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

blogs.nvidia.com

641–650 of 762 posts

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

#641

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The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over. The idea that crypto is a "store of value" seems like meager coping with the fact that transaction rates in a distributed system necessarily must suck compared to what Visa, et. al. are doing with IBM mainframes and racks of x86 hardware contained in the same datacenter (i.e. 1~2ms latency dom…

I agree that use cases may be limited with crypto, but some are pretty valid. E.g. international transfers are faster and cheper with crypto.

Usually, when i do international transfers, i expect a fixed known rate. Transferring to bitcoin or whatever and then having to carry the risks in wild swings in value is not really my cup of tea.

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

#642
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I upgraded to a 3070 I sold my 1080 Ti for 50% more than I paid for it and at this point I think I could have gotten more (it was a blower so not exactly a desirable card though). Cost me 100 bucks after tax to do the upgrade. Then I scored a 3080 and sold the 3070 for $700 plus shipping. It's to the point where I'm thinking about selling my "backup" 1060 3GB card, but if my GPU died then I would be in real trou…

ETh DAG is over 4GB now, no one wants 3GB cards

prices are still over $150 which is more than I paid for it new back in 2017.

like, shockingly to some, there exists a market for GPUs for doing things other than mining. And not all coins require 8GB cards either.

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

#643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100k transactions per section w/ serializability and all of the other things required to satisfy real-world concerns like fraud and regulatory constraints?

Bold of you to assume that the crypto-crowd have seriously taken fraud and and consumer protections into account. Crypto-currencies are a poor technical “solution” to a socio-economic problem, and while this remains the case associated problems (regulatory constraints, etc) will continue to be things that are relegated to the “don’t care/won’t fix/too hard” basket at worst, and stapled on as an afterthought at best.…

It's more than that, they view existing outside the reach of the legal system and consumer protections as being a benefit. "No chargebacks" is a major selling point that the community uses to evangelize to merchants, and the flip side of that is that it's much less protections for consumers.

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

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This will only penalise average users. How? Currently, average users can't get their hands on any of these cards because they're being bought in bulk by crypto miners. As soon as mining becomes unprofitable, the market will be flooded with cards that have been run 24/7 for months or years, which isn't a recipe for a good experience. The average user can only benefit from getting access to these cards again. nVidia…

> They're obviously going to test the firmware against common workloads. They can only test against pre-existing software. If they start penalizing uncommon workloads, this kills innovation in many areas, videogames included. In one of my projects I'm using GPGPUs for complicated optimizations in CAM/CAE. I don't use any libraries/frameworks. From nVidia's point of views, my compute shaders are extremely uncommon wor…

Just use a floating point op and it'll probably be never picked up as hashing.

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

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dollar is backed by the petro-dollar, the fact that Saudi Arabia and friends only accept dollars when selling oil is one of the reason the dollar is strong. When you factor in that the US military protects the petro-dollar while at the same time being the biggest consumer on earth of oil, it starts adding up. Europe and therefore the Euro is also protected by the US army. All of a sudden, your fiat's energy consu…

It's not like we'd stop protecting our oil supply if we converted to Bitcoin. We'd still need oil for cars and planes and so on. If we manage to stop using oil, we won't need the military to protect it anymore, even if we haven't converted to Bitcoin. So I don't think we can lay the military's oil consumption at fiat's feet.

It has nothing to do with protecting the oil supply. The U.S. military is deployed to ensure that oil producing countries don't go and sell their oil for anything other than dollars. Protecting the oil is completely orthogonal.

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

#646
post #534
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin (and the other coin systems) ultimately need to be able to handle transactions by a large number of users if they are to gain widespread acceptance. If I want to buy something with my coins, I don't expect to see "Sorry your transaction timed out. Please try again in a few moments". That is NOT confidence inspiring to me as the coin holder, and certainly not to the person/business expecting to receive my coin…

Transactions can't time out and there are two main solutions for businesses that want to accept bitcoin: * Accept transactions that are in the mempool * Use the lightning network Accepting mempool transactions obviously has lesser guarantees and unfortunately lightning hasn't seen great adoption even from centralised exchanges.

transactions that are not chosen for inclusion in a block (likely due to low transaction fees) do age out of the mempool eventually, so there is a network-enforced "timeout". It's not a hard number but it will eventually happen.

Also obviously there is a human-imposed "timeout" too. Like, if you buy something with Bitpay they expect your transaction to be included in one of the next 3 blocks. If it's not, they will "timeout" the transaction and it bounces. If it is eventually mined for inclusion, they will voluntarily return it to you minus whatever fees they choose to charge (average transaction fee is $24 right now, so you will lose $24 sending it to them, then $24 for them sending it back to you, and $24 to send it again).

https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

(of course they don't have to send it back to you, there is no network-enforced mechanism for this, they could bounce the transaction and then if it gets included an hour later they could not pay you back, the money is under their control once you've signed the transaction. They could even maintain a separate mempool of these "dead" transactions and use a friendly mining pool to process those transactions preferentially...)

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

#647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's the motherboard, not the videocard. Every motherboard does it.

Yep, that's through the BGRT, which is part of ACPI. I'm not actually sure if a GPU could export one to the BIOS, but I assume not.

The connection to the monitor is physically located on the video card. So the gpu could display whatever it wants without asking or coordinating with the motherboard.

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

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> skeuomorphism of gold mining I'm gonna steal that one, thanks. :D

That's putting it in the best possible light. Mining gold leaves the world with physical blocks of gold, which has no continuous upkeep cost. "Mining" cryptocurrency leaves the world with an asset that requires continual upkeep (further "mining") in order to maintain that asset. Any significant drop in the network's hashrate opens it up to attacks. The upkeep cost for Bitcoin is, and by necessity must be, proportiona…

I wouldn't be surprised if gold mining is way worse for the environment than Bitcoin mining.

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

#649
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean "the really easy part"? The Beacon Chain doesn't do much at all. Last time I checked, they hadn't even got a design for how contract code would be executed in Eth 2.0.

Yes, consensus is the hard part. That was a massive research effort, with a lot of game theory and recently-invented cryptography. Once you have that, you can get consensus on literally any data just by putting a hash of that data in each beacon chain block. In this case, a hash of the EVM state, while the EVM runs as before. There's still some discussion on the design, but that's more about deciding the best of mult…

Consensus is not the hard part. By "game theory", you mean "agree with everyone else, or we'll take your Eth away".

The hard part is figuring out how to execute arbitrary code and synchronize it across all shards, without removing the benefits of having shards in the first place.

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

#650
post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that use cases may be limited with crypto, but some are pretty valid. E.g. international transfers are faster and cheper with crypto.

Usually, when i do international transfers, i expect a fixed known rate. Transferring to bitcoin or whatever and then having to carry the risks in wild swings in value is not really my cup of tea.

When sending international transfers to a different currency, you often get unreasonably bad rate, banks kinda give you the exchange rate they see fit. Which often turns out to be like 4% fee. Paypal is the worst at that, but many normal banks are also bad. If you send 1 mill, you end up paying 50k just for exchanging eur to usd for instance
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