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Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

blogs.nvidia.com

601–610 of 762 posts

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#601
post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the upkeep cost of protecting the gold is continuous in the same way as bitcoin mining. This completely misses the point, which was one of magnitude: >> The upkeep cost for Bitcoin is, and by necessity must be, PROPORTIOANAL TO THE VALUE REPRESENTED by Bitcoin. Also, that upkeep cost is 100.00% to protect the value of existing bitcoin. C.f., gold: > If you want to own some gold you need to protect it (usually w…

I never understood the "violence" argument against government. In that sense of the word "violence", there is no alternative that does not at some level also come down to the threat of force. The "state apparatus of violence" won't look so bad after you've dismantled the state in favor of something approaching anarcho-capitalism and are then close to Hobbe's state of nature: nasty, british, and short.

brutish?

Although as a Brit myself it's amusing to consider myself some kind of atavistic archetype of humanity

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#602
post #571
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The environmental issues are concerning to me. The amount of electricity being burned through for what is essentially a skeuomorphism of gold mining, pretty much primarily for speculation now, is beyond belief. It's a completely artificial, and artificially scarce, product. Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any victory at all it is…

Do you apply the same level of concern to the US military? It produces a lot more CO2 emissions than Bitcoin. I don’t think it produces more benefits for normal people either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#603
post #365
post #15

Gamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation. Almost 6 month after launching new graphic cards from AMD / NVIDIA good luck gettting an RTX 30xx or 6800. On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing…

Yes, it's wrong for people to use energy to make a profit. When the environmental externality is not priced in. There really should be a carbon tax.

Does this argument apply to anyone making a profit so long as they use energy? How can you make profit without energy? I'd think to lose money you will also need energy.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#604
post #571
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The environmental issues are concerning to me. The amount of electricity being burned through for what is essentially a skeuomorphism of gold mining, pretty much primarily for speculation now, is beyond belief. It's a completely artificial, and artificially scarce, product. Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any victory at all it is…

Do you apply the same level of concern to the US military? It produces a lot more CO2 emissions than Bitcoin. I don’t think it produces more benefits for normal people either.

Visa seems like a better comparison than the US military when talking about digital money.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#605

I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even nee…

That is why there is the need to at the very least discuss government taxation over the mining and transaction of cryptocurrency without evoquing heated but unfruitful debate

Im curious to know how much more in taxes you think I should have to pay on my mining profits above and beyond the capital gains taxes I already have to pay.

I'd understand if you wanted all economic activity to have to figure in the negative externalities before a profit could be realized by stake/shareholders, but your comment implies to me that crypto should have some kind of special tax because you're upset you cant buy a gpu.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold has an upkeep, Fort Knox doesn't operate for free, neither does a bank.

Plus, gold was created by a supernova so you should take that energy into account as well.

> gold was created by a supernova

This is a tangent, but it's more fun than the usual Bitcoin fetishizing and bashing.

There is building evidence that neutron star collisions, not supernovae, are the primary source of the universe's gold [1].

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/did-neutron-stars-or-supernov...

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, gold was created by a supernova so you should take that energy into account as well.

> gold was created by a supernova This is a tangent, but it's more fun than the usual Bitcoin fetishizing and bashing. There is building evidence that neutron star collisions, not supernovae, are the primary source of the universe's gold [1]. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/did-neutron-stars-or-supernov...

Wow thank you. This is the sort of content I come here for.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#608
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The environmental issues are concerning to me. The amount of electricity being burned through for what is essentially a skeuomorphism of gold mining, pretty much primarily for speculation now, is beyond belief. It's a completely artificial, and artificially scarce, product. Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any victory at all it is…

Electricity usage will forever be a human need and people need to realize and accept that. Taking down bitcoin because it's software that runs on computers that uses electricity is not the answer here - renewable and sustainable energy is the answer. Everybody is just echoing the same headline they read on some news article about bitcoin using a lot of energy without thinking it through properly.

I think you are the one not thinking it through properly. Yes, humanity will use energy. But it is kind of by design that bitcoin uses more and more energy, and that just doesn't make sense. Sorry.

Bitcoin is not humanity using energy. It is humanity flushing energy down the drain.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#609
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does Visa offer distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority? Ok, I’ll bite. No, it doesn’t, but what is that actually useful for? The best answer I can come up with is illegal activities and libertarian fantasies. Even if one generously frames “illegal activities” in the context of financial freedom from a tyrannical regime, even that has limits. Any regime with a banking sys…

> what is that actually useful for? Ownership. It's the difference between "I own 20 quatloos because the Bank of Endor says so" vs. "I own 20 quatloos". It supports actual ownership instead of representative or proxy ownership. In the same way that you can have $20 in the bank or $20 in your wallet. When it's in your wallet, it's actually yours and you own it. When it's in your bank account, then you don't actually…

I was hoping someone would give this answer.

OK... so what exactly is "ownership"?

A buddy of mine mined ~160 BTC (currently about USD $8.1m) back when it was fairly worthless. He left it on a hard drive on one of his many machines. BTC became worth something. He look for said machine and HD. Couldn't find it. That BTC is effectively gone forever. So... who owns it?

There are a not small amount of stories like the one above for various levels of non-trivial amounts of money (tens of billions). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/business/tens-of-billions...

Situations like this point to a desire for many/most people to want some sort of custodianship so that they don't accidentally lose something that might be worth millions one day... or even hundreds or thousands one day. At that point, one is looking at banks and banking systems, so we're back at square one.

If one is looking at an alternative to banks, we sometimes/often get stuff like Mt. Gox and Bitfinex -- a situation in which a group of people who want to be independent of the banking system learn the lessons of the value of the banking system the hard way.

So I guess where I am at is that I appreciate a desire to rebel against banks -- they wield way too much power. That said, I don't think that it's particularly prudent (or maybe even possible) to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this matter. The banks definitely do some fairly nefarious stuff, but they also do a metric shitload of very pedestrian-but-useful stuff extremely well on a daily basis. Until a coin can replace that pedestrian-but-useful system with equal grace, I doubt that a coin will be able to replace our current system. Furthermore, somehow if it does, it will be because the current system integrates coins into the current system rather than coins usurping the current system.

So again... what is distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority actually useful for?

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For completeness sake: The BTC network is, by design, setting the difficulty of mining a new block so that its 10 min on avg. Currently there fitting ~2200 transactions in one block [0]. That makes 3.6667 transactions per second. BTC needs a hard fork in order to increase this dramatically. So you were actually quite generous with 10 transactions per second... [0] "Blockchain Charts" https://www.blockchain.com/charts…

> BTC needs a hard fork in order to increase this dramatically Which was proposed, and shot down by core Bitcoiners. They aggressively do not want to increase the transaction limit. Miners want transactions to be expensive, because that's where they'll get their money when the mining reward falls again. It's mind boggling that people will complain about banks conspiring to charge them hypothetical fees, then rush to…

You don't have to use BTC directly to settle transactions.

For example, Lightning is built ontop of BTC:

https://lightning.network/

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