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

overclock3d.net

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

#61

Post by Tom1971 »

milkey_mouse wrote: post #39
crypt1d wrote: post #15

Its mostly RX series that are being sold off and the reason for that is the ever-increasing Ethereum DAG size. I dont know the specifics, but due to the DAG size the ETH hash rate on AMD RX400/500s is starting to slowly drop, and will be behind the performance of their Nvidia counter-parts in a few months time. (Source: I run a mining operation.)

Isn't it only the 4GB RX cards that will get worse for mining? Or is it that the GPU memory bandwidth is less on AMD cards?

The theory out there is that the 480 has lower performance due to TLB trashing. So it's not DRAM size specific but GPU architecture specific.

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

#62

Post by dewhelmed »

benchaney wrote: post #21
vortico wrote: post #17

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does a single party control the difficulty level of Ethereum and Bitcoin? If so, it seems like they have massive control over the market. If not, how does it work?

The target amount of time per block was set as a global constant (1 block every 10 minutes for bitcoin, 1 block every 15 seconds for ethereum). At fixed intervals, the difficulty is adjusted based on the actual rate of mining. The computation is deterministic, and agreed upon using the standard consensus mechanism. No individual controls it.

So does that mean the network is now demanding each ether be mined every 12 seconds (20% harder statistic mentioned in the linked article), or the difficulty has increased naturally? E.g. there has been a large spike in the number of ether miners lately, which has caused the network to naturally readjust the difficulty to maintain the 15s/ether mining rate? If so, these GPU miners leaving the field would readjust the difficulty back again towards the original levels, or is this difficulty change a more permanent thing due to some underlying change in the technology?

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

#63

Post by abalone »

All I can think of is the careless environmental impact of all that dirty electricity consumption. For, let's be honest, a mostly speculative activity.

One cryptocurrency crashes, another gets hyped up, and the computational cycle repeats. When will it end.

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

#64

Post by grogenaut »

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…

Where do I check my raw kwh price? just on my bill? I'm in WA as well.

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

#65

Post by mathgeek »

Mtinie wrote: post #59
twblalock wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd would have said, sorry running servers for my internet business. Why do you think that would have helped? The landlord cares about the fact that he/she is paying more money because power consumption is high, not about why power consumption is high.

Do many people live in units where electricity is provide as a gratis benefit? That was never my experience in California, Washington, D.C., nor in Virginia.

It can be rather common when a unit isn't in high demand.

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

#66

Post by johnohara »

pdog wrote: post #45
zanny wrote: post #42

On the bright side, this has been a great test of etheriums scalability. Which isn't great , but when this mining craze dies down I won't hesitate to run ethminer when I'm not home for a little extra dough. What I would really expect is an overreaction to the price crash, which means the difficulty rate might drop a lot . At this point, doing what a lot of people do with bitcoin - mining small amounts for a long peri…

Proof-of-stake is coming to Ethereum later this year, so there isn't much point investing in a few more months of mining. Casper is the real reason everyone is selling their mining hardware.

Agree, to a point. Using proof of stake is an important objective for the Ethereum blockchain model. Vitalik has said as much in conferences worldwide since January of this year.

The drop in price helps potential stakeholders too.

But the real concern, and IMHO, the reason for the drop, may lie in the next big hurdle, which is creating applications based on blockchain contracts. It is a very different way of thinking about application development, and as such, may need more time for consideration.

More like hypertext and the world-wide web was in 1993 than it was in 1996 and '97.

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

#67

Post by foota »

Mtinie wrote: post #59
twblalock wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd would have said, sorry running servers for my internet business. Why do you think that would have helped? The landlord cares about the fact that he/she is paying more money because power consumption is high, not about why power consumption is high.

Do many people live in units where electricity is provide as a gratis benefit? That was never my experience in California, Washington, D.C., nor in Virginia.

Electricity is rather cheap in Washington because we have plentiful hydro power from the Grand Coulee Dam. See: http://www.neo.ne.gov/statshtml/204.htm

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

#68

Post by ams6110 »

Mtinie wrote: post #59
twblalock wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd would have said, sorry running servers for my internet business. Why do you think that would have helped? The landlord cares about the fact that he/she is paying more money because power consumption is high, not about why power consumption is high.

Do many people live in units where electricity is provide as a gratis benefit? That was never my experience in California, Washington, D.C., nor in Virginia.

Not really uncommon if you're renting in a house that's been split up to several rental units. I've mostly seen it with water, but gas and electric service can be done that way too.

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

#70

Post by benchaney »

dewhelmed wrote: post #62
benchaney wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The target amount of time per block was set as a global constant (1 block every 10 minutes for bitcoin, 1 block every 15 seconds for ethereum). At fixed intervals, the difficulty is adjusted based on the actual rate of mining. The computation is deterministic, and agreed upon using the standard consensus mechanism. No individual controls it.

So does that mean the network is now demanding each ether be mined every 12 seconds (20% harder statistic mentioned in the linked article), or the difficulty has increased naturally? E.g. there has been a large spike in the number of ether miners lately, which has caused the network to naturally readjust the difficulty to maintain the 15s/ether mining rate? If so, these GPU miners leaving the field would readjust the…

> So does that mean the network is now demanding each ether be mined every 12 seconds

You have it backwards. A 20% increase in difficulty would mean that a block was only being mined once every 18s. The intuition is that if there are fewer blocks, then it is harder to get one.

I think this change is due to the etherium difficulty bomb:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/themerkle.com/what-is-the-ether...

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