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Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

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41–50 of 162 posts

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

#41

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…

Or set up a startup thru which they mine coins themselves.

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

#42

I'd be surprised if GPUs and CPUs were ever shipped by sea instead of air. 6-8 weeks at sea Vs 12 hrs flight is quite serious deprecation, even if you're not mining them.

In GAAP you don't have to do calendar time-based depreciation (assuming you're dealing with something that doesn't have a finite life, e.g. nuclear fuel rods). There's also usage based depreciation, so, for example, you only depreciate the cost of the GPU while the computer is powered-on or the cost of a truck based on how many miles it's gone.

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

#43

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…

If proof of work is being done during peak solar load times the effect on the environment is negligible.

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

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Going to go out on a limb here and predict credit cards have a better $/watt ratio than bitcoin.

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

#45

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?

For the same reason why shovel manufacturers don't dig their own gold. Why take the risk of uncertainty that comes with the whole mining operation?

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

#46
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

>This is a gold rush[1]. People that were early in BitCoin already cashed

I heard that last time before the crash. Kind of a weird statement to make now that it's at $2800.

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

#47

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…

If proof of work is being done during peak solar load times the effect on the environment is negligible.

No, mining has to be done 24 hours a day to be profitable.

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

#48

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…

Or set up a startup thru which they mine coins themselves.

Start a REIT that does cryptocurrency mining.

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

#49

I'd be surprised if GPUs and CPUs were ever shipped by sea instead of air. 6-8 weeks at sea Vs 12 hrs flight is quite serious deprecation, even if you're not mining them.

In GAAP you don't have to do calendar time-based depreciation (assuming you're dealing with something that doesn't have a finite life, e.g. nuclear fuel rods). There's also usage based depreciation, so, for example, you only depreciate the cost of the GPU while the computer is powered-on or the cost of a truck based on how many miles it's gone.

I think he's concerned about the opportunity cost, not accounting issues.

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

#50

I'd be surprised if GPUs and CPUs were ever shipped by sea instead of air. 6-8 weeks at sea Vs 12 hrs flight is quite serious deprecation, even if you're not mining them.

In GAAP you don't have to do calendar time-based depreciation (assuming you're dealing with something that doesn't have a finite life, e.g. nuclear fuel rods). There's also usage based depreciation, so, for example, you only depreciate the cost of the GPU while the computer is powered-on or the cost of a truck based on how many miles it's gone.

GAAP or not if I have $BIGINT tied up on a boat haul (there's a joke about liquidity in here somewhere) with no returns while the operational cost of the task to be done rises, there's a cost.
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