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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

#311

Post by cwyers »

colordrops wrote: post #234
cwyers wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fiat money doesn't serve the same purpose as Bitcoin and in some ways is the opposite. Why are there so many trite unthoughtful comments being made about cryotocurrencies? I'm guessing people are turned off by all the scam coins and are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm turned off by watching a bunch of people who haven't learned basic lessons about banking trying to reinvent it, badly. Anyone who spent a few days learning about how banks do security could have understood that what these exchanges like Mt. Gox were doing was frightfully vulnerable, and anyone unwilling to spend at least a few days learning about banking security has no business running a currency exchange. But it's all handwaved away because fiat money is evil and cryptocurrency makes you feel like the hero in a Neal Stephenson novel so screw the man. So now we have a bunch of programmers and enthusiasts learning how the financial system works from first principles and making boneheaded mistakes as a result. And they have enough money swirling around thanks to Chinese capital flight that they can screw with the pricing for an entire market like GPUs. And then when you point out how much electricity this whole scheme wastes they say "well banks use electricity" as if that's the same thing. It's heedless, irresponsible and discouraging.

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

#312

Post by Zpalmtree »

raverbashing wrote: post #183
DanBlake wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Barring natural disasters and other extreme events, your real estate risks losing (let's say) 50% of value if you made a good purchase The intrinsic value of 1 BTC is ZERO

But you bought the GPU not the BTC?

Even if BTC becomes worthless, you still have the GPU to sell

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

#313

Post by mrb »

Jabanga wrote: post #156
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…

>Even Ethereum abandoned the idea of completely switching away from proof-of-work because they realized PoS isn't completely workable No it didn't. I follow Ethereum development closely and I know for a fact that's absolutely untrue. I'm not sure why you're misleading people about this.

You are right, I should have said "temporarily" not "completely". They abandoned the idea of switching to 100% PoS right away, and instead are trying to work on a hybrid PoS/PoW. Source: https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/851503370250661889 (100% PoS remains the ideal goal, but they have been unable to work it out yet)

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

#314

Post by MereInterest »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #309
cglace wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Perhaps this is ignorance on my part, but my limited understanding of bitcoin suggests that new bitcoins cannot be created by creating a loan. It would be impossible to use a fractional reserve system with bitcoins by definition. This distinction is important since over 90% of US currency is created via loan using this fractional reserve mechanism.

Unless people decide that bitcoins are not fungible, then fractional reserve banking is absolutely possible with them. You give me Bitcoin, and I will lend them out at interest, keeping some on hand to give back to you as you need them. The process is identical to banking with a fiat currency, and results in the same money multiplier.

Where there is confusion is because economists accept that money is an abstract thing, backed by people's willingness to accept it, whereas Bitcoin enthusiasts see money as a tangible thing that must be backed by a concrete thing. Thus, when economists say that the supply of money changes with fractional reserve banking, they are referring to dollars in the abstract, not physical dollar bills. When Bitcoin enthusiasts say that the supply is limited, they are referring to the bitcoins themselves, not the abstract availability of bitcoins.

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

#315

Post by rb808 »

billmalarky wrote: post #300
rb808 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So the price will rise and rise because people think it will rise and rise, and thus not sell? Sounds great.

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

#316

Post by Ajedi32 »

Nursie wrote: post #228

Excellent, my partner is looking for a card right now, a (lighly) used 1060, 1070 or 580 might be just the thing! In the meantime, my machine which is a gaming rig that is mostly idle, may as well do a bit of mining...

> a (lighly) used 1060, 1070 or 580 might be just the thing

I'm not really sure I'd call a card that's been used for cryptocurrency mining "lightly used".

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

#317

Post by MereInterest »

mrb wrote: post #303
shoo wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4. Bitcoin is already a net benefit to the economy. Venture capitalists invested more than $1 billion into at least 729 Bitcoin companies which created thousands of jobs. You may disregard the first three arguments, but the bottom line is that spending an estimated 150 megawatt in a system that so far created thousands of jobs is a valuable economic move, not a waste. We cannot decide if an activity is valuable or…

" We cannot decide if an activity is valuable or not based solely on if it creates jobs. " You are right. However Bitcoin is not pointless and comparable to digging holes and filling them up. The simple fact that this financial network is censorship-resistant is a huge benefit to society, already positively impacting many people.

I'd see that as a negative, rather than a positive. Being resistant to censorship means that it is also resistant to correction. With Bitcoin, there is no way to reverse a fraudulent transaction. If a debt is owed, one could not put a lien on bitcoins to prevent them from being spent, as one could with regular currency.

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

#318

Post by abalone »

soVeryTired wrote: post #200
bdcravens wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of all the SF/SV pollution caused by wastefully funded startups building the next Uber for ice cream or whatever.

Tu Quoque

More like false equivalence. What makes the cryptocurrency carbon footprint particularly wasteful is that, if we're being honest, its primary use is currency speculation.

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

#319

Post by paulgb »

billmalarky wrote: post #300
rb808 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems likely that more advanced currencies will continue to be developed. Why would ETH continue to hold value when a more advanced currency comes around, just as ETH has eaten into BTC mcap? It may not be an intentional Ponzi scheme, but it seems like a bubble economy.

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

#320

Post by dragonwriter »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #309
cglace wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Perhaps this is ignorance on my part, but my limited understanding of bitcoin suggests that new bitcoins cannot be created by creating a loan. It would be impossible to use a fractional reserve system with bitcoins by definition. This distinction is important since over 90% of US currency is created via loan using this fractional reserve mechanism.

> This distinction is important since over 90% of US currency is created via loan using this fractional reserve mechanism.

No actual US currency is created this way, we just have a strong social convention of treating “the bank owes me $1 on demand” as equivalent to “I have $1”.

So if I make a “deposit” (which is, on point of fact, a loan) of $1, and the bank retains $0.10 in reserve and loans out $0.90 to someone else, we say that I have the equivalent of $1 and the borrower has $0.90, so it seems that $0.90 has been created. But there is really only $1.00 of currency, of which the bank has $0.10 and the borrower has $0.90. I don't have a currency, I have a right to demand (with certain conditions, depending on the kind of deposit) currency from the bank.

Most dollar-denominated trade is actually trade in future claims of dollars rather than actual dollars. Nothing [0] stops a parallel thing from happening with Bitcoin; obviously, such trade would be distinct from exchanges of Bitcoin recorded in the Bitcoin blockchain, just as trade in future claims of dollars are readily distinguishable from exchanges of physical greenbacks.

[0] Except the current immaturity of the Bitcoin ecosystem compared to the banking systems of any developed economy, but that's presumably something that would change were Bitcoin to achieve broad, durable acceptance.

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