371–380 of 620 posts
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The end game is to transition to Proof of Stake, which doesn't have these problems and has other security advantages.
Bitcoin will never move to PoS. The community is far to fractured, without a leader they'll never agree.
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"service economy" was always a meme being sold to the gullible masses, manufacturing capacity is the only thing that matters for an economy. Manufacturing has always printed the money It amazes me how the US allowed itself to be nearly deindustrialized after manufacturing effectively won them WWII and global dominance. Now the US can't even make ventilators or face masks
US Manufacturing is still going. In fact, we manufacture more than ever. Folks conflate manufacturing with manufacturing _jobs_. Our manufacturing is more efficient then ever which is why you constantly hear this false refrain that US manufacturing is down or gone.
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> Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. Even if true (iirc there is a lot of doubt whether it is, see Iran), it's still moronic, because consuming renewable energy for shits and giggles obviously means that other energy demands are being met with your usual energy mix instead of that renewable energy that went into shits and giggles as assumed. In terms of net emissions it simply doesn'…
Proof of work cryptos are a pox on society. That said they are some of the most location neutral energy consumers. This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission. 1TW is around 20% of global energy production. This is enough of a factor to impact manufacturing of renewable energy equipment. It allows th…
If somebody's mining bitcoin they're clearly not interested in ethics in the first place.
Gosh I wish Apple with their loads of cash and drive to have the highest performing chip would get big ole fabs on US and EU shores. The fact that a disputed country owns the best fabs is downright scary for the future of the world (add in that the disputing country is the next superpower).
TSMC is building a $12b manufacturing facility in Arizona that will be able to produce the 5nm chips used in Apple products. They are fully aware of the geopolitical risks and are taking responsible steps to mitigate them. To the extent that the higher unit prices help them cover those investments, I'm more than happy to pay whatever portion of the increase gets passed on to consumers.
The 5nm plant is a good step for the US, but AFAIK, produces a small fraction of total 5nm output. And by the time it opens, 3nm will be the leading edge. It feels like a small concession by TSMC/Taiwan to keep the US off their back, but not significant enough. I mean, how do you even transfer thousands of talented engineers that far, with logistics and factory construction, too? It's not easy.
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> One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50 years in Taiwan) has really affected them ... This is the one aspect of manufactuing of chips that many are actually ignorant about - it needs huge amounts of pure water. This is the main reason why India doesn't yet have any fab, despite having the human resource for it and investors and government showing great interest to setup one. Two or three decades back…
What happens to the water the plants use? Is it polluted and unusable, or just tied up temporarily and can be released [safely] back into wherever it was diverted from?
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https://qz.com/2023032/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-use/ Thanks for making me look at this. We should ban cryptocurrencies.
What you are proposing is an authoritarian regime that can control what software is permitted to be run. This is madness, and will doom humanity. There is a reason that free speech is such a critical component of free societies.
I'm in charge of sourcing components for multiple companies right now. I believe they could double (100%) prices and companies would pay it. There's chips that I'm sourcing from obscure places in China just to get the part and paying whatever price they ask. Designers are getting overwhelmed because they're having to redesign boards for components that are available, only to realize by the time they finish the change…
One of the things my last employer did to get around availability problems was to buy a vendor's entire supply of a chip we could use and then redesigning the product to use it. IIRC, the supply was projected to be enough to last a year. Hopefully, a year from now it will have proven to be a good decision :-)
It's crazy out there!
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Ok - I wasn’t replying to the article - I was replying to a comment about crypto-induced price increases of consumer gear being blamed on datacenters, which just isn’t true. It’s not that OEM prices are going up, it’s that retail prices are. Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU which is immediately resold on the retail market at 100% markup. This is driven by crypto, not DL.
> Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU which is immediately resold on the retail market at 100% markup. The same might be said of event ticket resellers making a big markup. But the reality is that, in the case of event tickets at least, it's very common for the original sellers and the resellers either to be secretly the same party, or at least have some kind of profit sharing agreement. It's simply that the original se…
If someone is willing to pay 2x MSRP for a GPU then the MSRP is wrong (or rather, it's just a "suggestion" as the S indicates). My only point is that up until recently, there was not a long-term secondary market for GPUs. That is a new phenomenon that has been driven by crypto (as opposed to a big reduction in supply or huge increase in PC gamers).
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I agree with this but it's even worse than that. Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina. Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap…
> Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. Even if true (iirc there is a lot of doubt whether it is, see Iran), it's still moronic, because consuming renewable energy for shits and giggles obviously means that other energy demands are being met with your usual energy mix instead of that renewable energy that went into shits and giggles as assumed. In terms of net emissions it simply doesn'…
For instance. I don't cool my home with AC. does it bother you that I mine bitcoin overnight when the grid has surplus energy?
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"service economy" was always a meme being sold to the gullible masses, manufacturing capacity is the only thing that matters for an economy. Manufacturing has always printed the money It amazes me how the US allowed itself to be nearly deindustrialized after manufacturing effectively won them WWII and global dominance. Now the US can't even make ventilators or face masks
> "service economy" was always a meme being sold to the gullible masses, manufacturing capacity is the only thing that matters for an economy. Service economies work great in places where food and housing are free, so money is only needed to buy luxury goods. They only work poorly in the US because capitalists have leverage over service workers.