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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

#241

Post by bluecalm »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #70
bluecalm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a specific ban. Just even the playing field for traditional finance. Either make cryptocurrencies follow normal banking/financial laws or make laws for traditional finance more liberal. Cryptocurrencies and especially PoW based ones are a terrible, slow, inefficient and vulnerable technology which wouldn't survive a day of fair competition.

What is “fair competition”? Can you define it?

Technologies being subject you the same rules. The reason I can buy drugs, play online poker, request a ransom or just send money to an unknown at the other end of the world with crypto but can't with a bank transfer isn't technical. The only reason is that banks have to comply to regulation while crypto doesn't.

There are a lot of regulatory burden when trying to make a financial service. KYC, anti money laundering, reporting, privacy, data storage etc. There is basically none (that is enforced anyway) with crypto. That's the only reason it got traction. The technology is terrible. It's hard to come up with something more inefficient, expensive and hard to use. The one and only reason it's used for anything is that it evades regulatory burden.

It's literally "let's burn a lot of coal to run our steam powered car because steam powered cars are not subject to traffic laws" kind of situation. Fix and enforce the law and the steam car disappears. The same will happen to cryptocurrency.

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

#242

Post by codebolt »

chii wrote: post #203
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…

> "Who has the authority to ban crypto?" > The answer is the government. The gov't is supposed to represent the people's will. So are you saying that it is the will of the people to ban crypto? Aka, is crypto something that is causing harm to society, like heroin addiction etc? Let's go back to the prohibition era - why did the gov't decide to ban alcohol? And why did they re-instate it back afterwards? I argue that…

I'd say public opinion is absolutely swaying in the direction of a ban, especially as the facts become clearer.

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

#243

Post by codebolt »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #181
dragontamer wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the Exim email-server and "bind" DNS server is "decentralized", except everybody uses gmail.com, or even centralized upon AWS. There's your theory, and there's the practice of the internet and business. In theory, they should be the same. In practice, they're different.

Bitcoin doesn’t care about businesses. It doesn’t care about peoples wishes. It doesn’t care that everyone else is using Gmail. It provides a peer to peer, censorship resistant append only ledger for transactions secured by cryptographic signatures and proof of work. That is all. And that is plenty.

Without an on-ramp and off-ramp for converting into dollars/euros, Bitcoin is entirely useless, even for the hardcore idealists like yourself. And those can quite easily be made illegal.

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

#244

Post by vmception »

kennywinker wrote: post #177
zozbot234 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Making that trustless means I am open to scam sellers Cryptocurrencies support escrow transactions, where a mutually-trusted third party (e.g. an arbitrator) can decide whether the transaction should go forward if buyer and seller disagree. This is still "trustless" compared to other systems because it only depends on mutual trust wrt. each individual transaction, not on a pre-defined central authority.

Right, so my conveyancer (trusted by me, and my lender) escrows the money (lent to me by a bank that trusts me) via blockchain. How is this better than the current situation, where wire transfers are used, except 1) smaller fees 2) massive carbon footprint? Because I didn’t see any armored cars involved to offset the PoW energy. I’m not saying blockchain is useless - just i see no use for it when it comes to the way…

The carbon argument is so weird to me because if people understood blockchains it would actually bolster their argument.

Proof of Work Blockchains use the same energy whether there are any transactions or not. The idea that your participation or lack thereof deters demand in protest of the carbon footprint is just … wrong. Inaccurate.

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

#245

Post by kennywinker »

vmception wrote: post #244
kennywinker wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so my conveyancer (trusted by me, and my lender) escrows the money (lent to me by a bank that trusts me) via blockchain. How is this better than the current situation, where wire transfers are used, except 1) smaller fees 2) massive carbon footprint? Because I didn’t see any armored cars involved to offset the PoW energy. I’m not saying blockchain is useless - just i see no use for it when it comes to the way…

The carbon argument is so weird to me because if people understood blockchains it would actually bolster their argument. Proof of Work Blockchains use the same energy whether there are any transactions or not. The idea that your participation or lack thereof deters demand in protest of the carbon footprint is just … wrong. Inaccurate.

Sure it’s not a direct per-transaction carbon footprint - but every transaction has mining fees, and more transactions mean there’s more money in mining which means more miners which means more carbon burnt.

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

#246

Post by dasKrokodil »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #132
Justin_K wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you support Visa and Amex if their next generation networks required you to burn x minutes of natural gas or x pounds of coal to complete a transaction? Why is this an acceptable architecture for Blockchain? It is a race to the bottom.

That’s absurd comparison. No energy user (be it miners or the visa network) requires unclean power. Electricity is fungible. We all want power to be cleanly generated. This demand side bullying needs to stop. Give us clean energy!

There is no such thing as clean energy.

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

#247

Post by netizen-936824 »

jrockway wrote: post #117
endisneigh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of other wasteful activities that should be limited as well. Classic whataboutism. First of all your entire comparison makes no sense, you have to compare alternatives for use. What's the alternative to a dryer. Using a line and hanging your clothes. Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York? A ventless dryer? Doesn't use substantially less energy. And so forth. For every conceivable use case…

> Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York? I dry my clothes on a line in the winter in New York. It's below zero outside, but like 80 degrees and 0% humidity inside my apartment. Clothes dry fast. (And the space was already being heated, because I live in it, and it's against the law for the landlord to allow the temperature to go below 55 degrees, and they are paranoid, so it's more like 80-90 all winter.)

Its 80 in your place? Holy shit, I would just be sweating all the time. And finding a new place to live

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

#248

Post by IanCal »

philistine wrote: post #234
IanCal wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ince…

We are looking down the barrel of a gun. The gun is cryptomining's thirst for electricity destroying all our gains to diminish climate change. Your arguments may be right, but you are on the wrong side of our survival as a civilization.

The point here is that existing legislation does not cover this and trying to apply it would fail, you would need something new if you want it to work.

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

#249

Post by jrockway »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #247
jrockway wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York? I dry my clothes on a line in the winter in New York. It's below zero outside, but like 80 degrees and 0% humidity inside my apartment. Clothes dry fast. (And the space was already being heated, because I live in it, and it's against the law for the landlord to allow the temperature to go below 55 degrees, and they are paranoid, so it's more like 80-90 all winter.)

Its 80 in your place? Holy shit, I would just be sweating all the time. And finding a new place to live

Sometimes I feel like I have a fever and am getting sick, then I realize it's probably just in the 90s and I should open a window. Not great. This is with all my radiators turned off!

The heat is on a timer so it's not like this all the time, but I have to wonder what a world where thermostats have been invented would be like.

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

#250

Post by yourusername »

ericd wrote: post #167
endisneigh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of other wasteful activities that should be limited as well. Classic whataboutism. First of all your entire comparison makes no sense, you have to compare alternatives for use. What's the alternative to a dryer. Using a line and hanging your clothes. Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York? A ventless dryer? Doesn't use substantially less energy. And so forth. For every conceivable use case…

Then you can use a drying rack indoors, as Europeans do... They look like this: https://alittlelifeineurope.com/2017/09/10/in-praise-of-the-... Electrical resistive heating clothes dryers are an enormous energy hog.

Not all Europeans use a drying rack indoors. In the Netherlands only the poor do this. It takes a long time and doesn't even save any energy as the water from your clothes makes your entire house humid and feel cold in the winter.
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