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

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

#151

Post by cecilpl2 »

kmkemp wrote: post #111
kennywinker wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, I’ll never forget when I purchased my house and the armored truck delivered my money to the buyer. /s Most transactions don’t need a decentralized trust-less value transfer. But bitcoin is not only attempting to displace the small sliver of transactions that DO need trustless/decentralized

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.

I for one do not want to send hundreds of thousands of dollars to someone else without any kind of reversibility or fraud-protection guarantees. I'm willing to pay a token amount in terms of fee and delay in order to ensure that.

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

#152

Post by teawrecks »

Barrin92 wrote: post #72
xvector wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that energy could instead replace traditional energy sources which could be turned off. This is not true. Often, renewables aren't available to some locations but abundantly available in others. Other times, some people buy electricity from renewable providers and others don't. With 50-75% of Bitcoin mining being renewable, one thing is clear - it's helped the adoption of renewables and made them cheaper.

It has helped the adoption of renewables in the same sense how polluting the local river has helped the anti-pollution industry. This is broken window logic. The reason bitcoin uses renwables in the first place is because much of it happens in China where misguided state projects and subsidies have created excess capacity. It makes for a pretty decent joke though, the libertarian currency de jure runs on the misguide…

It may not necessarily be the same as "broken window" logic. Consider a world where no one had ever broken a window. There wouldn't be any window repair people. The first time a window breaks, we have a new opportunity to fill a need. Necessity is the mother of invention. The exponential demand for energy creates more pressure to develop more efficient renewable energy generation methods that probably wouldn't be incentivized by a constant amount of energy use. It's a risky bet, but it might be the only way to spur humanity into action.

We just need to increase carbon taxes at the same rate that renewables become affordable.

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

#153

Post by palebluedot »

mrfinn wrote: post #67
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…

Biggest problem about PoW coins, and that's something that everybody working on it knows, or should know, is that the need of power is steadily bigger each year. Where would be the limit of that? When that requires the energy of a big country? (We are quite away from that as far as I know [1] ) A heavily industrialized continent? More than the whole world? It's absolutely crazy. I know that there's a big lobby behind…

I sometimes wonder if we'll discover a Kardashev Type II civilization, harnessing the power of their sun via a Dyson sphere. And then, upon first-contact, realize they are using all that power to mine Bitcoin.

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

#154

Post by acdha »

xvector wrote: post #41
acdha wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’d only partially solve it: we don’t want to waste renewable power which could be going to something of value.

You are moving the goalposts. If Bitcoin miners pay for renewable energy, they are no longer harming the environment. Who are you to dictate what someone does with energy they pay for? Just because you do not like what they do, doesn't mean you can ban it if it's not harming you. There is no evidence that Bitcoin's usage of renewables is preventing others from paying for renewables too.

No, I'm recognizing that the economy is connected. Many of the best renewables — especially those which are available 24x7 — are things like geothermal or hydropower which have finite capacity, and non-trivial ramp-up time.

Proof-of-waste systems like Bitcoin are uniquely inefficient due to the way the network adjusts to increase the difficulty — an aluminum smelter uses a ton of power but they don't build new ones in excess of market demand for aluminum — and they're easy to ship around the world. That means that demand always goes up and any time some place has cheaper power for a non-trivial period of time someone will probably ship a bunch of mining hardware there.

This is a problem because right now we need the entire global economy to electrify as soon as possible. That means things like industrial processes need to be relocated to cheap sources of clean electricity because you can't just plunk a coal power plant next door, etc. and there are also challenges with peak power demand requiring upgrades to electrical grids or other equipment. Having so much power dedicated to something which has never found a useful purpose is a source of friction we don't have time for.

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

#155

Post by vorpalhex »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #124
vorpalhex wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trucks move people and items. Bitcoin allows us to buy porn, pot and run scams on a mostly centralized network.

I think the issue is your concern does not really answer the question I posed. We can follow the use 'use' argument as soon as we deal with the 'who has the authority to tell people what to do with energy/money/equipment'. Is it me? Is it you? Is it society? Is it government? As soon as we get through that conundrum, we can discuss how crypto is basically evil and used for nefarious purposes only and cars are more li…

I don't understand why anyone thinks this argument is some kind of checkmate. This is the equivalent of screaming you're a sovereign citizen when the police ask for your name.

Governments have this general monopoly on the use of force, which is why they tell you you can't do things like sell heroin. If you disobey them, they will send men with firearms and make you stop.

Governments can obtain their consent in a bunch of different models and lots of people argue about which ones are better.

A "world wide ban on crypto" probably is not going to happen but more and more countries are banning it. I suspect many more will continue.

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

#156

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

preommr wrote: post #135
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the real question always is: Who will make a decision as to what is considered frivolous. Not to search very far, I consider trucks in US for non-contractor use to be frivolous, but I don't go around telling people those need to be banned.

> I consider trucks in US for non-contractor use to be frivolous, but I don't go around telling people those need to be banned. What does you not liking trucks have to do with the issue of putting limitations on mining crypto? Just because you don't care about this random issue doesn't invalidate serious concerns other people have. Also, this is a pretty bad faith argument to say 'who can make these decisions'. We ma…

I do not believe it is a bad faith argument.

At the end of the day, trucks are there to illustrate a point that people may not agree what is considered 'good','efficient' or whatever qualifier you want to add. Trucks - those humongous behemoths intended for largely for contractors, but bought people with more money than sense for reasons that are not 'good','efficient' or whatever other qualifier you would want to add to crypto - are largely inefficient for a family unit. Some could easily argue that those should be banned for personal use as their gas-guzzling abilities are a MUCH greater threat to climate change than the entirety of crypto mining operation.

But do I suggest people are mandated to only get one Prius every 5 years? No. Do you know why, because the concerns of the people may be real, but we have not, as a society, yet decided that it is ok for those concerns to override individual choices.

You are right about society. You are wrong about the argument.

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

#157

Post by randomhodler84 »

dragontamer wrote: post #143
randomhodler84 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are many business that run their own payment infrastructure, BTCPay is the most popular. It is better for the network if people DONT use centralized providers. We all have the power to use decentralized infrastructure.

Bitcoin works the way it is intended, that is peer to peer payments. Everything else is just ecosystem, which can be replaced. Coinbase is important as an on-ramp for users for now, yes, but their importance to the network is peripheral.

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

#158

Post by qayxc »

jagger27 wrote: post #4

Key pull quote: > there isn’t an 8GB version of the 6500 XT. The 6500 XT also uses a 64-bit memory interface It only comes with 4GB of RAM on a narrow bus which makes it useless for Ethereum mining. It doesn't seem like it uses the same "LHR" technique as Nvidia.

This still doesn't explain why they cheaped out on the media engine side.

While I can see a justification for the lack of 4K H264 encode support (kind of pointless for a card at this level of performance), removing the AV1 decoder and H265/HEVC encoder is something I don't understand.

This makes the card completely useless for both game streaming and media creation for no discernible reason.

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

#159

Post by newbie789 »

hartator wrote: post #137
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…

> You can game 24/7 and dry your clothes every night of the week and STILL use less power than a modern, efficient single miner node. About 50% less! I think OP point still stands. This is comparable in term of "waste".

No post body was provided.

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

#160

Post by IanCal »

samwillis wrote: post #127
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…

There is literal legislation about energy efficiency of consumer goods (such as dryers), our houses have to be built to be environmentally friendly with good insulation to stop wasted energy, governments are banning plastic packaging. But crypto should be except? No, crypto should be legislated so that it’s energy usage is limited. To think otherwise is an enormous step backwards. I cannot understand how this is not…

Those are very different things.

My dishwasher is rated based on specific cycles, but I'm legally allowed to use it as frivolously as I want. I can run an A+++ rated dryer with a single sock in and send the photo to the police.

We don't limit energy use but inefficiencies. The equivalent in crypto would be to rate hardware by hashes per joule.

Crypto things are different because the incentives are different. I'm incentivised to use my appliances efficiently as the energy cost is just a cost.

On the other hand with PoW, I'm incentivised to mine efficiently but as much as possible because I can buy a thing that turns electricity into cash.

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