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One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

dvhardware.net

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Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#61

Post by fermuch »

maxerickson wrote: post #49
0x0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's possible to be energy efficient in a proof-of-work blockchain? Whatever energy saving you come up with will be negated by having to match competing miners' increasing throughput. If you are not running on 100% you are losing out?

The more efficient your hardware is the more profit you make per block (because you buy less electricity per block reward). If all hardware was equivalent and an unlimited amount were available efficiency wouldn't matter, but neither of those things are true.

Wouldn't the difficult per block rise, making it the same current usage as before?

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#62

Post by bigiain »

microtherion wrote: post #24
PKop wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apply that to energy efficiency research as well. The monetary incentives are too strong for it not to happen.

There would definitely be a first mover advantage. On the other hand, for most other VLSI applications, improved energy usage is a PERMANENT advantage: If e.g. Apple improves energy efficiency of Annn chips, it enables them to build better devices, even if the rest of the industry catches up. For Bitcoin, my understanding is that this is not the case, because any cost improvement in the industry will attract more min…

Yeah - that "first mover advantage" can be lucrative though.

Simplistically they're betting on:

(cost to you of mining a bitcoin)-(cost to everybody else of mining a bitcoin) * (time it takes to reach equilibrium)

being a very big number...

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#63

Post by argo_ »

yitchelle wrote: post #3

Just a thought, if we use even 1% of all computing power that is currently being used for mining cryptocurrency, what can it be used to accomplished?

if we use even 1% of all computing power that is currently being used for internet memes, what can it be used to accomplished?

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#64

Post by icelancer »

guiomie wrote: post #42
wmf wrote: post #28

Note that Bitmain is mostly a hardware vendor, although they do mine using their own equipment. Most of these chips will be sold to other miners, not used by Bitmain themselves.

I was wondering about this, why do they sell them instead of mining them? They could sell the older model once the new chips they designed are ready no?

Diversification of assets is a real thing at that scale. They don't sell everything, but a balanced approach from conservative (selling mining equipment) to aggressive (mining as much BTC as possible.... and some other political stuff I won't get into) is how Bitmain runs their business. It's smart. You want to balance your ranges.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#65

Post by [deleted] »

asudghionbio wrote: post #29
yitchelle wrote: post #3

Just a thought, if we use even 1% of all computing power that is currently being used for mining cryptocurrency, what can it be used to accomplished?

Nothing. This is all specialized silicon which is totally worthless for anything except mining Bitcoin. It's all going in the dumpster when the price crashes. It has no social value and never will.

[deleted]

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#66

Post by banachtarski »

whytaka wrote: post #5
yitchelle wrote: post #3

Just a thought, if we use even 1% of all computing power that is currently being used for mining cryptocurrency, what can it be used to accomplished?

Distribute porn. Play video games. Or some other thing that has subjective value that you might not agree with.

Not OP but that seems more useful. Even after digging for examples to prove a point, it's telling that this is all you can come up with.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#67

Post by icelancer »

Animats wrote: post #43

On top of that, Etherium mining is eating the graphics board market. The price of NVidia's higher end boards has doubled in the last six months.[1] Etherium was supposed to require a general purpose CPU to mine, but now it's done on GPUs with large RAM. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/cryptocurrency-b...

ETH is going PoS soon enough, the other altcoins drive GPU mining significantly as well. Particularly the CryptoNight coins (Monero, Electroneum, etc) for the AMD market, and Equihash coins (Zcash, primarily) for Nvidia cards.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#68

Post by esmi »

guardiangod wrote: post #2

From the article- Bitmain, the largest Bitcoin miner on the planet, is now buying a whopping 20,000 16nm wafers a month from TSMC! That's double as much as in the previous quarter and a higher volume than what NVIDIA orders from TSMC. Related material- https://www.gmo.jp/en/news/article/?id=764 A competitor to Bitmain just finished their prototype 12nm Bitcoin mining chip and is moving forward to their target 7nm min…

Where is the source for how many wafers nvidia buys? That's usually confidential information.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#69

Post by wmf »

joe_the_user wrote: post #53
wmf wrote: post #28

Note that Bitmain is mostly a hardware vendor, although they do mine using their own equipment. Most of these chips will be sold to other miners, not used by Bitmain themselves.

To repeat a comment from elsewhere, supposedly Bitmain's approach is to "burn in" their chips by mining and then sell them. This approach gives them the latest, most energy efficient chips at a low cost since they then get sold. Obviously, they could optimize the mine-to-sale ratio dynamically as mining-profits and chip-prices change.

So Bitmain is ordering 16 nm ASICs from TSMC but what they're selling you is last-generation... 16 nm ASICs.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#70

Post by maxerickson »

fermuch wrote: post #61
maxerickson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more efficient your hardware is the more profit you make per block (because you buy less electricity per block reward). If all hardware was equivalent and an unlimited amount were available efficiency wouldn't matter, but neither of those things are true.

Wouldn't the difficult per block rise, making it the same current usage as before?

Eventually. But newer hardware will tend to be the most efficient component of the hashrate and push out older hardware by generating more hashes per unit of electricity (hence the CPU->GPU->ASIC progression).
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