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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

#71

Post by rothbardrand »

dbcooper wrote: post #68

AMD announced the Vega 10 based GPUs today (on sale August 14). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14889357 Apparently they are going to bundle most of them with games and hardware discounts initially, to discourage buy ups by the miners. http://www.anandtech.com/show/11680/radeon-rx-vega-unveiled-... The RX Vega 56 part has 50% higher SP compute per watt than the RX 580 and 570 (50 SP GFLOP/watt), and is only $399…

EDIT: I see these bundles are definitely to limit demand on the early cards. I expect they will keep miners at bay until they start having volume on the single cards. That's fine.

Single Point calculations per watt or per second are not really the relevant measure for miners, it's all about memory bandwidth.

We will see how these stack up.

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

#72

Post by rothbardrand »

mrb wrote: post #66
rothbardrand wrote: post #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…

You severly underestimate the number of GPUs mining other cryptos. For example ZEC has half a million GPUs right now (200 MSol/s).

I'm not sure what your point is. Do a similar calculation for the ETH difficulty and there are a lot more GPUs mining ETH....which are going to crowd into ZEC and ETC. IF you have 10,000 GPUS mining ETH and you have to move them in a few months, are you going to now be adding another 1,000 GPUS?

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

#73

Post by rothbardrand »

hueving wrote: post #65
rothbardrand wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And we're still waiting for tulip bulbs to return to their peak value. Just because it continued up before doesn't mean it will continue up in the future.

The difference is that tulip bulbs were not a new technology with a compelling use case that keeps reaching wider and wider audiences.

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

#74

Post by dbcooper »

rothbardrand wrote: post #71
dbcooper wrote: post #68

AMD announced the Vega 10 based GPUs today (on sale August 14). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14889357 Apparently they are going to bundle most of them with games and hardware discounts initially, to discourage buy ups by the miners. http://www.anandtech.com/show/11680/radeon-rx-vega-unveiled-... The RX Vega 56 part has 50% higher SP compute per watt than the RX 580 and 570 (50 SP GFLOP/watt), and is only $399…

EDIT: I see these bundles are definitely to limit demand on the early cards. I expect they will keep miners at bay until they start having volume on the single cards. That's fine. Single Point calculations per watt or per second are not really the relevant measure for miners, it's all about memory bandwidth. We will see how these stack up.

OK. Memory bandwidth for the Vega 56 part is 410GB/s, vs. 256 and 224 for the RX 580 and 570 respectively.

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

#75

Post by rothbardrand »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #63

i wonder if these massive mining operations have enough power to cheat the system: couldn't they quickly compute a series of valid blocks with the cheated transaction if they band together? the longer chain of blocks would win against a shorter one. On the other hand they would have a self interest to preserve the system, if trust in cryptocurrencies collapses then the big miners would have a lot to loose.

This is a sybil attack and it would take wide collusion and would be difficult to pull off, and it would allow you to do what? Reverse some transactions that you had the keys for.

It's really expensive attack to get back the $5 you paid for Starbucks.

So you would want to do it with a multi-million dollar transaction.

However, the thing is, anyone you pay a multi-million dollar transaction to is going to let it clear for more than just one block... probably for many blocks...before handing you the goods.

Because everybody is aware of this risk.

Chains reorganize anyway, just naturally when sometimes two blocks are found within the propagation delay.

Trying to run ahead is very hard.

Wallets like Electrum show one confirmation in red, and several in yellow and only after the chain has gotten extremely expensive to unwind will it show them in green.

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

#76

Post by rothbardrand »

freeflight wrote: post #58
jdavis703 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You say "no real purpose" but what you mean is "a purpose I don't value". That's fine, don't do it. The problem comes when you think that people doing things you don't like is somehow wrong.

People have attempted to make scientific computing good for proof of work-- GRIDCoin is an example. But it doesn't work for actually securing the network, due to the nature of how blockchains work.

You're free to work or mine or do whatever you want and then donate that money to scientific research.

But what makes you think you know better how I should spend my money? You don't even know how I'm spending my money.

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

#77

Post by rothbardrand »

dbcooper wrote: post #74
rothbardrand wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: I see these bundles are definitely to limit demand on the early cards. I expect they will keep miners at bay until they start having volume on the single cards. That's fine. Single Point calculations per watt or per second are not really the relevant measure for miners, it's all about memory bandwidth. We will see how these stack up.

OK. Memory bandwidth for the Vega 56 part is 410GB/s, vs. 256 and 224 for the RX 580 and 570 respectively.

Right, those are good numbers for the price, comparable to the 1080 Ti, so this bodes well for using them for mining... however we will have to see if there are any gotchas (the access patterns for mining are different than for games, so for instance GDDR5X was less effective than GDDR5 despite being theoretically faster.)

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

#79

Post by mikekchar »

rothbardrand wrote: post #73
hueving wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we're still waiting for tulip bulbs to return to their peak value. Just because it continued up before doesn't mean it will continue up in the future.

The difference is that tulip bulbs were not a new technology with a compelling use case that keeps reaching wider and wider audiences.

That's such a weird comment, because they literally were.

I think I understand what you mean, but I also think that you underestimate the impact that the introduction of the tulip to Europe had on the economy. If you browse through the Wikipedia page, I think you will find it interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Also interesting is the effect that it still has on the economy. Some of the big flower monopolies that still exist today (nearly 400 years later!) were created by people who speculated on tulip bulbs and diversified quickly enough (mostly by using profits to buy up land).

We tend to think about things from our own perspectives, but when you are looking at that time period, imports of agricultural products to the wealthy is what ruled the world. Just like they were able to saturate their market, so will we with abstract financial products. Those who are able to diversify quickly enough will probably be the next big winners. Those who keep buying graphic cards will probably be the next big losers.

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

#80

Post by dbcooper »

rothbardrand wrote: post #77
dbcooper wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. Memory bandwidth for the Vega 56 part is 410GB/s, vs. 256 and 224 for the RX 580 and 570 respectively.

Right, those are good numbers for the price, comparable to the 1080 Ti, so this bodes well for using them for mining... however we will have to see if there are any gotchas (the access patterns for mining are different than for games, so for instance GDDR5X was less effective than GDDR5 despite being theoretically faster.)

Was that due to increased latency?
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