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

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651–660 of 762 posts

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

#651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we're firmly in the ridiculous arguments camp already, it may as well be pointed out that all of that energy leaving the planet is a good thing. It's why the earth isn't a barren hellscape like venus, whose atmosphere captures energy much more efficiently. Most people would actually prefer that we capture just a bit less than we currently do.

So you are saying we will capture so much energy from the sun that the entire planet will become inhospitable. Do we then just keep burning fossil fuels until earth becomes inhospitable instead? Or do we kill ourselves and stop the need for energy use entirely? Remember that humans will forever have energy needs as we advance.

Absolutely yes, at a sufficiently big-picture view the eventual problem is energy expenditure itself. Capturing more energy from the sun, or more realistically something like large-scale fission/fusion utilization still results in an increased amount of energy being deposited into the earth's atmosphere even aside from the greenhouse effect.

I am obviously not an expert but I looked at the magnitude of the energy itself vs the greenhouse effect and it's about 10-100x less potent than the greenhouse effect. But that means that even if we had 100% clean carbon-free energy, we can't continue increasing our energy utilization forever. And we still have a huge portion of the world that is below a first-world living standard and will eventually want automobiles and air conditioning and vacations using jet travel too.

IF we do not level off the energy consumption of the "first world" standard of living sometime within the next 50-100 years then we are on a course to cook ourselves to death even with 100% clean energy.

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

#652
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you would compare Visa with Bitcoin, unless you had no idea what you were talking about.. Visa does not enable one to transact without the rest of the banking system. It's useless on its own. Really pointless point of reference.

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…

When this becomes an actual problem (it isn’t yet), the lightning network is ready to handle that kind of throughout.

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

#653
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.

You don't do bitcoin. Bitcoin is impractical. We are talking about crypto in general, not just bitcoin. Nowadays you can for example get xlm from a cex, move it to your wallet and send that. It's fast and with very low fees( lower than paypal etc). There's even a stablecoin you can exchange it for so you dont have to worry about price swings.

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

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

That hardfork happened already; it's called Bitcoin Cash.

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

#655

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…

Besides, a Syrian refugees who can manage to get their liquid assets into a digital store like bitcoin could probably alsoamage to get them into a commodities account and buy gold. Bitcoin isn't the only way, or even most convenient way, of moving assets across borders.

Paper gold maybe. Buying actual gold tends to be harder than one might expect and it's almost always monitored and kept track of.

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

#656
post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to look at the planet as a set of resources. Resources grow and shrink, but are definite and limited in any given moment all the same. Generally, spending them on less productive tasks is bad. It's cool they are using solar power vs burning gas/coal, but it doesn't change the fact that those same resources would benefit the planet much more if used in a different capacity. If a billionaire hoarded manufactur…

Each hour 430 quintillion Joules (430 exajoules) of energy from the sun hits the Earth.[1] It is almost exclusively reflected back out into space, and wasted. We have nearly no incentive to capture it, so the energy is being wasted at a mind boggling scale. I've been mining cryptocurrencies with solar power for about 6 years or so. The great thing about crypto mining is that it creates a price floor for energy usage.…

Nope, no, don't go that way. Yes, the Sun does bathe the Earth with a constant stream of energy, a stream that remains mostly unused. The point is, that it is also mostly not useful energy, energy we have technology to convert into forms we can make use of. And that is a fundamental quality of that Energy.

The infinitesimal portion we do manage to convert with the currently available technology shouldn't be pissed away in the wind so lightly.

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

#657
post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't, it's not accurate at all. "Mining" in the context of Ethereum is what powers it, not some abstract useless calculations.

AFAIK Ethereum is still proof of work, meaning miners are not doing useful calculations. Miners are not just running smart contracts.

this is correct, I think solidity doesn't even run on a gpu at all

The energy usage of ethereum comes from the proof-of-work DAG, not the solidity execution. You can easily see this by running a (non mining) ethereum node, any decent CPU will churn through the transactions in blocks in a matter of milliseconds (~200 ms per block), not the 13 seconds it takes to generate that block

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

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no "endless tweaking" to keep your GPU mining rig working. Constant GPU driver updates are the norm for gaming GPUs because GPU drivers include a huge pile of workarounds for buggy games, and there are new buggy games hitting the market all the time. But if you just want to run a specific straightforward GPGPU task like a miner, you only need to get one driver version properly cracked to unlock full performan…

Plus, part of the profitability of mining cards is being able to resell them once their profitability is low (and they do usually still work fine for gaming after a year of mining). The new mining cards will have to be insanely profitable to make them look better than the 30-series cards.

And i suspect this is one of the reasons Nvidia is doing this. Market Segmentation -> Sell two cards instead of one that gets resold on ebay

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

#659

Buying gamer GPU allows to sale it later, when crypto bubble pops up. Buying specialized hardware makes it useless later. Prices (and availability) for specialized hardware must be really sweet to satisfy miners.

And that's exactly what this move is meant to do.

This move is not going to change anything. The Mining demand is more or less inelastic as long as it's profitable. Many of the major miners have power and space to basically expand with as many cards as they can get their hands on. So this card is just going to accelerate their expansion.

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

#660
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warren Buffett, the renowned investor, famously dismissed gold in a speech given at Harvard in 1998. He said: “It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or some place. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.” It sucks that gold is so desired just for its look. If it were cheaper it wou…

The same about diamonds.

Diamonds are worse; they are only expensive because the supply is artificially restricted, and the marketing makes it obligatory for every groom to buy a diamond ring.
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