Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

pcgamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 162 posts

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

#141

Post by rothbardrand »

freeflight wrote: post #99
rothbardrand wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The problem comes when you think that people doing things you don't like is somehow wrong. I should have clarified that more: As I said before I have no issue with the basic concept behind cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is a great thing and will hopefully do even greater things in the future. And of course, everybody is to free to do with their time and resources as they please, never suggested otherwise. What I have an…

Alts, like internet startups in the Dotcom era, fall into three categories: 1. Genuinely new ideas from clueless people who will fail (because they don't understand that distributed systems are hard, Satoshi made it look easy) 2. Genuinely new ideas from good devs that will succeed (extremely rare, I consider that Bitcoin is the only chain that meets that requirement for me, though some others might in the future) 3. Blatent schemes to try and grab money because there is huge interest.

It's really hard to tell what category something is going to fall into... but the thing is, bitcoin has had massive returns and if you can produce a really good innovation, the impact on society and consequently the returns could be equally massive.

So yes there is a lot of speculative money out there, but the only way to tell the good from the crap is to do your due diligence.

For me, even if the good is %1 (and I think it's a bit less than that right now) it's ok.

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

#142

Post by rothbardrand »

lmm wrote: post #107
rothbardrand wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cryptocurrency "mining" consists of essentially burning money, by design (proof of work and all that). I don't have to know a lot about you to know that's a poor way to spend your money.

It's a bad idea to spend $300 on electricity to get a currency worth $900?

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

#143

Post by rothbardrand »

rothbardrand wrote: post #69
slyfocks wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Silly. Comparing the entire infrastructure of bitcoin to just a tiny sliver of the credit infrastructure. You need to include on the other side, all the energy the employees use, the buildings, the gas in their cars, the computers they run, and all of this for the related companies and the like. Or you just look at the cost in energy of finding the one correct hash for that block-- which again is going to be two or t…

Downvotes galore but no counter arguments. Whatever bitter bunnies.

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

#144

Post by rothbardrand »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #121
ojr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do people really use bitcoin like they use PayPal though? It seems to me that the vast majority of people own bitcoin because they speculate that its value will go up and not to make actual transactions.

There is a certain amount of speculation and bitcoins value has gone up a lot more due to reasons that are worth speculating on (increased adoption) than based on usage in its primary applications (Remittances and convenient value transfer).

However, simply holding bitcoin as a hedge against inflation and central bank currency risk is a legitimate use.

One of the big rallies in bitcoin coincided very precisely with the Cyprus collapse where the government simply confiscated a percentage of everyone's money in the banks.. and in places like Venezuela bitcoin is literally a life saver.

So remittances may be the biggest market, but hedging against incompetent government is not an illegitimate use of it... and I would separate that from "speculation" as a use case.

Speculation tends to get a bad rap, but remember, speculators sell when prices are high and buy when prices are low-- they tend to moderate prices.

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

#145

Post by rothbardrand »

hueving wrote: post #112
rothbardrand wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your thinking is exactly where I was in about 2012. The network effects is why bitcoin has remained so valuable in the face of, say, litecoin which is arguably better technologically.

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

#146

Post by rothbardrand »

mrb wrote: post #85
rothbardrand wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I was replying to " There are just not that many coins out there that are GPU mineable to support really massive operations, like a full 747 of GPUs. " And I pointed out that's not true because 1 airplane-load of GPUs represent only a tiny minority of the mining power of just 1 cryptocurrency like ZEC. Also you seemed to assume this airplane-load of GPUs is meant for Ethereum, but Genesis Mining (the miner who rented…

I'm assuming most GPUS are mining ethereum and that this will change. (not the airplane load, I don't think the airplane load even exists)

But you are right there's a huge number of GPUs out there. My main point is there is going to be a big shift to the others from ethereum when ethereum becomes less profitable...

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

#147

Post by biggerbistro »

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…

They did embrace it: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3204149/components-graphics/a...

The problem is their core audience (gamers) gets cranky when they can't buy cards at regular prices due to the huge crypto demand. It negatively affects their image and they would rather have their fanboys than the disloyal miners who would happily switch to nvidia if it meant a greater ROI.

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

#148

Post by Shorel »

everheardofc wrote: post #84
KGIII wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

All previous attempts at centralized services failed, except the ones backed by banks. Bitcoin works because it is not centralized.

You are free to design a better alternative. If you do it, you will be rich.

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

#149

Post by needlessly »

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 stop there? Why not complain about the wealthy individuals over at Wall Street or Silicon Valley syndicates? Or how about the amount of food waste that occurs everyday?

You're argument barely makes a blip. Perhaps if you should choose not to browse reddit or hacker news at least 3 times per week to save the environment.

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

#150

Post by Shorel »

KGIII wrote: post #132
throw2016 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can cut down trees and exchange it with my friends as a medium of exchange and call it value. It has no value to the wider economy or world but to us, and even though it has value to my friends it's a terrible, wasteful and unethical way to generate value. I am not generating value, just wasting trees. You just can't create money or value out of nothing. Its linked to utility, markets, labour and the wider economy…

You know that trees are pretty much the definition of a renewable resource, right? As in, I have a large sustainable forestry operation and they are cutting trees down as I type this. I own it, I don't do the work. That wood builds your house, provides heat, provides jobs, makes dowels, and makes paper - depending on what is harvested. And, it will be able to do so in perpetuity. The process is called TSI and is even…

It is not that easy. There's always a point of 'very slow return that requires no humans to succeed'.

Otherwise, we could just fill the Sahara with trees in a decade. It is not going to happen.

Post reply on HN