purposes.
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