461–470 of 520 posts
I have no sympathy for miners, but purely from software freedom perspective this is maximally evil: closed-source software that decides what you can use your hardware for. 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.
Could it possibly even be usable as a second card in a SLI setup?
I don't think Nvidia (or most companies) should be deciding what to do with the tools they sell. I don't want someone telling me what software I can run with my CPU or GPU any more than I want someone telling me what I am allowed to build with the hammers or screwdrivers I buy.
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…
I checked your numbers against [0]. Road distance NY -> SF = 2900 miles [1]. Model S mileage is 290Wh/mi [2]. That is 840kW for Tesla against 657kW for a single transaction. This is all order-of-magnitude stuff but... wow. [0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [1] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=road%20distance%20san%... [2] https://www.zeviecars.com/browse-cars/tesla-model-s
Perhaps this is the cost of running a secure system.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 r…
The cost imposed is proportional to the fee, since the fee has to pay for the electricity used to mine the transaction. And $10 of electricity is just... not a lot to worry about.
If you believe the electricity consumption in general has huge externalities, you have bigger problems than mining, and once you address those the mining cost/diffiuclty will adjust
I have no sympathy for miners, but purely from software freedom perspective this is maximally evil: closed-source software that decides what you can use your hardware for. 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.
> 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…
That won’t stop Nvidia having a near monopoly on high end GPU. They use this to jack up the price of machine learning cards as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
OK, I think you're talking here about VHEMT [1] and the like, which is only very tangentially related to traditional [2] antinatalism. The latter is more a reduction-of-suffering philosophy, in much the same way that vegans/vegetarians/etc believe that it's better for an animal never to live at all than to endure the conditions of modern meat farming.
Obviously neither movement stands much chance of success since neither stands any chance of convincing an entire population. If they have any effect at all, the former will tend to eliminate genes associated with environmentalism, while the latter will tend to eliminate genes associated with unhappiness (which doesn't sound so bad).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov...
[2] It's not new, goes back to Ancient Greece at least
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s some high class mental gymnastics though. Because if you divide the energy spent across the number of transactions you land back where you started. And if the energy was burned for 0 transaction capacity then the underlying would be worthless. Secure but worthless. So it doesn’t take much inference to realize that the value is in transactbility. You’ll have to explain to me why when mining a block of transacti…
« it doesn’t make sense to break that down on a per transaction basis with division » Because the division result is meaningless as it just reflects how full a block was, not the cost of a transaction. Again: miners expend the same amount of energy regardless if they are validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block. Exactly the same amount. And whatever math you might be doing doesn't account for batched transactions…
For one that’s horrifyingly wasteful - you say it like it’s a good thing but it’s really not. And two, I’m describing the network as it exists today. That’s not dishonest; there’s no plan to increase the quantity of transactions per block. If it ever changes we can run the numbers again. But saying it’s a bad way to run the numbers is like saying there’s no cap on the number of bitcoins because the core team could just change the cap. Ok, and if they do, we’ll run the math again.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am referring to this [1] Linus, not Torvalds. Watch the video. You have already decided that it is the miners that are screwing you over, and even when presented with evidence, you to the contrary, you keep shilling NVDA. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfIibTBaoMM
Sorry, you're right, I misunderstood the Linus reference as Torvals not Linus Tech Tips. But so you count reductionist click bait opinion commentary on YouTube as "evidence"? Commentary that comes from a company who's profit motive is driven by clicks and attention? Saying that companies primarily care about their bottom line is tautological, it contains no information. It's still a straw man regarding whether or not…