81–90 of 352 posts
> Bitcoin miners rarely use GPUs anymore, but ASICs Seeing the title and the conclusions, how can this be the case? Computationally they're not much behind ASICs per $, are much more broadly available to buy and are easier to sell when needed.
And what's to blame for Bitcoin's high price? A broken fiat monetary system. I can't believe some people still think that Bitcoin is more speculative than major tech stocks. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Uber, Snapchat... All propped up by money printing. I think if we ran a simulation using hard (non-fiat) money, the net losses of these big tech companies would be even more significant than Bitcoin's losses on electric…
Alternate opinion: proof of work mining provides a valuable service to society much moreso than videogames and the premium on GPUs reflects this. This isn't mainstream opinion of course, however I predict it will be. Crypto mining is the true first electricity buyer of last resort. It's a productive activity which can use megawatts of power and be turned off at a moments notice in order for the grid to meet the deman…
> Bitcoin miners rarely use GPUs anymore, but ASICs Seeing the title and the conclusions, how can this be the case? Computationally they're not much behind ASICs per $, are much more broadly available to buy and are easier to sell when needed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Assuming everyone commenting here has read the post Proof of stake is mentioned at the end of the article. > Other mechanism for securing blockchains exist and successfully used (see Proof of Stake). Proof of Work creates external costs (environmental impact, higher electricity prices, GPU scarcity) to benefit a small group of miners.
How beneficial blockchains are is a separate question, but proof-of-work is popular because proof-of-stake has serious issues.
For people interested, look up the "nothing at stake" issue.
And what's to blame for Bitcoin's high price? A broken fiat monetary system. I can't believe some people still think that Bitcoin is more speculative than major tech stocks. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Uber, Snapchat... All propped up by money printing. I think if we ran a simulation using hard (non-fiat) money, the net losses of these big tech companies would be even more significant than Bitcoin's losses on electric…
The reason why tulips are so successful and anti-fragile is that they can be grown everywhere.
By the way, if an activity like mining is only profitable because of money printing (depressing interest rates), given the world has been in zero to negative interest rates, this means the activity is not productive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you mention anything about the cloud, deep learning training on GPUs and the impact on the environment that has and the increasing costs of training and fine tuning your neural net, they won't care at all, they will still do it after all these years. As you know it is still a valid point.
> If you mention anything about the cloud, deep learning training on GPUs and the impact on the environment that has and the increasing costs of training and fine tuning your neural net, they won't care at all, they will still do it after all these years. There is a recent trend to discuss environmental impacts of training deep learning models in papers. See e.g. Latent Diffusion Models (Heidelberg), RETRO (Deepmind)…
Seems like you rushed to comment towards the wrong person.
> ...than cryptocurrencies which are a highly speculative.
How can a regulated stablecoin like USDP or USDC, or even CBDCs sitting on a cryptocurrency technology like XRPL or the Stellar Network etc. be 'highly speculative'?
I hope you haven't shown your 'bias' and targeted me, instead of the parent comment.
Alternate opinion: proof of work mining provides a valuable service to society much moreso than videogames and the premium on GPUs reflects this. This isn't mainstream opinion of course, however I predict it will be. Crypto mining is the true first electricity buyer of last resort. It's a productive activity which can use megawatts of power and be turned off at a moments notice in order for the grid to meet the deman…
It’s a profitable activity. There’s a difference there.