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

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

#91
post #32

Who makes money in a gold rush? It's the guy selling shovels.

If you mean Samuel Brannan, then you make money by diverting church funds to pay violent gangs to establish and maintain a shovel monopoly. Then you lose it all to a real estate crash and a divorce.

So the real lesson is be immoral, break the law, diversify and don't get married.

It's not like he is the only one who thought of selling shovels with huge markups.

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

#92

As a cryptocurrency-confused individual, I read articles like this and wonder how I'm supposed to assign any meaning to the "value" being created here, and by blockchain PoW in general. So this company is buying a bunch of wafers... He's converting the value of the wafers into value on blockchain, I guess? Because I can't help but interpret these things as "some people are wasting a lot of electricity, and you should…

Perhaps it might help to consider it equivalent to one converting the value of picks and buckets into value in gold. Just as the picks and buckets are worth what they’re worth, the gold is worth what someone else is willing to pay.

This analogy is great, thanks.

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

#93
post #45
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The cynical answer is that customers are willing to pay more than the hardware will ever mine over its lifetime. The non-cynical answer is that setting up gigawatts of data centers is not trivial and not Bitmain's core competency. Also, selling the hardware upfront locks in the profit even if the price of Bitcoin later crashes.

Of course. That's the same non-cynical answer to the question "Why would TSMC sell the hardware instead of mine with it?"

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

#94
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK, they're still actively supporting the LLVM backend for Myricom's LANai chips, despite Myricom being sold off a few years ago. And the NICs don't really need custom high speed RF, the foundry has a SERDES block that'll work just fine for connecting to a phy.

Yes, but what I was saying is that Google likely does not design the PHY and/or other such low-level components. I am trying to point out that designing a NIC is not equivalent to designing custom ICs, unless you are also designing the ICs used in the NIC.

The PHYs aren't even on the same board for them; it's just SERDES going to a connector.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_form-factor_pluggable_tr...

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

#96
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.

So they are like the saloon owners of the gold rush - huge profits made off of short term insanity of the masses.

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

#97

As a cryptocurrency-confused individual, I read articles like this and wonder how I'm supposed to assign any meaning to the "value" being created here, and by blockchain PoW in general. So this company is buying a bunch of wafers... He's converting the value of the wafers into value on blockchain, I guess? Because I can't help but interpret these things as "some people are wasting a lot of electricity, and you should…

> "some people are wasting a lot of electricity, and you should pay them for it!" Hard question to answer. Is it a waste? Compared to having one centralised miner plodding along at zero difficulty, yes. But it depends what new tech/ideas comes out of all this blockchain stuff. Are particle accelerators a waste?

Particle accelerators have a direct benefit. Miners, IMHO, do not provide direct benefits, only indirect ones.

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

#98

As a cryptocurrency-confused individual, I read articles like this and wonder how I'm supposed to assign any meaning to the "value" being created here, and by blockchain PoW in general. So this company is buying a bunch of wafers... He's converting the value of the wafers into value on blockchain, I guess? Because I can't help but interpret these things as "some people are wasting a lot of electricity, and you should…

PoW will go away. Noone will entrust their wealth to miners. There are plenty of other ways to achieve consensus and coins are moving away from PoW.

But we are still not done with the Bitcoin bubble.

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

#99

As a cryptocurrency-confused individual, I read articles like this and wonder how I'm supposed to assign any meaning to the "value" being created here, and by blockchain PoW in general. So this company is buying a bunch of wafers... He's converting the value of the wafers into value on blockchain, I guess? Because I can't help but interpret these things as "some people are wasting a lot of electricity, and you should…

Why are banknotes worth anything? They are just pieces of paper with some ink on them, after all. They are "worth" something, because people are willing to do work or trade you stuff for them. The same with mining bitcoin - instead of printing banknotes, you make a "thing" that you can then trade for services and objects, because people want to have that "thing"(this part is crucial). Most importantly, people are wil…

Do you see people printing banknotes out of feathers or some other randomly expensive material? No, and similarly mining bitcoin is some randomly expensive process. The process of securing a "coin" can be done very cheaply with minimal computing cost and the world will shift to that.

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

#100

As a cryptocurrency-confused individual, I read articles like this and wonder how I'm supposed to assign any meaning to the "value" being created here, and by blockchain PoW in general. So this company is buying a bunch of wafers... He's converting the value of the wafers into value on blockchain, I guess? Because I can't help but interpret these things as "some people are wasting a lot of electricity, and you should…

Anything can have "value" if someone is willing to pay for it. The US dollar is just a piece of paper if nobody is willing to exchange anything for it. Cryptocurrency has value because some speculator is willing to pay for it because they think it'll be worth more in the future.
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