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Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

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Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#121

Post by [deleted] »

flashman wrote: post #92
gwern wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners shouldn't be meaningfully exposed since they can sell off their ETH as soon as they mine it (deposit it to an exchange address and sell off every few minutes via an API, or something like that). And while ETH might crash enough to make it no longer profitable and risking your capex, you can switch your GPU to mine whatever is most profitable, so you're more diversified than it looks and insulated from the inst…

Resale value on the GPUs is also worth monitoring. While it remains high enough, you can discount much of the capital cost because you'll get a high fraction back if you decide to sell the cards.

[deleted]

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#122

Post by eximius »

pdog wrote: post #45
zanny wrote: post #42

On the bright side, this has been a great test of etheriums scalability. Which isn't great , but when this mining craze dies down I won't hesitate to run ethminer when I'm not home for a little extra dough. What I would really expect is an overreaction to the price crash, which means the difficulty rate might drop a lot . At this point, doing what a lot of people do with bitcoin - mining small amounts for a long peri…

Proof-of-stake is coming to Ethereum later this year, so there isn't much point investing in a few more months of mining. Casper is the real reason everyone is selling their mining hardware.

Metropolis comes this year which will not include PoS but will include zero knowledge and a few other things.

Casper is expected sometime next spring.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#123

Post by zo7 »

Interesting, looking at the price graph Ethereum's price seems to correlate with Bitcoin's, which lost about %20 of value ($500) recently. In case anyone's wondering, the crash seems mainly driven by anxiety of an upcoming blockchain fork splitting the currency in two next month.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-15/bitcoin-battered-be...

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#124

Post by notgood »

hueving wrote: post #96
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the energy expended in crypto currency mining less valuable than that expended by the traditional financial sector?

Of course it's much less valuable. The crypto currencies are intentionally difficult to mine, wasting vast amounts of energy. A small mining company could probably process all of Visa's transactions which outnumber transactions on bitcoin by at least an order of magnitude.

That doesn't make sense; you are comparing the creation of a currency against the usage of other. The finance sector includes the creation of cash (its paper, price of counterfeit measures); the transportation of cash (think ATMs), the materials needed for creating debit and credit cards, including their chips, the equipment to protect banks from being robbed (think big steel security safes) along many other resources to make such industry work.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#125

Post by j_s »

zo7 wrote: post #123

Interesting, looking at the price graph Ethereum's price seems to correlate with Bitcoin's, which lost about %20 of value ($500) recently. In case anyone's wondering, the crash seems mainly driven by anxiety of an upcoming blockchain fork splitting the currency in two next month. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-15/bitcoin-battered-be...

HN discussion: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758587

An interesting comment there mentioned the need to control private keys (as opposed to leaving them with an exchange) to take advantage of a split by selling coins on both sides of the split.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#126

Post by creyes »

DanBlake wrote: post #22
pfooti wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's 385 / month revenue? On a setup that's what, $3400 to buy, for seven 1070s? Seems like asking for 10 months to cover capex is a bit thin, given the price instability.

High risk, high reward. If you buy the average piece of real estate and rent it out, you are looking at 30+ years to cover the cost. You can also lose it all (housing bubble) or quadruple your investment (investing in SF 10 years ago)

also weird analogy cause the houses value will (theoretically) appreciate... a GPU prolly not so much.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#127

Post by ufo »

ue_ wrote: post #90
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The network collectively determines the difficulty based on how much compute power is being used. Specifically, it adjusts the difficulty up or down based on whether blocks are being found (relative to a constant expected duration) too quickly or too slowly respectively, which ensures the time taken to find blocks stays within a small interval. The specifics of how Bitcoin does it can be found here: https://en.bitcoi…

How does "the network" decide this? And what's stopping me from setting the constant to something lower in my own mining code? Does it follow that if most people in the network are duped into a ridiculously high difficulty, that it will be impossible to mine more BTC?

> And what's stopping me from setting the constant to something lower in my own mining code?

The difficulty constant is determined by an algorithm that takes into account the average time that it currently takes for a new block to be mined. It tries to balance difficulty so one block is mined every 10 minutes, on average (if blocks are being mined too fast the difficulty increases, if blocks are taking too long to mine it decreases). This algorithm is part of the "bitcoin protocol" and you can't just change it in your own mining code because the other nodes in the network will not recognize your blocks as valid if you use the wrong difficulty constant

> Does it follow that if most people in the network are duped into a ridiculously high difficulty, that it will be impossible to mine more BTC?

This is kind of what has already happened. Nowadays there is specialized bitcoin mining hardware out there which is has driven the difficulty into the stratosphere. Bitcoin mining using CPUs and GPUs has become unprofitable, which is why the small miners have moved on to alternative cryptocurrencies where they won't need to compete with specialized hardware.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#128

Post by mhluongo »

Fej wrote: post #109
mrb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong. The cryptocurrency industry is also made of real companies hiring real people. For example as of Sep 2015 there were 729 Bitcoin companies employing thousands of people: https://venturescannerinsights.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/the-...

You can't seriously be comparing those the entire rest of the world economy. Cryptocurrency doesn't even register as a drop in the metaphorical bucket.

That's like saying any small vertical in the stock market shouldn't be compared to the wntire rest of the economy. Well no, and that's not the comparison being made.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#129

Post by duskwuff »

jameskegel wrote: post #103
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the worth of ETH and USD denominated in ISK. ETH in ISK = 16524.55 USD in ISK = 103.42 ETH / USD (1 * ETH) / (1 * USD) # Multiplicative identity 16524.55 ISK / 103.42 ISK # Expand to ISK 16524.55 / 103.42 # Cancellation of units 159.78 # Division

...is this an Eve Online reference? If so, although unexpected, I appreciate it.

Icelandic króna, more likely. AFAIK, there isn't an open exchange between currency and in-game ISK.

Re: Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150

#130

Post by rspeer »

notgood wrote: post #124
hueving wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's much less valuable. The crypto currencies are intentionally difficult to mine, wasting vast amounts of energy. A small mining company could probably process all of Visa's transactions which outnumber transactions on bitcoin by at least an order of magnitude.

That doesn't make sense; you are comparing the creation of a currency against the usage of other. The finance sector includes the creation of cash (its paper, price of counterfeit measures); the transportation of cash (think ATMs), the materials needed for creating debit and credit cards, including their chips, the equipment to protect banks from being robbed (think big steel security safes) along many other resource…

This is a common knee-jerk response that doesn't make any sense. None of that stops Bitcoin from being wasteful, and most of it is still necessary if Bitcoin is used more.

Are you claiming that Bitcoin replaces physical security? How would it do that? Why doesn't someone just walk in and take your computer?

And if you're concerned about the creation of small computer chips (why would you be concerned about this), I assure you that Bitcoin is using more of them.

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