Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So are you also opposed to aluminum production?
[deleted]
Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half
661–670 of 762 posts
Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half
#662Gamers 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…
> it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption Because it makes so much sense to dedicate equal or if not vastly greater resources to playing games?
Gaming needs the same cards, but they are not running at max 24/7.
Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 its…
What I am really getting out all of this is that at some point we will hit the human population limit that earth can sustain, even with renewable energy sources.
Whether or not that limit is actually reachable and something we should actually worry about I don't know. i.e: is there enough physical space for that many people on earth where each person uses X amount of renewable energy where the sum of X is greater than the amount of energy the earth can actually capture without being negatively affected.
Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
Destroying few delapidated homes to make space to build a block of flats on that plot of land? Sure! But not to drive up demand there are better ways to do that in case of housing. There are places where more efficient housing can't be built bot because lack of demand but local regulations that serve local wealth owners. Waste food... Not so much bacause food preduction doesn't really suffer as a result of low demand…
> Coal power plants close because there are cheaper ways to make electricity now, not because demand dropped. The price for power is set by supply and demand. Increased demand for power increases the price. This means that coal plants can afford to operate depending on the amount of demand. Here’s a story about coal plants closing due to lower demand: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/the-covid-1... He…
Can't argue with that. Low power demand accelerates decommissioning coal based power plants that was planned already. We save some CO2 with that short term. But demand will bounce back eventually after the pandemic and things will not get better without significant investments in power generation. And massive demand is what drives the investment.
In CO2 free future we'll have all of home heating running on electricity and all of our transportation too. Power generation needs incredible amount of investments over the next 50 years. I believe crypto mining might drive those investments so we are ready for that future.
Even now there are instances where flexible demand of crypto miners helps balance the grid now: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-01/bitcoin-m...
Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half
#665Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on…
Maybe it's time to create an adversarial network that can figure out how to mine on the GPU without causing it to halve the hash rate, train that network on an NVIDIA GPU, and shove it to them.
That's not how adversarial networks work
Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half
#666Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
> because you're upset you cant buy a gpu.
This is exactly the kind of antagonism that is detrimental to everybody. Read op comment again:
> Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation
I am not "upset I can't buy a GPU", mining uses a lot of power[1] and its environmental impact is not being taken into consideration. So yeah, if mining is damaging the planet and if we can assess the damage quantitatively and link it to mining without a doubt, it should have to be taxed accordingly.
Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
As does the statement that because hydro dams are being used mining is not doing environmental damage.
But that’s not what I said. I said the amount of CO2 being generated was probably not as high as you might expect from a naive reading of the kWh consumed.
Sure, but to truly avoid all naive readings would be to analyse the total impact of constructing the hydro plant in such an out of the way place for the purpose of mining.
There's an emissions cost to producing the equipment required to construct the hydro plant.
There's an emissions cost associated with constructing the hydro plant.
This is multiplied if you are building it in an area without heavy industry (no existing demand, remember?) - because you have to construct your own support infrastructure and road network to build and service the plant.
Not to mention the impact of the now flooded 'wilderness' (which is highly likely to contain carbon sinks).
Or the impact to forestation and vegetation downstream.
Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try handling millions of automated machine to machine micro transactions per second on the Visa network. The Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin can handle this today.
Lightning network is interesting, but what you say really isn't true in any practical sense.
Care to explain why not? Because it is true in every practical sense.
Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I find the "Bitcoin burns energy" argument completely laughable. With all due respect, your skepticism appreciated; let me explain.
A more useful perspective is "humanity uses more and more energy for computation". The many devices which enable us to post these comments burn energy. The astronomically high video-traffic these days burns energy. Modelling early universe, protein folding, advanced chemistry... every damn thing we compute has the cost of burning energy.
As an aside, let's not forget how much electricity gets used simply for heating. There's no shortage already of "smart heaters" with a nice side effect of mining you some coins while they keep your house warm. Anything environmentally wrong with that?
See, it's not the endgoal of cryptocurrencies to burn energy; it's simply a cost. Now, thanks to bitcoin, we can have economies of scale drive optimization of that cost: improving the core compute-per-joule ratio of our technology. With all the collateral improvements across the globe with regards to environmental impact.
Could you say that porn distribution industry "kind of by design" lead to people watching more and more porn? Regardless of the answer, thanks to that we can have fast internets now. Similarly with bitcoin: thanks to it, we'll pack more & more bitflips into every joule, up to the thermodynamic limit.