161–170 of 352 posts
A game theoretically designed paperclip maximizer is growing so large that we're starting to see collateral damage in the broad economy; car prices and availability issues, just to name one example.
I work in deep learning and had to camp out in front of a best buy to get my hands on some 3090s. A good portion of the people in line with me were crypto miners who were waiting to get more GPUs to add to their collection because they're making money on each one and as long as it's profitable it makes perfect sense for them to buy up more.
I work in deep learning and had to camp out in front of a best buy to get my hands on some 3090s. A good portion of the people in line with me were crypto miners who were waiting to get more GPUs to add to their collection because they're making money on each one and as long as it's profitable it makes perfect sense for them to buy up more.
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…
No, not for Bitcoin. GPUs are no good at mining Bitcoin; you need an ASIC for that.
> Once they successfully do the attack, they can take over the blockchains and allocate all cryptocurrencies to themselves […]
No. Having a majority of mining power does not enable anyone to assign currency to themselves, except for the mining reward. That would require faking digital signatures.
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They provide decently good evidence of causation, because of the lack of correlation with CPUs. Correlation doesn't prove causation, but it is evidence for it.
How does the lack of correlation with CPUs verify the GPU correlation?
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I've read that takes 2 years to get a new semi-conductor fab up and running. While demand for GPUs has skyrocketed not only in crypto but in other areas. Couple that with us going into 2 years of global lockdowns and subsequent supply disruptions have probably exacerbated the situation greatly.
It takes two years under normal circumstances; from what I understand backlogs for the lithography equipment are a huge bottleneck in the industry since there are only a few companies that make such specialized machines. They were already backordered for years pre-pandemic, with most of those getting pushed out because of supply constraint issues. We’re never going to return to the level of industrial output pre-Covi…
So in the last little while, Ethereum mining has become almost impossible on GPUs with 4gb of RAM and below. Prices of these sub 4gb RAM cards have plummeted to match. So I would say, yes, high GPU prices are caused by cryptocurrency mining.
Short answer - yes. I don't have ANY data to prove this point, but strictly empirically - 1) it only takes a small number of GPUs bought due to increased demand to significantly alter price, all because the shop inventories are small. 2) Eth is not the only GPU mined coin and miners can easily and quickly switch to RVN or whatever else when Eth is diving. 3) outside factor - Bitmine is placing big orders at TSMC whic…
PC Hardware can come from an Era with so many manufacturers and true-actual fierce competition, resulting in complete commoditisation of components. However, now in 2022, there are only 2 CPU vendors,2 GPU vendors and even with storage the number of manufacturers is small. Only TSMC can deliver 5nm and Mr Cook has all that capacity on lock (AMD and Intel will get a look only when he is done with it) Mining like with…
In other words, there is visibly a shortage of graphics cards that is not affecting any other components. That strongly suggests that there is something driving demand for graphics cards that is not driving demand for other key components of computers, which are available in sufficient supply. And the list of things that extra demand could be coming from is rather short indeed.