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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

#291

Post by ue_ »

ufo wrote: post #127
ue_ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

Thanks for the response. Out of interest, what are the smaller currencies that may still be profitable to mine with a 2012ish GPU, aside from Etherum? I've read that LTC is unprofitable, for example.

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

#293

Post by cglace »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #281
angus-prune wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worth comparing this against the cost of minting money. A brief search showed that the US mint used 694,462.4 gigajoules in 2011[1] (~0.2Twh). The US is ~25% of world GDP, so lets times this by 4 for a naive cost of minting across the whole world. This gives a cost of ~1Twh annually for minting the entire world's supply of money, with a total Gross world product of ~$80 trillion[2]. Bitcoin is using ~1.3Twh[3]…

US dollars are primarily created by banks using the fractional reserve system. So a better estimate, though harder to find, might be the total energy (including human calories) to create a loan.

Why? It's going to cost energy to create a loan regardless of the fiat it's denominated in.

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

#294

Post by alok99 »

bdcravens wrote: post #115
strictnein wrote: post #110

I sold my hardware last week. GTX 1060s, a 1080, an AMD R9 290X, some other stuff. Unless I'm missing something, there's no huge flood of video cards on ebay. There's maybe ~20% more than there was a week ago. All told, for the in demand mining hardware, you're only talking about a couple thousand cards.

Bitcoin is down 20% over past 7 days; Ethereum, 30-40%. That said, I don't think people sell that fast. Back when I GPU mined Bitcoin (2011), when the price fell from $35 to $2, I turned my miners off and waited a few months before selling. (If only I had kept them going, but that's a sad and off-topic story ....)

The 2011 mining wave was great. I sold a couple 7950s I had for double the price of what I bought them for only about a month prior. Sadly I missed the Ethereum wave

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

#295

Post by root_axis »

monort wrote: post #244
cwyers wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already a less wasteful solution, it's called fiat money.

Bank Of America Tower requires around 8 megawatt. And it's only one skyscraper.

So what? Bank of America is a company that provides banking services as a business model, they are not a necessary aspect of fiat currency any more than coinbase is a necessity of bitcoin.

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

#296

Post by bogomipz »

nulagrithom wrote: post #153
bogomipz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" If you are located in the 'mining valley' of Washington where power is ~2c/kwh you are still getting healthy profits" Can you clarify what "mining valley" you are referring to? Is this Chelan County? If so I thought there was talk about a moratorium on new high load customers but maybe that never came to pass? See: http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-miners-public-utility-spar-o...

Not the parent commenter but yes, Chelan and Douglas counties have fantastically inexpensive kwh due to their hydroelectric plants. The dams are owned by a public entity and the cheap power and plants are meant to be a boon to the local economy. Last I heard (directly from a city council member last year) there is a moratorium on high load customers due in part to all the mining operations that sprung up. Realistical…

Thanks for detailed response. So it sounds like the power arbitrage game is done in Washington(at least for now.) Although I imagine this is good news for those miners who are grandfathered in.

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

#297

Post by ikeboy »

kobeya wrote: post #226
ikeboy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on region, some are 20 cents, national average is 13.7 according to https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-york-new-jersey/news-release...

But the regions where people are hosting miners are between 2-4c per kWh. Those are the competition, and those are the people buying (and selling) these.

I was responding to

"But even if you dont have a facility in washington and just mine from your apartment, your power cost would probably be $100 a month."

Even if they're only paying the national average, it's still off by a factor of 2.

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

#298

Post by CyberDildonics »

ExcilSploft wrote: post #285
CyberDildonics wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predicting a future of devestation. You would think we would be past buying into that ruse by now.

Is it that far fetched? Right now most disk encrypting ransomware demands bitcoin for decryption.

Are biological weapons being used to mass murder people a natural extrapolation of ransomware?

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

#299

Post by mrb »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #184
mrb wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) No there is no other way. (An alternative, proof-of-stake, is still an active research area. Even Ethereum abandoned the idea of completely switching away from proof-of-work because they realized PoS isn't completely workable.) 2) Because a permission-less censorship-resistant decentralized financial system has the potential to truly improve society, hence worth spending energy on it. I have presented multiple arg…

I read your arguments and unfortunately most don't hold water. > 1. Miners currently use approximately only 0.0012% of the energy consumed by the world. This doesn't change the fact that you're using energy. The second argument is basically the same, just extrapolating into the future. > 3. Mining would be a waste if there was another more efficient way to implement a Bitcoin-like currency without proof-of-work. This…

1. See last paragraph in my post's argument 1. The point I raise is that it makes no sense for people to be so outraged and vocal about miner's energy use and apparently don't care about much bigger energy users/wasters by multiple orders of magnitude... At the very least this makes critics hypocrites as they themselves waste energy and don't to care about it (eg. driving a car with low fuel efficiency.)

3. It's not a fallacy. If X is worthwhile to society, and if the only one way to obtain X is to spend energy doing Y, and if alternative uses of this energy are not clearly superior (for example doing Z), then Y is not an energy waste. X = permission-less censorship-resistant decentralized financial network. Y = mining. Z = for example building desalination plants to provide clean water to third-world countries.

4. You seem to recognize the validity of this argument :) See the reference I give in the post: https://venturescannerinsights.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/the-... these are not mining companies.

5. This argument shows that even if you are unconvinced by arguments 1-4 and holds the view that mining is wasteful, you should at least recognize that it is becoming less and less wasteful over time.

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

#300

Post by billmalarky »

rb808 wrote: post #289
horusthecat wrote: post #267

Does anyone know where the money that initially went into the cryptocoins during the run-up this year came from, or where it went?

It works like a Ponzi scheme. The people who are buying now give their money to the people who got in earlier. As long as more and more people buy its great but eventually you run out of buyers - optimistically the price will level off but more realistically it'll crash.

This isn't correct and is downright misleading.

There are many possible scenarios. IE people will hold the Ether under the assumption that it will be more valuable in the future. If the supply of "sellers" goes down and the number of "buyers" stays constant, the price will continue to go up (ignoring new ETH being created for simplicity).

As to how ETH could become valuable? Well if the network really does scale and the possibility for decentralized apps really does come to pass, then this is an incredibly transformative technology with a lot of potential, that runs on ETH.

Ponzi schemes are scams because there is no value created, and it is known to the scammers that there is no value being created. With crypto currencies the value is big "unknown" which is why it's speculative, but it certainly isn't a "scam" sense there is true potential there.

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