Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says • Hacker News Board

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#141

Post by cedilla » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

randomhodler84 wrote: post #114

cedilla wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poisoning the water supply to increase the margin on bottled water is a valid business plan. Banning that is a good answer, and neither authoritarian nor fascist.

Supply again. Supply!! The analogy would be you telling people they have to drink that water a certain way and banned from drinking it the way they want. That’s fascism. Everybody that wants to ban PoW is an authoritarian fascist. Might be an eco fascist, might be a boot licking state loving fascist… still a fascist.

I thought that was a simple story.

No one is banned from drinking poisoned water. What is banned is poisoning other people's water. Really, this isn't that difficult.

If you want to make a point about supply, please make a point about supply instead of just repeating the word randomly.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#142

Post by Buttons840 » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

WatchDog wrote: post #128

vorpalhex wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single miner uses 1,300W (Antminer S9) and runs 24/7. That is 218,400Wh for a week. A gaming computer at ~400W, left on 24/7, is 67,200Wh. That assumes you are playing 24/7 - your idle wattage in sleep is If you run your dryer every night of the week for an hour, you are using about 38,400Wh. You can game 24/7 and dry your clothes every night of the week and STILL use less power than a modern, efficient single mine…

1000W+ power supplies are pretty common on the high end of gaming PC's, I've got a 1200W psu in my machine, as my old 750W PSU was shutting off when I upgraded my GPU. I don't know how many watts it's drawing during a resource intensive game, but it's gotta be a lot more than 400. I think I'll look into getting a wall plug power meter.

RTX 3060 + 5950x CPU under load is like 400 to 450 watts, based on my power meter. That includes power to monitor and other peripherals as well.

I agree with OP though, we're within an order of magnitude of other legit uses, so let people be free. Increase electricity costs or taxes if you want.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#143

Post by dragontamer » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

randomhodler84 wrote: post #139

dragontamer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets say Coinbase and Paypal (both BTC processors) stop supporting your website. Do you think that you'll get as many BTC transactions if this happens?

I don’t think you understand how cryptocurrencies work. There ain’t much Coinbase and PayPal can do to stop someone sending coins to my address. I don’t have a website, nor do I care what Coinbase or PayPal do or say.

I don't think you understand the practical business realities of the internet.

No typical business is going to work with BTC addresses on the raw. They're going to (and currently) using simple APIs like Coinbase API (https://developers.coinbase.com/) to "implement BTC receipts".

As far as US business is concerned, the typical payment processor for bitcoin is Coinbase. They handle the bitcoint transfer, transaction history, and conversion into USD all at the same time.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#144

Post by randomhodler84 » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

ruined wrote: post #131

randomhodler84 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how it is centralized? Because… it isn’t.

there's only one blockchain

Only one Bitcoin blockchain, correct. There are affinity scams like bcash and bsv that try to steal the name.

The users/miners decided, in decentralized fashion by contributing resources. Decentralized!

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#145

Post by jhasse » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:43 PM UTC

cedilla wrote: post #83

Tenoke wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imposing global technological bans so willy-nilly seems like a nice idea only on the surface. Things like machine drying your clothes at home in the US (uncommon in Europe so seems frivolous) uses as much if not more energy. Others might consider gaming or self-hosted servers or who knows what else equally inefficient. Do you really want to put things so easily on the potential chopping block even if this one thing y…

You severely underestimate the power use of proof-of-work blockchains. It's on the scale of nations. But the main difference is that whatever you compare with those blockchains, it will never have the critical flaw: the automatically increasing difficulty. Your dryer doesn't periodically flood the drum to make it harder because more people are interested in tumble drying.

Difficulty isn't necessarely increasing. It could also decrease if less people are interested in mining (e.g. when energy prices go up).

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#146

Post by Xylakant » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:44 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #97

Tenoke wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make sense to compare 1 person gaming or clothes drying to a specific mining machine. The consideration was about global bans and total outputs from those activities.

Bitcoin mining uses more power than the country of Sweden. [1] - https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...

I have no love for bitcoin, but I always hate this comparison. It’s useless. Sweden uses much more energy than it uses power (as pretty much every country) and it also exports power usage by buying finished products. Why is the power usage not compared to something useful? The power or rather energy usage of the global banking network for example?

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#147

Post by pph » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:44 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #66

Tenoke wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imposing global technological bans so willy-nilly seems like a nice idea only on the surface. Things like machine drying your clothes at home in the US (uncommon in Europe so seems frivolous) uses as much if not more energy. Others might consider gaming or self-hosted servers or who knows what else equally inefficient. Do you really want to put things so easily on the potential chopping block even if this one thing y…

The typical drying machine pulls about 2-6 KW while running. A cryptomining rig pulls about ~1.2 KW while mining. A drying machine runs for an hour a week. Let's say 2 hours a week. That's 12kWh per week at the high end for drying. A cryptomining rig running 24/7 ends up using 201 KWh for the same time period. That's 16x more taking the most pessimistic clothes drying usage, so I'm not sure how you're concluding "use…

A household dryer is very unlikely to get anywhere near 6 kW even at peak. In Europe it's common to have 16 A at 220-240 V which gives you a maximum of roughly 3.5 kW.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#148

Post by zozbot234 » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:44 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #138

kmkemp wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put a 20% downpayment on my house and it involved a wire transfer that was scheduled for days in the future that required my physical presence at a centralized authority (bank). With Bitcoin, that process takes less than an hour, with very little "fee", and doesn't involve any of the "trust", which was represented in my example by time delays, scheduling, and traveling.

Oddly enough making buying a house faster is not really a priority for me. I appreciated that mechanisms of trust kicked in for that transaction - my bank wouldn’t release mortgage money to anyone but a lawyer or notary, and my notary would not have released money to the seller unless they actually owned the place and transferred ownership to me. Making that trustless means I am open to scam sellers, and have to trus…

> Making that trustless means I am open to scam sellers

Cryptocurrencies support escrow transactions, where a mutually-trusted third party (e.g. an arbitrator) can decide whether the transaction should go forward if buyer and seller disagree. This is still "trustless" compared to other systems because it only depends on mutual trust wrt. each individual transaction, not on a pre-defined central authority.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#149

Post by friendlydog » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

mrfinn wrote: post #28

World really needs a ban on PoW cryptocurrencies. I guess on one side lot of people is not caring about it as long as they make some money of it, and in the other side maybe other people in power, is not caring as that would make a perfect excuse to ban any kind of cryptocurrency. I guess too we all will care as soon as the devastation caused by the climate change becomes a massive life threatening issue.

In 2019 the US used 18.27 billion gallons of fuel from airlines. If we limited flights to once a week we would save an amazing amount of fuel and increase flight occupancy, and decrease consumption as people would need to decide if the trip really needed a week layover if they couldn't take care of the problem in a 24 hour period. Much more than crypto consumption unless I am wrong.

Edit:

Commercial aviation makes up 918 million metric tons of carbon.

Bitcoin mining makes up 22 million metric tons.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#150

Post by II2II » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

ray__ wrote: post #71

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #21

Man, I'm glad I snuck a 1080ti purchase in a few years ago when BTC was crashing hard. Of course, being Nvidia means it'll suck if I have to transition to a Linux Desktop before the next cryptoshit market crash, but if it takes that long then they've probably managed to kill of high-end PC gaming along with the environment and I'll have bigger problems.

I started using Nvidia cards with Linux about two years ago and haven't had a single issue so far. It has always been Ubuntu, so that might be part of it, but I get the impression that Nvidia's beef with Linux isn't an issue anymore.

I have one machine using AMD and another using Nvidia. The only quirk with the Nvidia drivers, from my perspective, is having to install them separately under most distributions while AMD graphics just work. Even then, there is a lot less hassle to using Nvidia drivers under Linux than either vendor's drivers under Windows.

(I recognize that there have been issues with Wayland support in the past, it creates issues for some developers, and support for modern Nvidia cards on most other operating systems is non-existent. There are likely other issues, but it seems like most of the issues would affect a small number of people.)