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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

#211

Post by chii »

cortesoft wrote: post #100
Barrin92 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any infrastructure dedicated to the mining of crypto is opportunity cost. Even if you use renewables, that energy could instead replace traditional energy sources which could be turned off. This is an example of Jevon's paradox, namely that increases in efficiency or quality are offset by increases in demand. It's one of the reasons why we have globally barely made a dent when it comes to the increase of renewables a…

> This is an example of Jevon's paradox, namely that increases in efficiency or quality are offset by increases in demand. That is kinda the main point of a carbon tax... it is to make carbon usage LESS efficient, since you have to pay an extra tax in addition to the cost of the energy itself. Ideally, the money gained from the carbon tax is then redistributed to everyone equally, and that money can then be used for…

> Ideally, the money gained from the carbon tax is then redistributed to everyone equally

i dont think that's a good idea - the redistribution does not decrease carbon.

I think the correct carbon tax is the amount of money it takes to fully remove the carbon emitted (at current tech levels). This pot of money is then used to actually remove carbon.

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

#212

Post by colinmhayes »

xvector wrote: post #200
colinmhayes wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pay for all my energy to be renewable. That's not how it works. It just means that instead of everyone using 10% renewable energy you use 100% and 9 other people use 0%.

It means that I am effectively purchasing carbon credits to offset my carbon emissions. I and my Bitcoin mining rig have a net zero impact.

Buying renewable energy isn't the same as purchasing carbon credits. Since energy is fungible there's no way to say your demand for renewable energy actually mattered if others are agnostic in their demand for renewable versus non renewable energy. When we use more energy it's not renewables that are picking up the slack, the fossil fuel plants burn more.

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

#213

Post by chii »

acdha wrote: post #163
politician wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Waste". The parent's point is who are you to say? Maybe we should closely audit your energy usage and ban those activities we find objectionable. Authoritarianism isn't an ideal outcome.

They explained the difference for you in the second paragraph: unless any other system, proof-of-waste systems are uniquely bad because the amount of power used isn't linked to any sort of useful activity — it's just a function of how much competing hash capacity there is in the network. Even something like heating your house to 78℉ is a lower category of waste because you won't increase that to 120℉ or start heating…

> isn't linked to any sort of useful activity

so you made a judgement on what an activity is useful. There's no such objective judgement possible, since usefulness is a subjective matter.

Therefore, pricing carbon correctly (and thus pricing electricity correctly) is the way to provide all parties the full information on cost, and each would decide how best to use their own money to buy energy.

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

#214

Post by chii »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #193
xvector wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Who are you to dictate what someone does with energy they pay for? A member in a democratic society that doesn't give you a fundamental right to mine bitcoins. > Just because you do not like what they do, doesn't mean you can ban it if it's not harming you. Believe it or not, this is not how society works.

>> Just because you do not like what they do, doesn't mean you can ban it if it's not harming you.

> Believe it or not, this is not how society works.

and yet, we are now unbanning a lot of activities that some people dislike - such as smoking pot. the OP's point is that not everyone is in consensus about the energy use of PoW being a waste.

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

#215

Post by iszomer »

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.

Can you imagine if PoW cryptocurrencies hadn't of existed, that the climate change narrative would have been adapted to apply as "the world really needs to ban triple-A gaming" instead?

This story reminds me of an urban legend that the Sony Playstation 2 consoles almost hit a snag on an export ban because of "potential military applications". Different era, different context I suppose.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about...

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

#216

Post by vorpalhex »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #199
vorpalhex wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to interpret your current question as "Who has the authority to ban crypto?" The answer is the government. Governments are restricted to their borders but they do like to cooperate, and so EU may pass a general crypto ban and the EU may even ask the nations it trades with or that want to join to do similar. But there is no real question that a government may ban something in it's borders. "Ah, but I can get…

I take issue with the statement "it makes tax evasion stupidly easy". The moment you touch any US-based exchange, your information is up for grabs by a variety of agencies from IRS to various LEOs. It may make doing the deed easy, but it does not really change much. It has been years now since blockchain made it into mainstream. There are companies specializing in selling blockchain insights. Unless we are not talkin…

> I am paying for it. If you don't like my use, either raise the price or, well, leave me alone.

Residential miners are using subsidized electricity. We do that so Grandma can afford to be warm and run her dryer.

If we forced miners to use commercial electricity plans then they would in fact pay a whole mess more.

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

#217

Post by acdha »

chii wrote: post #213
acdha wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They explained the difference for you in the second paragraph: unless any other system, proof-of-waste systems are uniquely bad because the amount of power used isn't linked to any sort of useful activity — it's just a function of how much competing hash capacity there is in the network. Even something like heating your house to 78℉ is a lower category of waste because you won't increase that to 120℉ or start heating…

> isn't linked to any sort of useful activity so you made a judgement on what an activity is useful. There's no such objective judgement possible, since usefulness is a subjective matter. Therefore, pricing carbon correctly (and thus pricing electricity correctly) is the way to provide all parties the full information on cost, and each would decide how best to use their own money to buy energy.

> > isn't linked to any sort of useful activity

> so you made a judgement on what an activity is useful.

No, I understand how the system works. Bitcoin uses power as a function of the aggregate network capacity — it must to avoid a 51% attack — and that means that the power usage not coupled to the number of transactions being processed: even if Bank of America wasn't already many orders of magnitude cheaper, they wouldn't buy a mainframe they didn't have work for just to stay tied with Wells Fargo. It's the computational equivalent of Luftansa flying all of those thousands of empty flights.

> Therefore, pricing carbon correctly (and thus pricing electricity correctly) is the way to provide all parties the full information on cost, and each would decide how best to use their own money to buy energy.

This would help considerably but it's not enough: we need to radically pivot the global energy system and that will involve things like shifting where major power consumption occurs (e.g. ideally things like blast furnaces or smelters would be located near sources of hydro, geothermal, nuclear, etc. power) and getting everyone to convert to things like EVs en masse.

Unfortunately those decisions take a longer timeframe than shipping a container full of cryptocurrency mining hardware to wherever the current cheapest source of power is. That adds a lot of noise to the pricing signals we need to drive business decisions, especially for major capital expenditures which require years of planning. It doesn't help if, say, Iceland adds 10GW of clean geothermal power but the price stays the same or even goes up because a bunch of miners showed up the week after it went online.

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

#218

Post by bored_itworker »

Tenoke wrote: post #2

Good way to spin having only 4GB vram into an 'anti-mining feature' I guess. Of course, 4GB is typically considered the bare minimum for modern 1080p (let alone higher) gaming and this is just a budget card which was definitely not limited with any mining considerations.

4GB ram is not enough for a good 1080p gaming card. You'd most likely only be able to play esport titles on the 6500 XT. I went from a 3GB 1060 to a 6GB 5600 XT and it makes the extra frame buffer makes a massive difference as new games are getting very demanding to run, even on 1080p.

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

#219

Post by teawrecks »

Barrin92 wrote: post #201
teawrecks wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inc…

it's a complete non-argument you can use it to justify literally anything. Dropping atomic bombs on Japan, hey construction boom! Covid-19, pharma industry innovation! Do you turn the heater on and leave the fridge open to accelerate humanity's fight against climate change? No. We have about a few thousand pressing issues that spur us on to push for renewables as it is, we don't need to waste energy on purpose.

> We have about a few thousand pressing issues that spur us on to push for renewables as it is, we don't need to waste energy on purpose.

Crypto mining is one of those issues, we don't have a choice. Your argument reduces to "if we had no issues pushing us, we would have enough issues pushing us" which is a contradiction.

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

#220

Post by BostonEnginerd »

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…

I just looked up how much energy my last dryer load used. It came in just shy of 6kWh. The unit is a standard electric dryer, around 10yr old. Just wanted to provide some additional data.

We do about 4 loads per week here. I hope that the newer heat pump based dryers are reliable!

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