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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

#111

Post by sumedh »

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…

> no real purpose

That is a loaded statement. If you ask a monk whatever you are doing in life has no real purpose.

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

#112

Post by hueving »

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.

In addition to mikechar's sibling comment, keep in mind that the blockchain technology can still be used for all kinds of stuff even if Bitcoin and Ethereum completely collapse to zero. They are just specific implementations and there is nothing particularly unique about them technologically compared to any given fork of the same code.

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

#113

Post by mcv »

chx wrote: 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…

Don't they get some kind of bulk discount on those cards? A deal to pack them in bulk and ship them straight from the factory seems kind of obvious.

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

#114

Post by mcv »

andreasklinger wrote: post #104
hueving wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Sounds like an interesting story here. How did you out him/her?

i seriously can't wait for Bitcoin the movie i imagine it to be somewhere between Hackers and Departed PS: given we currently have an emoji movie, had an facebook movie. A bitcoin movie is only a question of time - too many good stories here.

I think you could fill a season of TV drama.

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

#115

Post by martinald »

School-Cotton wrote: post #52
jdavis703 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes exactly, say you are on a 12month refresh cycle of your GPUs at Nvidia/AMD - 2 months is nearly 1/6th of that.

AMD or NVidia could 1up them by air shipping, which is very low cost considering the value per kg of the shipment.

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

#116

Post by Qwertious »

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…

The problem is, the mining comes and goes extremely sporadically, and can cause huge problems. Namely:

* Overproduction for the sake of mining can leave you with huge oversupply of cards, which is very costly. * GPU miners can crowd out the enthusiast market, which is terrible in the long term: * gamers have brand loyalty and buy peripherals (like FreeSync monitors) and miners don't. * if gamers can't buy GPUs at affordable prices when they're building their new PC, then (some companies perceive that) they might just buy consoles instead, which shrinks the entire market. This is more a problem for the "budget" market, obviously. * Enthusiasts recommend products to non-tech-savvy consumers, which again, means that if temporary mining sales crowd out non-mining sales, they lose money in the long term.

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

#118

Post by gnode »

crb wrote: post #117

If people are this serious, why don't they just set up their mining operation next door to the factory? I imagine the factories are where they are in part because land and power is cheap?

Mining happens where power is cheapest; often near hydropower in agricultural china. Factories are usually in places with good shipping links.

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

#119

Post by Qwertious »

KGIII wrote: post #86
everheardofc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of Work is inefficient by design. The transaction speed of the entire network is equivalent to that of an average node. Adding more hardware increases inefficiency. A centralised service like HN on the other hand could be designed to scale linearly with the amount of hardware resources. Edit: Now that I think about it I wouldn't be surprised if someone makes a cryptocurrency based around "digging holes" keynesi…

And our comments are creating no value. We're just ephemerally yelling into the wind. If the claim is about resource usage, the concern is about value. If nothing else, they are at least creating value - something we both aren't doing. Hell, I don't even expect you to agree with me. I'm just posting to speak my point of view and amuse myself. This conversation is pretty much the most wasteful thing we are going to do…

>It does amuse me, but I'm not really sure that's very valuable.

That's valuable. It lowers the demand for jetskis and cocaine, at a fraction of the price. Also, there's not much point in life if being entertained isn't valuable.

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

#120

Post by annabellish »

ojr wrote: post #92
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.

closest thing to Bitcoin was gold certificates not the tulip bubble that lasted 2 years. Gold certificates stopped circulating when the US government said so with Executive Order 6102. Bitcoin is not gold to me, gold is a shiny rock, periodic element, and bitcoin is alternative to PayPal with less transaction fees and a better api. That's where I see the value. Programmable money without going through a too-big-to-fa…

>with less transaction fees and a better api

Bitcoin has significantly higher transaction fees than paypal and a much less mature, much harder to use API.

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