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Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

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Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#341

Post by yellowapple »

rixed wrote: post #313
throwaway55421 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we do need more energy. Energy can fix essentially any problem we have. Need to desalinate water? Energy. Need to heat your Arctic home? Energy. Being able to use energy in crazy and inefficient ways is a feature, not a bug. Everything you ever do outside of subsistence level agriculture is proof of that. The ideal state of being would be one in which we have limitless fusion power or similar and we basically jus…

> we do need more energy Sounds like ideology to me. I, for one, need many thing from basic food to nice music, but energy on its own in not in that list. I wonder what people picture when they say "energy" but probably not that thing that is equivalent to movement and that is always a constant by definition (at least here and now), and that increase entropy when we manipulate it (entropy being that thing every life…

> I, for one, need many thing from basic food to nice music, but energy on its own in not in that list.

Energy is a dependency of both of the things you listed - and an abundance of energy makes those things more accessible to more people, yourself and myself included.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#342

Post by h4kor »

ericd wrote: post #201
h4kor wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can probably pay higher prices when mining rewards are high.

Maybe. Just hard to imagine a company with employees numbered in the low hundreds competing for fab capacity with nVidia.

NVidia has a far greater complexity to handle. GPUs do a lot of things and are more generalized with each iteration. In comparison ASICs are super simple chips.

If GPUs would still use the fixed rendering pipeline they started with ( only push your triangles and texture to the GPU and you get your image) they could also handle their business with a few hundred employees.

Just shrink your chips to the latest fab size, add more computing cores, maybe improve some algorithm if a better solution is found.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#343

Post by FranksTV »

kingo55 wrote: post #272
ip26 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many years has etherium been putting off proof of stake now? Two? Three?

There are forks of Ethereum already running PoS consensus (e.g. Binance Smart Chain, Songbird and an upcoming fork called PulseChain to name a few). I hear the difficult part is getting the sharding to work.

The difficult part is figuring out why anyone would ever want to use any of this stuff for anything other than money laundering.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#344

Post by FranksTV »

h4kor wrote: post #216
swalsh wrote: post #118

I guess we'll find out. It's increasingly likely the merge will happen his year. When ETH moves to PoS, mines will likely move to other currencies, or sell their hardware, that said the return for alternative crypto's still on PoW is unlikely to match that of ETH. I would be very surprised if demand from miners is not reduced.

Let's hope this happens. They have been promising this for a long time. It's the "fusion energy will be available soon" of the crypto currency space.

You can raise a lot of money on potential. When something becomes real suddenly it has to work.

Its like the Oak Island treasure. If they ever actually dig something up, it'll kill the tourist revenue.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#346

Post by goldenbikeshed »

rasz wrote: post #276
trulyme wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I missing something? Why would NVIDIA want to reduce demand for their graphic cards?

Relying on single customer can have quite severe negative consequences (walmart crushing whole businesses is a good example). GPU shortage is destroying PC position as a viable gaming platform. Give it couple more years of GPU shortages and Nvidia will irrevocably lose whole market segment, leaving it with compute and shaky scam riddled crypto.

Yes, nvidia and AMD should collude to destroy crypto from a market risk reduction perspective.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#347

Post by wpietri »

bvaldivielso wrote: post #209
wpietri wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlation is correlated with causation, so I think this sort of exploration of a question is still valuable.

I agree that it's valuable and interesting, just not a definitive answer to the question

Did I miss where somebody promised you a definitive answer to the question?

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#348

Post by goldenbikeshed »

Reichhardt wrote: post #218
svara wrote: post #158

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.

Its dead easy to fix it though: for politicians to ban the purchase of Proof of Work cryptocurrencies. All of the major exchanges are centralized now anyway. Tank the price (via basic supply-demand microeconomics) and you solve electricity and chip supply issues. The fact that this easy step hasn't been done suggests a broader conspiracy to destabilize Western nations and sow chaos, perhaps to usher in a transfer of…

Or maybe our western liberal democratic capitalist societies have long degenerated to a point of complete and utter directionlessnes.

Your conspiracy would have the west fucking themselves over.

How about this: a plutocratic elite has accumulated enough capital to be no longer accountable to anyone as almost each and every actor with power in society has been bought out - they don't care about you being able to afford a GPU for your world changing machine learning project for a fair price. They care about themselves and themselves only, and doing so are molding the rest of society into the same myopic egotistical form.

The recent pandemic and the sheer amount of people not willing or able to comply with simplest (masking, vaccinating, etc.) mitigation measures due to what boils down to a kind of malicious dumbness or idiocy driven by mass and social media reminds me of the kind of spirit that allowed the nazi party to come to power in Germany.

This doesn't bode well for ongoing crises like the destruction of the ecological support system of our species' home planet driven by greed and an endless appetite for convenience.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#349

Post by goldenbikeshed »

0x0nyandesu wrote: post #268
naruvimama wrote: post #263

Just waiting for the EU and US to restrict, crackdown or regulate bitcoin and other private crypto. At the minimum ban regulated institutions from dealing in it. Problem is too many people are already heavily invested in the pyramid scheme.

Most capitalists see crypto and the GPU market as just capitalism working as intended. There's nothing stopping gpu manufacturers from producing more product. Given that crypto is already 10 years old and has other things depending on it you sound like an old man yelling at some kids on their lawn.

> capitalism working as intended.

Needlessly destroying the planet and making it more expensive for me to drown the inevitability of impending doom by playing AAA video games.

Well ain't that just swell.

Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

#350

Post by rixed »

yellowapple wrote: post #341
rixed wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we do need more energy Sounds like ideology to me. I, for one, need many thing from basic food to nice music, but energy on its own in not in that list. I wonder what people picture when they say "energy" but probably not that thing that is equivalent to movement and that is always a constant by definition (at least here and now), and that increase entropy when we manipulate it (entropy being that thing every life…

> I, for one, need many thing from basic food to nice music, but energy on its own in not in that list. Energy is a dependency of both of the things you listed - and an abundance of energy makes those things more accessible to more people, yourself and myself included.

It's also a dependency of everything detrimental. My point was: it's not central in itself, but is framed to appear so because of ideology.
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