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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

#131

Post by cesarb »

whataretensors wrote: post #71

Anything that mentions bitcoin mining gets people worked up and negative for some reason. More demand for compute is a good thing long-term. More demand for video cards is great for all parallel computing long-term, hopefully someone besides NVIDIA seriously moves into the space.

> Anything that mentions bitcoin mining [...] More demand for video cards is great [...]

Bitcoin mining no longer uses video cards. More demand for bitcoin mining does not translate into more demand for video cards.

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

#132

Post by trhway »

blackrock wrote: post #129

The amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. It is all about virtual digital mining, which is to race to find the first hash, that has X number of zeros in the front of it. And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. Can't there be a more useful usage of cryptocurrency mining to show proof of work? Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein…

>And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work.

No. PoW is just an old name from the 199x spam fighting. The point here is planet-scale consensus, not "proof of work". One way to achieve distributed consensus in untrusted non-static environment is to randomly choose master for a given block. Imagine that everybody just throws a dice, and whoever gets 6 becomes that master. How we make sure that there is only one master for a given block, and that when you say 6 you really got 6 as i have no way of checking whether you even threw the dice at all? Satoshi's great insight was in building such a verifiable and statistically [for several minutes] single-master dice by using the good old hash based PoW.

Now, if somebody could come up with more energy efficient way to achieve that consensus at such a scale...

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

#133

Post by elmar »

blackrock wrote: post #129

The amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. It is all about virtual digital mining, which is to race to find the first hash, that has X number of zeros in the front of it. And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. Can't there be a more useful usage of cryptocurrency mining to show proof of work? Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein…

A little known fact is that validating a block with 1 Bitcoin transaction or all the world 10 minute transactions in Bitcoin would spend roughly the same energy.

The energy is spent on security independent of transaction volume.

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

#134

Post by monob »

qeternity wrote: post #122
peterjlee wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Price != Value "Price is what you pay, value is what you get." Warren Buffett

You have use value and exchange value.

Exchange value is most often price, but it is in reality the vector of the equivalent amount of goods and services you will receive for a unit of some good or service.

The point of money is that it collapses all exchange values to two vectors, one for selling to money, one for buying with money.

The downside of money is that it hides many very obvious relationships. In a topical case, that the cost of video cards has essentially stayed constant when expressed as etherium units.

tl;dr: money lets you calculate prices as n, exchange values needs n^2.

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

#135

Post by msuvakov »

blackrock wrote: post #129

The amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. It is all about virtual digital mining, which is to race to find the first hash, that has X number of zeros in the front of it. And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. Can't there be a more useful usage of cryptocurrency mining to show proof of work? Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein…

Primecoin is an example: https://primes.zone

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

#136

Post by zeroxfe »

trhway wrote: post #132
blackrock wrote: post #129

The amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. It is all about virtual digital mining, which is to race to find the first hash, that has X number of zeros in the front of it. And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. Can't there be a more useful usage of cryptocurrency mining to show proof of work? Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein…

>And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. No. PoW is just an old name from the 199x spam fighting. The point here is planet-scale consensus, not "proof of work". One way to achieve distributed consensus in untrusted non-static environment is to randomly choose master for a given block. Imagine that everybody just throws a dice, and whoever gets 6 becomes that m…

> Now, if somebody could come up with more energy efficient way to achieve that consensus at such a scale...

A handful of the top cryptos are using some variant of proof-of-stake (like dPoS, dBFT, etc.), all of which are energy efficient. Ethereum is currently experimenting with PoS in Casper.

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

#137

Post by esmi »

Simon_says wrote: post #104
esmi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, it's bounded above by how many GPUs are sold, no?

I suppose could estimate if I knew the number of GPUs sold but I've only seen estimates of that. As far as I know nVidia doesn't give their shipment numbers.

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

#138

Post by rpearl »

trhway wrote: post #132
blackrock wrote: post #129

The amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. It is all about virtual digital mining, which is to race to find the first hash, that has X number of zeros in the front of it. And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. Can't there be a more useful usage of cryptocurrency mining to show proof of work? Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein…

>And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. No. PoW is just an old name from the 199x spam fighting. The point here is planet-scale consensus, not "proof of work". One way to achieve distributed consensus in untrusted non-static environment is to randomly choose master for a given block. Imagine that everybody just throws a dice, and whoever gets 6 becomes that m…

a cheaper way to achieve this is to have a centralized currency and mature financial infrastructure.

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

#139

Post by phkahler »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4
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…

> A competitor to Bitmain just finished their prototype 12nm Bitcoin mining chip and is moving forward to their target 7nm mining chip Huh, maybe the dark fibre of Bitcoin will be cheap silicon and subsidized fab research.

>> Huh, maybe the dark fibre of Bitcoin will be cheap silicon and subsidized fab research.

EUV lithography subsidized by a pyramid scheme based on a bubble in virtual currency!

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

#140

Post by 6nf »

cm2187 wrote: post #77
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…

How long do you think it takes them to amortize them?

At current prices and difficulty probably on the order of 6-12 months.
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