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Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

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Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#281

Post by falcolas »

ikt wrote: post #275
falcolas wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, it feels like the corporate perpetual “13 months out“. i.e. never coming, always on the horizon.

this is a major update to a system that handles trillions in transactions, i'm happy they're taking their time on it. tbh though very seriously likely this year, all the major infrastructure is in place

And, as ever, the exact same thing was said early last year, too. And the year before, if my memory serves me. I’ll have more faith that it’s actually coming once Star Citizen comes out.

Until it’s actually released, skepticism’s the safest bet.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#282

Post by jefftk »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #277
itsoktocry wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> therefore there's absolutely no way prices of hardware and energy will return to normal until governments won't stop this nonsense. For all its faults, the market is great at solving these problems. Though I suppose it depends on what you mean by "normal".

The problem is that miners are buying GPUs. Without denying the problem, how can the market fix this?

Historically, for many products, high demand leads to lower unit prices as manufacturers become more efficient. Since we're a decade into GPU mining, there's been a lot of time for manufacturers to adjust. While so far they have not been able to keep up with demand, I don't think it's clear that they never will.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#283

Post by benreesman »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #116
benreesman wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m annoyed as the next guy that my deep-learning rigs are costing 5 figures, but “scumbag” might be a little strong for people who arbitrage NVIDIA’s repeated failures to effectively segment their GPU offering?

But they are. I ranted about this here a few weeks ago, but we're still getting intermittent rolling blackouts because of energy shortages caused by miners moving into the country (we have cheap electricity… for now at least).

As I mention above: I’ve got no special love for Ethereum miners.

But why you’re trying to lay your municipality’s busted, corrupt-ass utility’s issues at their feet is perplexing.

Ethereum miners at their worst are the maggots crawling around in your community’s failure to form a voting bloc to reform utilities.

At best they provide an arbitrary demand for electricity that makes solar panels obvious.

So I missed the part where you’re a newcomer troll.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#284

Post by chii »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #277
itsoktocry wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> therefore there's absolutely no way prices of hardware and energy will return to normal until governments won't stop this nonsense. For all its faults, the market is great at solving these problems. Though I suppose it depends on what you mean by "normal".

The problem is that miners are buying GPUs. Without denying the problem, how can the market fix this?

GPUs are manufacturable. The market is meant to signal to manufacturers that this is profitable to make more of, and thus, more would become available in the future. Unfortunately, the current world events conspired to not allow this balance to happen - chip shortages and logistics problems etc.

Give it a few more years, and it will balance back out.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#285

Post by 300bps »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #277
itsoktocry wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> therefore there's absolutely no way prices of hardware and energy will return to normal until governments won't stop this nonsense. For all its faults, the market is great at solving these problems. Though I suppose it depends on what you mean by "normal".

The problem is that miners are buying GPUs. Without denying the problem, how can the market fix this?

LHR was one attempt at it with varying success.

And it won’t take a few years to balance out. If ETH really does go PoS in the next six months then you’ll see a lot of RTX 3080 and 3090 come on the market for very cheap.

A lot of ETH miners say they’ll go to RVN or others but there is no way other coins can take the hash rate currently devoted to ETH.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#286

Post by kelseyfrog »

jefftk wrote: post #282
kelseyfrog wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that miners are buying GPUs. Without denying the problem, how can the market fix this?

Historically, for many products, high demand leads to lower unit prices as manufacturers become more efficient. Since we're a decade into GPU mining, there's been a lot of time for manufacturers to adjust. While so far they have not been able to keep up with demand, I don't think it's clear that they never will.

Sorry, not following. Can you explain how efficiencies in GPU production interact with network difficulty to produce lower GPU prices? I'm not finding much in the literature.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#287

Post by sdn90 »

I'm very curious to see how this plays out over the next year:

1. BTC dominance seems to be getting lower

2. Ethereum PoS seems very likely to launch this year IMO

3. Alt chains which run on PoS like AVAX and SOL have been eating into Ethereum's market share of the smart contract space. Newly onboarded retail users to crypto have been priced out of Ethereum due to fees over the past year. The alt chains running PoW seem to have no real usage.

4. Fed raising interest rates could dampen the growth of crypto asset prices

If I put myself in the shoes of a miner running GPU's, once the merge happens I only see these options:

1. I switch to a chain that is still profitable for GPU's. None of these have much demand for block space and unless that changes, other profit minded miners will be dumping the token.

2. Switch to some kind of P2P GPU-aaS like Render or Livepeer. I haven't been following this space to closely but I doubt it would have the same returns as mining Ethereum over the past years.

3. Exit out of mining and sell GPU's

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#288

Post by jokethrowaway »

kingo55 wrote: post #248
squarefoot wrote: post #234

One word: yes. https://www.hardwaretimes.com/gpu-mining-farm-w-over-4000-ge... https://hothardware.com/news/a-look-inside-a-massive-rtx-307... https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-shortages-worsen-crypt... And energy prices, of course. More demand = higher prices. Also keep in mind that cryptocurrencies become harder to mine with time, therefore the pursuit of more powerful hardware and more energy isn't going to st…

At least on the ethereum side they are moving to a Proof of Stake system which doesn't require the insane hardware and energy that Proof of Work consensus requires. So there will be some relief on the horizon. Also, I expect over time that fewer cryptos will use Proof of Work. Unless you're Bitcoin/Ethereum, proof of work chains get attacked all the time. Look at Ethereum Classic.

Proof of Stake implementation has been as never-ending as COVID restrictions.

Besides, it's not clear whether PoS won't create governance problems. PoW is a pretty smart solution of proving you spent some money and pays the miners so that people who have computing power won't attack the system.

PoS is trusting rich people, hoping they won't bring down everything for who knows what profit - a government printing money to delay a market crisis, is not that far.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#289

Post by jokethrowaway »

chii wrote: post #284
kelseyfrog wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that miners are buying GPUs. Without denying the problem, how can the market fix this?

GPUs are manufacturable. The market is meant to signal to manufacturers that this is profitable to make more of, and thus, more would become available in the future. Unfortunately, the current world events conspired to not allow this balance to happen - chip shortages and logistics problems etc. Give it a few more years, and it will balance back out.

There is not enough competition, people got conditioned to high prices for 10 years - once prices are raised they are not coming back.

Good luck starting your GPU company

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#290

Post by jokethrowaway »

groone wrote: post #213
barkingcat wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nvidia straight up just stopped selling any cards, declined all their client/customer base, and just put 100% of their global output to mining cryptocurrencies, I think it's a good chance nvidia can do a 50%+1 attack on both bitcoin and ethereum at the same time. Once they successfully do the attack, they can take over the blockchains and allocate all cryptocurrencies to themselves, cash out, and it'd probably reg…

The part where you say "cash out" is hilarious. There is no cash in it. You only get to keep the bits. Any cash comes from buyers and if there is any attack all the buyers are scared away.

There are BTC futures, they could use those to bet against BTC
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