211–220 of 620 posts
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> I'd be more OK with this if crypto in fact solved a problem for most people. see: https://foldingathome.org/
What does this have to do with cryptocurrencies/cryptoassets? It's almost a decade older than Bitcoin. The inspiration (SETI@Home) is even older.
Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
> I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50 years in Taiwan) has really affected them, and various sources seem to confirm it, here's one : https://fortune.com/2021/06/12/chip-shortage-taiwan-drought-... And while I wholeheartedly agree with the crypto/GPU issue, all in a…
This is the one aspect of manufactuing of chips that many are actually ignorant about - it needs huge amounts of pure water.
This is the main reason why India doesn't yet have any fab, despite having the human resource for it and investors and government showing great interest to setup one.
Two or three decades back Intel desired to setup a fab in India, but the deal fell through because it would mean India would have to divert a huge amount of water from agriculture and potable water for the population to such fabs. TSMC has approached the indian government many times (even this year) seeking permission to setup a fab in India. But the indian goverment has remained non-commital.
The indian government believes it is in their long-term interest to wait for fab tech to evolve to use less water. Indian states already squabble over sharing water resources, and India has to feed a billion people, and such a diversion of resource doesn't make sense in the long-term.
(Perhaps the James Bond movie was right - we'll all be fighting for fresh water in the coming decades. :)
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I agree with this but it's even worse than that. Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina. Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap…
> Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. Even if true (iirc there is a lot of doubt whether it is, see Iran), it's still moronic, because consuming renewable energy for shits and giggles obviously means that other energy demands are being met with your usual energy mix instead of that renewable energy that went into shits and giggles as assumed. In terms of net emissions it simply doesn'…
Knocking a single coal mine offline in China famously cut bitcoin mining activity by a third earlier this year.
https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-env...
Now, the claim could still theoretically be true, but I really want to see some hard numbers with sources from the next person trying to defend that claim.
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Do you mean storing already made chips? I imagine that's (often) expensive from a depreciation perspective.
Cheap microcontrollers are not deprecated for a very long time. STM sells chips designed 10 years ago, AFAIK.
Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
I agree with this but it's even worse than that. Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina. Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap…
You're joking yourself if you think government seizures are just; in the US asset forfeiture does not require even a criminal conviction. This is a problem for all people. Crypto solves a problem for all people.
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The end game is to transition to Proof of Stake, which doesn't have these problems and has other security advantages.
Not for Bitcoin. PoS is a broken system that reinvents oligarchies. Proof of Work is the only secure protocol that works today -- possessing the real, desirable properties like decentralization and censorship resistance. Don't tell me about vaporware ETH2. The end goal for Bitcoin is Dyson spheres around stars. And it can be no other way.
Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
I agree with this but it's even worse than that. Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina. Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap…
Thanks for making me look at this. We should ban cryptocurrencies.
Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining net…
Are they also raising prices of CPUs? Arm chips? Your argument is based on an assertion that sounds like it could be right, but is it? Hasn't every country in the world been injecting cash stimulus into people's hands in an epic attempt to boost demand across all industries? Also why are miners the target here. Are there not deep learning, gamers, anything else who also want to use these monsterous compute units? (GP…
Deep learning, gaming, etc. are different in that someone doing 2 way SLI doesn’t make others need to do the same. If my online opponents are playing on RTX 3090s, I’m not forced to upgrade to play with them.
[a]: The energy usage is a byproduct of the proof-of-work system
[b]: hence why things like Folding@home, SETI@home, etc. never gained massive popularity like coins did; they don’t reward you except in feel-good thoughts
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I think it's interesting that we have three options now for sidestepping this by streaming games and yet none of them have made much of a dent. Microsoft seems to have the best business model but you're stuck streaming the games on Game Pass, and their latency seems to be the worst in my experience. Stadia seems to have the best tech in terms of latency, but the weird "it'll only work on these certain Chromecasts" la…
The availability of the high bandwidth, low latency FTTP internet is lagging severly enough for these to have no impact. The use cases where I, a high end gaming PC owner, would use streaming services are: travelling. Except unless you visit a city center, you aren't getting 5G, and you aren't getting WiFi 6 speeds. I'm in the UK, and here my parents live, where I live and where my friends live, none have the speeds…
Not just down, but up too with low latency and jitter.