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TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

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Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#191

Post by yarky »

cletus wrote: post #55
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #32

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 agree with this but it's even worse than that. Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina. Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap…

> in regions with cheap hydro power, the miners can use so much power they end up making power more expensive for everyone.

Not if there are laws to keep electricity price within a range. In places like Canada electricity is not necessarily traded in public for-profit markets, and must by law stay below inflation. I agree that in can be a problem in (most of?) the US.

> I really wonder what happens to Bitcoin (or any PoW coin) when it no longer becomes economical to mine new coins.

That might be the equilibrium price, the electricity/production cost. Isn't the pow algorithm smart enough to keep rewarding at least above electricity cost?

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#192

Post by Alex3917 »

ren_engineer wrote: post #172
pcurve wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their margin is approaching 40%. They're basically printing money at this point. It's hilarious how a manufacturer can be so profitable nowadays.

"service economy" was always a meme being sold to the gullible masses, manufacturing capacity is the only thing that matters for an economy. Manufacturing has always printed the money It amazes me how the US allowed itself to be nearly deindustrialized after manufacturing effectively won them WWII and global dominance. Now the US can't even make ventilators or face masks

> "service economy" was always a meme being sold to the gullible masses, manufacturing capacity is the only thing that matters for an economy.

Service economies work great in places where food and housing are free, so money is only needed to buy luxury goods. They only work poorly in the US because capitalists have leverage over service workers.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#193

Post by rjbwork »

JackC wrote: post #119
_huayra_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Decentralized currencies rely on proof of economic waste. It's possible to imagine forms of economic waste that have different externalities, e.g. different environmental impacts. But we don't have evidence yet (that I know of?) that introducing one decentralized currency reduces waste in another one -- if you did introduce a new currency that wasted economic value in a new way, there's no evidence that crypto as a w…

>In this model crypto is like ... an emergent antipattern of networked civilization, where the network starts to waste every economic resource that it can "see" and provably waste.

Exactly. As I've said to a number of people I've discussed crypto with, I'm happy to advocate for making PoW systems illegal. They'll happily gobble up a Dyson sphere of energy and a solar system of hardware in service of running a payment system with a tiny fraction of the throughput of any credit card company or bank.

They are a complete waste of resources, energy, and human endeavor and society would be better off without them. I'll reserve judgement on PoS and other non-PoW systems until they're more widespread and I actually understand them better.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#194

Post by Nullabillity »

JackC wrote: post #119
_huayra_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Decentralized currencies rely on proof of economic waste. It's possible to imagine forms of economic waste that have different externalities, e.g. different environmental impacts. But we don't have evidence yet (that I know of?) that introducing one decentralized currency reduces waste in another one -- if you did introduce a new currency that wasted economic value in a new way, there's no evidence that crypto as a w…

> Decentralized currencies rely on proof of economic waste.

See also: the gold standard.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#195

Post by Kye »

ConcernedCoder wrote: post #165
cletus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this but it's even worse than that. Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina. Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap…

> I'd be more OK with this if crypto in fact solved a problem for most people. see: https://foldingathome.org/

What does this have to do with cryptocurrencies/cryptoassets? It's almost a decade older than Bitcoin. The inspiration (SETI@Home) is even older.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#196

Post by haakon »

phone8675309 wrote: post #182
drcode wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end game is to transition to Proof of Stake, which doesn't have these problems and has other security advantages.

Cool, when is Bitcoin moving to Proof of Stake? Before or after the FSF release Hurd?

There are no such plans, and it's extremely unlike there ever will be.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#197

Post by dingaling »

StephenSmith wrote: post #115

I'm in charge of sourcing components for multiple companies right now. I believe they could double (100%) prices and companies would pay it. There's chips that I'm sourcing from obscure places in China just to get the part and paying whatever price they ask. Designers are getting overwhelmed because they're having to redesign boards for components that are available, only to realize by the time they finish the change…

Bosch recently opened their own chip fab in Dresden, primary focus for now is on automotive chips and those required for their in-house tools and appliances:

https://www.bosch.com/stories/bosch-chip-factory-dresden/

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#198

Post by formerly_proven »

vmception wrote: post #164
formerly_proven wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

The energy use is of captured energy that would be lost in transport to other energy users, because it uses just as much energy or more to transport it. This means that “renewable energy more than the output of Argentina was always being wasted for over a century every day because it was uneconomical to transport it” Crypto mining has been unique in that it only needs power and housing to stay dry, low infrastructure…

If your first paragraph is about rejected energy, then there's not a lot to say here except that rejected energy doesn't mean what you think it does.

If not, then I don't know what it is supposed to be about. No one builds power plants in places where there is no demand for power. Electric power can be carried over pretty large distances though with very low losses, so having say a few hundred km between a hydro-dam and a large consumer is not a major problem.

According to your post the best result would be that Bitcoin farms are powered by renewable energy plants build in places where nobody would have any use for that power anyway, because they're too remote to connect to any consumer. Even if this happens (and from what we're able to tell, it is not, instead we see coal and natural gas plants being ramped up to power bitcoin farms), it's still a net negative because building renewable energy power plants (as well as bitcoin farms) causes a significant amount of emissions. In normal use of e.g. a solar panel, this makes sense because it displaces non-renewable energy sources with higher emissions, so net emissions are reduced. In your scenario, there's a bunch of solar farms in the middle of the Saharan desert mining bitcoins, which - at this point - yes would not be able to displace non-renewable energy, but still represents a net-negative regardless because of the effort required to put all that shit there in the first place.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#199

Post by DanTheManPR »

randomopining wrote: post #125
gootler wrote: post #86

Taiwan is China.

At this point it's literally it's own country called Taiwan.

The government of Taiwan has been willing to maintain the status kayfabe, including maintain the "Republic of China" name and holding China's seat at the UN for a couple of decades. It all seems quite ridiculous from the outside, but a lot of people in the region still get quite pissy about the particulars.

Re: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage

#200

Post by samvher »

nightski wrote: post #173
bluGill wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto mining is a market rate good.

Nvidia already added in a hardware crypto mining block to it's latest models and they are still having massive supply issues. It's not about crypto even though everyone likes to make a big deal out of it to feel better.

The latter does not follow from the former (even if it might be true). The mining block only affects the latest batches of a few models, but profitability of mining also affects demand for the other models, for AMD GPUs, and in the second-hand market. Unless the supply of mining-blocked GPUs is sufficient to cover all displaced demand from these other segments, it doesn't necessarily help much.
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