141–150 of 620 posts
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Their margin is approaching 40%. They're basically printing money at this point. It's hilarious how a manufacturer can be so profitable nowadays.
Genuine question because I’m unfamiliar with the market. Why aren’t competitors undercutting these big players? 40% is ridiculous
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> Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. Even if true (iirc there is a lot of doubt whether it is, see Iran), it's still moronic, because consuming renewable energy for shits and giggles obviously means that other energy demands are being met with your usual energy mix instead of that renewable energy that went into shits and giggles as assumed. In terms of net emissions it simply doesn'…
Proof of work cryptos are a pox on society. That said they are some of the most location neutral energy consumers. This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission. 1TW is around 20% of global energy production. This is enough of a factor to impact manufacturing of renewable energy equipment. It allows th…
It's estimated all of the U.S. is ~17% of global energy. [1]
"According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden." [2]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 [2] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
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Honest question: is it possible to make a cryptocurrency that does not rely on some real-world scarce resource (e.g. chips, electricity, drive space)? This seems to be a cornerstone of what makes any crypto valuable in the first place (scarcity), and as long as that scarcity has real-world consequences, it seems like it would have the same result. Chia claimed to "Save the world from proof-of-work wastage", but it wo…
The underlying problem is that you need to prevent sybil attacks, i.e. group X creates many peers in the network and so gets much more voting power than they "ought to" have. The only known way to do so is through attaching a real-world cost to ~votes. The way PoW does so is through equating votes and hashrate, so votes cost real money because hashrate requires real hardware. PoS works in mysterious ways, but the bas…
One way is you could look to some historic list of people (like for example, everyone who had a US passport issued in 1992), and say they are the voters.
An evil actor subverting more than half of those people would be very hard.
Bitfinex (which has been outlawed in the USA) keeps printing Tether to prop up the price of Bitcoin, graphics cards are snatched up as soon as they are manufactured, and they're using an Argentina-sized amount of power to keep the whole thing going. Yes, it works, but no one on earth will ever use these Bitcoins to buy two pizzas ever again. What's the end-game, at this point? As many bagholders as possible?
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Their margin is approaching 40%. They're basically printing money at this point. It's hilarious how a manufacturer can be so profitable nowadays.
Genuine question because I’m unfamiliar with the market. Why aren’t competitors undercutting these big players? 40% is ridiculous
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While Crypto is certainly a contributor to demand, I think a large part of the problem is related to a demand spike similar to the 'toilet paper shortage', where companies try to stockpile because they hear there will be a shortage, which in turn makes the problem worse. Additionally, COVID stoppages caused chaos in supply.
The toilet paper shortage is kind of a bad example, because it was caused by a very real and sudden shift in demand from the very seperate commercial and personal toilet paper manufacturing markets.
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> I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50 years in Taiwan) has really affected them, and various sources seem to confirm it, here's one : https://fortune.com/2021/06/12/chip-shortage-taiwan-drought-... And while I wholeheartedly agree with the crypto/GPU issue, all in a…
A recent Typhoon (one of the half dozen that hammered China) refilled all their reservoirs about a month or so ago. The one thing that complicates economics is that it's not a linear equation like they teach in Macroeconomics. The equations are more or less "true" in a vague sense but each term is actually a differential equation term in both time and other quantities. If you are familiar with simple one variable ODE…
Yes I should have phrased that better, sorry. The thing is, making one wafer of chips takes roughly 3 months, and everything else has even more terrible lead times. So there's a delay in the impact of events.
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Prices for used GPUs are also inflated, though I think they have started to come down a bit. Once Ethereum moves to proof-of-stake (early 2022?) the market will probably get flooded with used GPUs.
I’m saving up for the flood of old GPUs. I can finally realize my dream of taking all my ML work off the cloud once I scoop up some old mining GPUs for relatively cheap
Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
> I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50 years in Taiwan) has really affected them, and various sources seem to confirm it, here's one : https://fortune.com/2021/06/12/chip-shortage-taiwan-drought-... And while I wholeheartedly agree with the crypto/GPU issue, all in a…
And TSMC was never really affected. They were not forced to save water, unlike every other company on the island.
[1] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2021/07/05/200...
Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
(though we should still move crypto away from GPU mining for environmental and security reasons)