91–100 of 134 posts
Bitcoin ate all the GPUs and I said nothing because I was not a gamer. Now Chia wants to eat all the hard disks, and I am pissed . I declare war on hegemonizing proof-of-waste swarms. Burn the coins. I want that disk space back.
“Chia” means “shat” in French.
It's really important that manufacturers start responding to cryptocurrency induced shortages with auctions. The demand from the cryptocurrency users will be extremely high until they've spent a particular amount in total. They can do that with 1000 units, or with 5000 units. Obviously auctioning off units would be bad for having predictable prices for retail customers but that is irrelevant if aggressive miner buyin…
I've worked with Big Retail execs before. They're old school and conservative (in the business sense).
In a smoke filled CES hotel room they shook hands on a deal of X for $Y, and that's how it's going to stay for the next decade.
2) Risk. These shortages and cryptocurrency demand spikes are a blip on the history of these companies. It'd be stupid to suddenly change their entire business models and retail relationships for something that could disappear next month.
As much as I believe cryptocurrency and hence mining is here to stay, I can't fault these companies for not believing the same and acting accordingly. Especially given the cycles of boom and bust that cryptocurrencies have gone through.
Bitcoin ate all the GPUs and I said nothing because I was not a gamer. Now Chia wants to eat all the hard disks, and I am pissed . I declare war on hegemonizing proof-of-waste swarms. Burn the coins. I want that disk space back.
“Chia” means “shat” in French.
https://old.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/n2lren/thoughts_on_a_... Fixed link.
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“Chia” means “shat” in French.
You mean chier, the verb. Chia means chia
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Burning your regular customers is terrible business practice. It's not always about the money. Also, remember when Martin Shkreli increased the price of an anti-parasitic drug by 5000%? That upset a lot of people, and arguably it's what put him in jail. Of course, HDDs are not quite the same as vital medicine.
An auction is not an arbitrary increase just because you can. It’s the exact opposite- a natural market where supply and demand reach the optimal price. Yeah it’s bad for regular customers, but if there’s no supply then what would they be able to get anyway?
But for them, availability will also be limited, and next-term prices will get higher.
Also, increasing production of a highly-demanded item is not unheard of! But it will take months.
Sample size 1: every 3 months I need to buy a large hard drive (14TB+). I buy external USB ones since they are the cheapest. Since it was due, in the last couple of weeks I was scanning prices in Romania daily, in case I get lucky with a discount. In the last week, prices surged 60-100%, and stock disappeared for 4 TB+. I panicked and after a lot of scanning I managed to buy a slightly smaller one than I needed with…
They rented a truck and hit up all Costcos (I think it was) from Florida to I don't know where buying all of the drives they could. There was a limit on how many so it was a mission to do it.
Edit to add a link and change "Around 2010" to 2012,
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> Cryptocurrency, as wasteful as it might appear, is like a drop in the ocean compared to the data centers of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. It isn't, as 'mytherin points out. > Likes on Facebook provide much less value to society That's absurdly untrue. For all the warts of big social media players, they still provide tremendous social value - rich long-distance communication, organizing ad-hoc groups of people (…
> Not that much on an ongoing basis. It's also O(n) with respect to the amount of extra money you need in circulation. I think this isn't quite correct, but is even more in favor of fiat currency. Minting money costs in proportion to the number of bills/coins. If more value is needed, the denomination being printed can be changed to represent more value with the same cost. On the other hand, cryptocurrencies require…
Supplies of most fiat currencies are effectively infinite, and the currencies depreciate in general, see virtually anything from USD to the currency of Zimbabwe.
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I wouldn't count on the cheap hardware, it may be pretty much broken after endless full power use for mining.
Miners usually undervolt the GPUs to mine at peak efficiency, not peak performance and power consumption. Since chip wear correlates with power usage and heat production, GPU usage for mining is actually much less taxing for the hardware than typical gaming use with its frequent overclocking and rapid alterations between low and maximum power use.
Capacitors notably derate exponentially with increasing temperature as do many other things.