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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

#51

Post by caf »

jdavis703 wrote: post #42
martinald wrote: post #22

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.

Depreciation is probably not a concern, but inventory management sure would be. 6-8 weeks shipping implies you have 6-8 weeks worth of sales at sea at any one time, which is potentially a lot of money to be tied up.

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

#52

Post by School-Cotton »

jdavis703 wrote: post #42
martinald wrote: post #22

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 the point was that due to upgrade cycles being what they are, a given model of graphics card will be less valuable in actual reality after a few months at sea; not just less valuable according to accounting.

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

#53

Post by slyfocks »

tedunangst wrote: post #44
rothbardrand wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to a recent estimate, ~4000 times more energy intensive. It’s an incredible waste of resources for most current use cases.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ypkp3y/bitcoin-is...

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

#54

Post by freeflight »

Thriptic wrote: post #20

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 think AMD's problem is manufacturing capacities. They can't even properly fulfill the current demand of gamers and miners, you want them to start a completely new line specialized just on miners? Where are they supposed to manufacture these chips?

It would also be wasted effort on AMD's part as the cards are selling like crazy anyway and once the cryptoboom stops there's still plenty of gamers left to buy them.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

jdavis703 wrote: post #42
martinald wrote: post #22

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.

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by KGIII »

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…

Yet, here we are - wasting resources to post trivialities online. Their consumption is generating value, yet our comments are just yelling into the wind.

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

#58

Post by freeflight »

jdavis703 wrote: post #43
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…

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

It's not just the electricity, it's major wear and tear on lots of hardware with no real purpose. This get's worse the more different currencies there are and the more people are farming them.

While I like the basic idea behind Bitcoin, I really don't like this development of "Let's invent a couple of dozen more of those!". It also shows the ugly face of how what we as human societies actually value. While I haven't compared any numbers, I'm pretty sure Folding@home or Seti@home can only dream of having the kind of computing power available to them that some of these cryptocurrencies manage to mobilize.

You want my cycles to find a cure for cancer? Nah, I'll keep my cycles to myself.

Using my cycles to make the imaginiary profits? Sweet, let's buy warehouses full of hardware!

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

#60

Post by isubkhankulov »

free_everybody wrote: post #57

This is great news. I can't wait until people realize that Ethereum is a largely useless network and GPUs rain down like manna from the heavens.

its useful for conducting unregulated securities offerings and launching dapps. i just haven't found any useful dapps yet. dapps are mostly used when you need censorship resistant functionality.
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