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Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

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Re: Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

#451

Post by Anderkent »

mlyle wrote: post #412
tuankiet65 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of Bitcoin mining is to produce a block , which contains a bunch of transactions. The Bitcoin network dictates that each block's SHA256 hash starts with a certain number of zeroes, so the only way to achieve this is to brute force the block data until you find the "winning" block which hashes to a number of zeroes. Once someone finds a winning block, they're rewarded with a number of Bitcoin. This sub…

> And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions. Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy used to process a transaction goe…

>Then it'd be "only" 65 kilowatt hours, compared to ~1 watt-hour for conventional payment networks.

Sure, and? You get other benefits, those might not be relevant for you in which case keep using conventional payment networks. But if things like counterparty risk of your payment processor come into your calculations, even $10 dollars a transaction migth be a good deal.

Re: Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

#452

Post by andrepd »

windexh8er wrote: post #247
m3kw9 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the PlayStation was able to be used to mine crypto. Game developers depend on gamers to actually play their games, what would you have Sony do? Encourage it or do nothing? Pretty sure their obligations to any shareholders would be to limit it so more gamers can play and buy games for it.

Not trying to pick on your comment but I'm always frustrated when someone points out "obligations to shareholders". I wish people would push back on this more. Sony's obligation when building and selling the PlayStation is to the end user customer. Not the shareholder. Because if Sony has only the shareholder in mind then a gaming console is probably the wrong market to be in from a pure profit perspective. Sony's ob…

The more I read about Friedman the more I'm convinced he's one of the most harmful thinkers/politicians of the past 75 years.

Re: Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

#453

Post by oooooooooooow »

mcny wrote: post #376
mrec wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I seriously fail to understand anti-natalists I think it very much depends on how one experiences life. The two ends of that scale are largely incomprehensible to each other. Your point about "the next Newton" is unrelated, and IMO misses the mark. It's not coincidence that Newton, Hooke, Boyle etc appeared in the same place at the same time, and it's not because there'd been a crippling shortage of randomly arrang…

> The two ends of that scale are largely incomprehensible to each other. Absolutely. Just to set the record straight, I am not anti-birth and I think I agree with GP more than I disagree. We must do everything we can to reduce the carbon footprint per person. I am just logically following what my parent post said. I didn't even know the word anti-natalist. I want all children who are born to be healthy and reach thei…

Your POV comes across much more sensible in this answer, to me. It's become clear how families in societies tend to make fewer children as the civilization progresses. People in some underdeveloped countries try to make a large number of children because the child mortality is so high, and there's a dire need for manual labor. So one way to do better is work towards improving the situation in underdeveloped countries. In developed countries very rarely you see mothers of 8, and a target fertility rate of "below 1", as you stated, is nonsense.

You'll have to pardon my bluntness, I've seen many self proclaimed environmentalists straight up advocate and encourage women to never have children for the sake of the planet.

Re: Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

#454

Post by anonisko »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #325
arcticbull wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The CMP version is a straight-to-landfill product. As soon as it stops being profitable for mining it will have zero resale value, and become e-waste. Like literally every other piece of Bitcoin or crypto mining technology. It’s straight to the landfill every 6 months. Bitcoin generates 100 GRAMS of ewaste for every transaction. Every 2 transactions consumes as much energy as driving a Tesla from SF to NY [edit for…

> Like literally every other piece of Bitcoin or crypto mining technology. I don't get this comparison because Nvidia isn't a Bitcoin mining technology company. Or at least they weren't until a week ago. When someone deems it not profitable to mine on a set of 50 GPUs they purchased, they can resell those to gamers. But these mining cards are just e-waste. > Don’t hate the player; hate the game. Games don't exist wit…

> Games don't exist without players.

Of course they do. Just because a game isn't being played doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Or at least, the rules do.

In a world of 7 billion humans, all you need is 2 to be the first movers and start playing. If the game is rewarding to the players, then it will continue to attract more players and grow until the size of the network of players itself becomes a huge part of the value of playing.

Games are just a protocol. And if the protocol is useful and better than other protocols, or has some first/second mover advantage, then the network using the protocol will grow until it saturates the addressable nodes.

Re: Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

#455

Post by floatboth »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #434
myself248 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must have different definitions of "essential". I'm curious which jobs you're referring to, because to my understanding, every aspect of society that I consider essential, has existed since before the advent of GPUs.

I'm guessing CAD and engineering uses?

CAD doesn't really use GPU power, only a basic viewport that any integrated potato can render. Related simulation stuff (CFD, FEM) can be done with GPU compute but it seems that CPU is usually good enough.

Probably the most critical usage of GPUs is scientific simulations for biology/medicine, climate, space, etc.

Re: Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

#456

Post by sellyme »

mseidl wrote: post #446
sellyme wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The oddest solution I can think of is gamers lease graphics cards at a low low price and nvidia mines on them in the off-hours. This would be a complete non-starter in markets with high electricity costs or temperatures. Running a GTX 3090 at 100% load during the summer where I live would cost $140/month and will heat up my room to about 65°C.

This is the other thing I don't understand. I'm from Germany and our power is around 35 cents per khw. Even using a 14th/s asic with bitcoin as high is it is now, you're losing lots of money. It uses 1,3 kilowatts. The fact that the prices of the cards are so high in Germany now too... the 3080s are at 2000€ plus.

> I'm from Germany and our power is around 35 cents per khw.

I don't know if this is a typo or just a slightly different way of writing it in German, but now I'm trying to work out exactly what a "kilohour watt" would be. I think it's just a millionth of a kilowatt hour? Definitely wouldn't want to be paying those prices!

I can't find anywhere genuinely using that unit, although it is mentioned in this 1979 9th grade Electrics curriculum as part of a True-or-False quiz at page 370: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED182438.pdf

Time to file it in my list of "technically correct but extremely annoying units" along with "5Mm" (5000km) and - mainly in the context of batteries - "10Ah" (10000mAh).

Re: Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

#457

Post by anonisko »

vorpalhex wrote: post #432
squeaky-clean wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like literally every other piece of Bitcoin or crypto mining technology. I don't get this comparison because Nvidia isn't a Bitcoin mining technology company. Or at least they weren't until a week ago. When someone deems it not profitable to mine on a set of 50 GPUs they purchased, they can resell those to gamers. But these mining cards are just e-waste. > Don’t hate the player; hate the game. Games don't exist wit…

> When someone deems it not profitable to mine on a set of 50 GPUs they purchased, they can resell those to gamers. Except they can't. GPUs used for mining are trash - too much heat and stress continuously. Think about the average load on a consumer card used normally - maybe a daily 4 hour gaming binge max? Meanwhile a mining card is running near 100% capacity 24/7, probably without enough cooling.

Assuming the crypto bubble pops catastrophically and never recovers, yes we'll be left with a lot of worthless ASICs and GPUs, but also a ton of newly freed energy sources and chip manufacturing facilities, the development of which will have been funded or subsidized by the crypto speculative craze.

A world with more access to energy and cheaper silicon chips is probably necessary to address the immense challenges civilization is facing.

Re: Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

#458

Post by aseipp »

Anderkent wrote: post #451
mlyle wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions. Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy used to process a transaction goe…

>Then it'd be "only" 65 kilowatt hours, compared to ~1 watt-hour for conventional payment networks. Sure, and? You get other benefits, those might not be relevant for you in which case keep using conventional payment networks. But if things like counterparty risk of your payment processor come into your calculations, even $10 dollars a transaction migth be a good deal.

The entire point of this subthread you're responding to is that the cost of transactions is so energy intensive that those "other benefits" are null and void.

It's called an externality. It doesn't matter if you'd pay $10 for it if the cost imposed is too great. There are a lot of things people would absolutely pay for that we don't allow, because of that. Dumb weird fantasies about decentralization or counterparty risk or whatever don't actually matter if the energy cost is that high. It's just not important enough. Sorry.

Re: Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

#459

Post by mlyle »

Anderkent wrote: post #451
mlyle wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions. Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy used to process a transaction goe…

>Then it'd be "only" 65 kilowatt hours, compared to ~1 watt-hour for conventional payment networks. Sure, and? You get other benefits, those might not be relevant for you in which case keep using conventional payment networks. But if things like counterparty risk of your payment processor come into your calculations, even $10 dollars a transaction migth be a good deal.

Sorry, but even if we significantly improve things such that a transaction "only" takes the equivalent of a few days of my electricity use.. that's not so great. There's better ways to do this that don't require mining.

Indeed, from a decentralization perspective, mining is looking worse than proof of stake, etc.

Re: Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

#460

Post by benrbray »

anonisko wrote: post #450
lurgburg wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a simple ban on converting fiat -> to bitcoin would go a long way? It wouldn't be absolute, black markets are a thing, but there are costs to participate in a black market, which costs will rise over time as good old physical cash declines.

It's definitely not this simple. How would you execute an exchange ban politically? Any politicians who did this would be responsible for instantly vaporizing tons of value owned by an increasingly non negligible fraction of the population that spans a broad spectrum of political affiliation. An exchange ban also wouldn't stop bitcoin, because the network would still continue running and anyone cutoff and stuck with…

I don't really want to see politicians giving bitcoin holders too much weight when making decisions about how the economy should function.

Anyone who owns Bitcoin is gambling. There was never a guarantee that value would go up, or that the government squash the idea entirely.

If we as a society decide that Bitcoin is too dangerous, current holders should accept Bitcoin for what it was: a bad investment.

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