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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

#351

Post by jrockway »

mjevans wrote: post #186
jrockway wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he just wants the video card to play games. Gamers have suffered from low supply of graphics cards because of the mining fad. With that dying down, they should be able to buy a card now.

I dislike the idea of a crypto-currency that is biased towards specific configurations of silicon because it dis-proportionately assigns value and encourages cabals to form to amplify that distortion of value. These cards also signify the use of electric generation towards 'mining' for virtual currency instead of more productive uses for society: even including entertainment. The mining raises the overall cost of ele…

> The mining raises the overall cost of electricity for everyone.

Are you sure about that? If anything, more demand will make supply more efficient, lowering the cost for everyone.

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

#352

Post by jasonlingx »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #350
jasonlingx wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy used = mining reward * (1 - mining profit margin) / unit cost of energy Where mining reward = (mining block reward + transaction costs + mining premium) I use "mining premium" to refer to the premium people are willing to pay to mine, i.e. as a hobby, research, or to evade taxes or capital controls. I think when considering efficiency, we can disregard these costs - i.e. energy spent evading taxes is really an…

This formula which I haven't gone through in detail enough to see if I completely agree, directly support the point of waste. As society lowers the cost of energy, we would expect even more energy to be wasted with all other variables remaining equal. Halve the cost of energy and now you've doubled the amount of energy spent. If the cost all energy worldwide improved dropped by a factor of 100, society should explode…

Would you then say that all that energy from the millions of stars burning in our night sky is wasted?

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #350
jasonlingx wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy used = mining reward * (1 - mining profit margin) / unit cost of energy Where mining reward = (mining block reward + transaction costs + mining premium) I use "mining premium" to refer to the premium people are willing to pay to mine, i.e. as a hobby, research, or to evade taxes or capital controls. I think when considering efficiency, we can disregard these costs - i.e. energy spent evading taxes is really an…

This formula which I haven't gone through in detail enough to see if I completely agree, directly support the point of waste. As society lowers the cost of energy, we would expect even more energy to be wasted with all other variables remaining equal. Halve the cost of energy and now you've doubled the amount of energy spent. If the cost all energy worldwide improved dropped by a factor of 100, society should explode…

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by ufo »

ue_ wrote: post #291
ufo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The value of the smaller currencies is tied to the value of bitcoin and bitcoin is down 30% this month so I doubt that there will be much profit to be made here today.

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

#355

Post by billmalarky »

paulgb wrote: post #319
billmalarky wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same argument can be made for stocks in companies. Sure it could be a bubble. No one knows the value of this stuff it's still 100% speculative (not generating a known return). That's why there's so much potential for massive returns at this stage.

That said, don't put money that you can't afford to lose into cryptocurrencies or there's a good chance you could get hurt.

Also, it's a great way to get easy exposure to high risk investments as a part of your risk adjusted portfolio.

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

#356

Post by paulgb »

billmalarky wrote: post #355
paulgb wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same argument can be made for stocks in companies. Sure it could be a bubble. No one knows the value of this stuff it's still 100% speculative (not generating a known return). That's why there's so much potential for massive returns at this stage. That said, don't put money that you can't afford to lose into cryptocurrencies or there's a good chance you could get hurt. Also, it's a great way to get easy exposure to h…

Stocks and crypto are both subject to speculation, but it's apples and oranges. The actual value of a stock is its discounted future value. When people speculate on stocks, they speculate on what its discounted future value is.

With crypto, the discounted future value is by that definition zero. People are instead speculating on what the consensus value will be, i.e. what they will be able to sell it for. It seems that in time the consensus will favor the currency with the best technology, not the one that was first.

(My personal bet is that all crypo will trend towards zero eventually, but that's besides my point here)

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

#357

Post by AngryData »

TylerE wrote: post #43
gwern wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners shouldn't be meaningfully exposed since they can sell off their ETH as soon as they mine it (deposit it to an exchange address and sell off every few minutes via an API, or something like that). And while ETH might crash enough to make it no longer profitable and risking your capex, you can switch your GPU to mine whatever is most profitable, so you're more diversified than it looks and insulated from the inst…

If Eth crashes (more) and bitcoin continues to drop, no crypto is going to be worth anything.

Bit coin isn't dropping, yeah it had a small peak the last month but it is still at $2300 which was only first achieved in in May.

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

#358

Post by AngryData »

nodesocket wrote: post #33
DanBlake wrote: post #7

Just took a quick look at this. If you are located in the 'mining valley' of Washington where power is ~2c/kwh you are still getting healthy profits. A computer with 7 GTX 1070 graphics cards should produce ~230 mh/s and draw 1 kw. This would cost approximately $30/month in power factoring in kw demand + cooling. The above setup will currently generate $385/month in ETH. So basically for miners who are in the right s…

Sorry noob question, but if you don't pay for power at your apartment could you run a rig for just the cap x to get started?

They might think you are growing weed and evict you if you draw too much.

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

#359

Post by [deleted] »

Taek wrote: post #341
abalone wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Primary use today, sure. But cryptocurrency has more practical application every year, and there are a lot of compelling reasons to believe that major economic players will switch to decentralized currency (not private blockchains, the public ones) in the next 10-20 years. If during the dotcom bubble internet startups had required something similar (provable waste), people would have said the same thing you are. But…

[deleted]

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

#360

Post by celticninja »

cwyers wrote: post #187
celticninja wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you are not actually considering the electricity usage of fiat money at all.

Banks aren't setting themselves on fire in the course of operation: http://gizmodo.com/a-huge-fire-took-out-a-bitcoin-mining-ope... Because banks aren't setting themselves up in places based on the electricty cost. And shoving rackmount servers in close proximity and underventilating them. Even huge fintech operations aren't chasing cheap power at the exclusion of other concerns. Banks do not use the kind of electric…

So from a sample size of 1 you think all miners are setting g themselves on fire?
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