Nvidia Is Giving Up On the Cryptocurrency Mining Market (latimes.com) 176
"Nvidia's nine-month crypto gold rush is over," reports the Los Angeles Times. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
"Our core platforms exceeded our expectations, even as crypto largely disappeared," founder and Chief Executive Jensen Huang said Thursday on a conference call. "We're projecting no cryptomining going forward...." Nvidia said it had expected about $100 million in sales of chips bought by currency miners in the fiscal second quarter. Instead, the total was $18 million in the period, and that revenue is likely to disappear entirely in future quarters, the company said.
Investors are expressing their concern at the sudden collapse of what had looked like a billion-dollar business. Three months ago, Nvidia said it generated $289 million in sales from cryptocurrency miners, but warned that demand was declining rapidly and might fall by as much as two-thirds. Even that prediction was too optimistic.
Investors are expressing their concern at the sudden collapse of what had looked like a billion-dollar business. Three months ago, Nvidia said it generated $289 million in sales from cryptocurrency miners, but warned that demand was declining rapidly and might fall by as much as two-thirds. Even that prediction was too optimistic.
Is it dead yet? (Score:1)
Can we call cryptocurrency dead yet? And blockchain?
Lot of suckers lost money, but my sympathy is limited because it was such a stupid idea to begin with.
Re:Is it dead yet? (Score:4, Interesting)
In the very beginning, one man paid for two pizzas using 10,000 bitcoins, which at the highest price would have been $80,000,000
https://www.investopedia.com/n... [investopedia.com]
Re:Is it dead yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
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On december 15th 2017, one Bitcoin was worth USD$17,900.
10,000 Bitcoins * $17,900 = USD$179,000,000.
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As a currency it is dead
That pronouncement would be a bit premature.
Re: Is it dead yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem with these logistical tracking in the block chain ideas is (among other things) how do you ensure that the physical item matches the coin?
You put a sticker with a serial number on the item?
Re: Is it dead yet? (Score:2)
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The true cost of mining (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The true cost of mining (Score:5, Informative)
GPU production did not substantially increase. Both AMD and Nvidia looked at cryptocoins, realized they were almost certainly a bubble that could pop at any time, and accordingly made no long-term investments to increase production. They pretty much maxed out their contracts with chip foundries (neither make their own chips - Nvidia uses TSMC and Samsung, AMD uses GlobalFoundries and TSMC), but they could never keep up with such an absurd demand spike with existing infrastructure.
Further, the GPUs are hardly useless now. They're already starting to appear on the secondhand market, and be snatched up by gamers. I myself am contemplating getting a second card, if they get cheap enough. The really useless mining hardware are the ASICs - which are pretty tailor-made for the purpose of mining, although I suspect the Bitcoin ASICs might be able to be repurposed to brute-force SHA-256 passwords.
And finally, the headline is a bit inaccurate. Nvidia isn't "giving up". They're just letting shareholders know not to expect another quarter of massive sales volume, because they expect the remaining crypto miners to mostly buy ASICs, not general-purpose cards. (And the glut of used cards is probably going to hurt at least their low-end sales for a year or two - given a choice between this year's $200 card, and last year's $800 card, used, for $200, lots of people will pick the latter.)
Re:The true cost of mining (Score:5, Insightful)
>Further, the GPUs are hardly useless now. They're already starting to appear on the secondhand market, and be snatched up by gamers.
A lot of the GPUs *are* useless to gamers because they don't have video circuitry on them or video outputs. So they're pretty much only good for GPU computing. I suppose they could be sold to the scientific computing market, but I suspect demand for GPUs there isn't as high as gamings, so it's likely folks won't get too much money back.
I wish the GPU card manufacturers hadn't started making these cards without the video circuitry and ports. This is the cheapest part of the card, and at least if they had proper video outputs the cards would be useful second hand to gamers and folks who want to drive really high resolution displays. What a waste.
Re:The true cost of mining (Score:5, Interesting)
Right, I forgot about those.
They might still be useful in SLI/Crossfire configurations. Only one GPU needs video outputs for that to work. Do mining-specific cards still have the SLI edge connector?
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Right, I forgot about those. They might still be useful in SLI/Crossfire configurations. Only one GPU needs video outputs for that to work. Do mining-specific cards still have the SLI edge connector?
Well it's not needed for mining so if you were making an extremely stripped down single-purpose version I don't see how that'd survive.
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I do not believe they have the SLI connectors cut out on the headless cards. But with the new DX and Vulcan you dont really need it anymore, you can even do cross vendor in some cases, and with time it is only going to get better.
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Do mining-specific cards still have the SLI edge connector?
Most certainly. Miners would build multi-bay PCI buses for this specific purpose. One CPU can mine using 16 or so graphics cards, as it's mainly just doling out the work to the GPUs.
If I had several GPU cards, then I'd definitely strap them all together with SLI connectors. In mining, it's a race to solve the next block, so a set of strapped cards would mean more parallel compute power, and thus better chances.
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Umm. SLI is not used in mining rigs. It actually hinders performance in most algorithms. You should really lookup this stuff before you comment about it.
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A lot of the GPUs *are* useless to gamers because they don't have video circuitry on them or video outputs.
Define "a lot". Headless GPUs represent a tiny minority, mainly because all serious miners shied away from them, knowing their resale value was zero, or close to that. Some suckers still bought them but the totl amount is probably low single digit percentage of all, and I'm generous here.
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They were never for miners, they are for deep learning, engineering, scientific computing.
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Except nvidia said "Check out this card we made for you miners!"
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I was actually referring to the AMD Instinct (7nm, no video)
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nVidia never said that because nVidia never made such cards. They were all made by integrators and they were all GTX 1060 cards. nVidia just sold the chips to integrators.
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You dont think the partners just did that on their own did you? You realize that the P106-100 is not the same chip as the P106. Very very close, but far from the same.
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If they requested it, nVidia provided it.
Re:The true cost of mining (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of the GPUs *are* useless to gamers because they don't have video circuitry on them or video outputs. So they're pretty much only good for GPU computing.
That's like saying that CPUs are only good for CPU computing. I'm seeing a lot of "hidden" applications for GPU computing these days, e.g. video and photo editors that are taking advantage of OpenCL and related tech behind the scenes. As a sibling post mentions, things like SLI should be useful for gamers and others that only use GPUs to process what's immediately visible. Games might also offload physics modelling etc. to GPUs.
Today, it seems completely backwards that GPUs used to be limited for display only. Why build those nice parallel processor arrays if you can't actually use them for general computing? Fortunately, some clever people worked around those limitations by putting general data into image textures. Eventually, the industry gave in and formalized the idea into OpenCL and CUDA.
You can forget about cryptocurrencies and see all these companies talking about data mining and AI. Things like tensor cores neither for gaming nor cryptos. That said, such companies are probably not interested in random second-hand GPUs, but the point is that GPU computing is huge and professional and not going away.
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I wish the GPU card manufacturers hadn't started making these cards without the video circuitry and ports
These cards are for the deep learning market, now going vertical and no sign of stopping. Gamers don't need to feel left out, they benefit from the extra volume, which adds capacity the fab lines and contributes to bringing down the price of their next gaming GPU.
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There arent many of those portless cards in the wild, and most of the people that bought them are still mining with them. However, they are still good for GPGPU and cracking rigs and the such. I mined, made a little bit of extra money after paying off my hardware costs. now waiting for the market to fall out so I can grab a bunch of cheap used cards and PSU's.. Everyone thinks that miners abuse the cards, when infact 90% of the miners keep them cooler than a gamer would or could cooped up in their tiny case
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How dare you bring truth to the table? Boo!
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"GPU production did not substantially increase"
FTS:
"Nvidia said it generated $289 million in sales from cryptocurrency miners"
Your statement and Nvidia's statement really don't match up do they, sure they didn't build new production but they certainly would of gone to full capacity at a time when normally it would have been quiet with gamers waiting for the next gen'.
And any gamer with savvy won't touch an ex-miner-card because they've been 'ragged'. A card would have to be 90% off of SRP before I'd even co
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MrLogic, your logic is flawed. The average temp of a gpu mining stays at 55-60c, the average temp of a gpu gaming is 75-85c. Using only one algorithm on the card means you're effectively only using about 20% of the GPU at any one time. Not to mention miners undervolt the card to keep it running cool. most big miners dont even overclock the cards. Anybody that doesn't buy old mining gpu's is a fool. I don't suggest buying the cards some gamer decided to mine with when he wasnt gaming, because that card has b
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The difference is miners run their systems 24/7. And I'd like to see the evidence that miners actually run their cards cooler than gamers, you can assume all you like but miners know they haven't got long to mine before asic miners will make their system useless for mining.
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Im not assuming, I mine, and I know a lot of miners. Go to any miner forum or IRC channel and ask a few questions. If your card is running 24/7 at 80c youre degrading your gpu sure, but when running them cool at 55-60c and being undervolted and under clocked. You not only preserve the life of the VRM you also preserve the life of the silicon. Its like overclocking your cpu, you can run for years on an overclocked cpu as long as the voltage is low and the temp is low. there is no difference in a CPU and GPU
Is this some kind of parody? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only has millions of tonnes of greenhouses gases been produced due to mining
If you want to troll you have to use some figure that sounds like someone somewhere might actually believe it. According to you the atmosphere is 100% CO2 at this point. I'm still breathing pretty well.
it has also produced millions of graphics cards that are now useless due to being fried alive by mining
This also seems rather absurd; I have a friend with a dedicated mining rig and something like 16 cards - why would miners "Fry them alive"?? The longer the cards last the more money they make so the miners treat the GPU's like tender infants and take great pains to cool them properly. There is no reason those cards will not last 10x longer than a GPU in the average PC sold to someone in a dusty house.
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If the next gen of cards produces a significant boost in performance, they'll upgrade anyway. If the GPUs have any life left in them, that's money left on the table.
What you may mean is they have to take great pains to cool them so they last until the next gen is out (since they run 24/7 at max speed.) But that makes them last longer than they otherwise would, n
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If the GPUs have any life left in them, that's money left on the table.
Or, you sell them, and no money is left on the table.
What you may mean is they have to take great pains to cool them so they last until the next gen is out
Oh come on, how could they time that??? Bullshit. They keep the whole rig as cool as they can so they can overclock things as much as possible. But in the end the cards are still working and can be sold, to help pay for upgrades when more powerful cards arrive. In reality though t
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Actually its a mix of all of them, Undervolt the core, and underclock it, then overclock the memory. A lot of cryptocurrencies are memory bound(ethash for one) meaning you need that memory timing tight, and memory clock high. You however need very little core power, so it gets tuned down.
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Miners don't upgrade all of their cards as soon as new ones comes out. You would never turn a profit if you did that. There are still warehouses full of 970/980 rigs running to this day. Sure they have added a bunch of rigs with 580's and 1070's. That does not mean they stopped using the old cards. Have you ever even talked to a miner? Let alone one that has more than 1 mining rig?
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That's not how mining works. You need fast hashes that profit more than electric costs. PoW chains have difficulty increases.
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"If you want to troll you have to use some figure that sounds like someone somewhere might actually believe it. According to you the atmosphere is 100% CO2 at this point. I'm still breathing pretty well."
Heh, you're the one who doesnt know what they're talking about. Humanity produces thousands of millions of tons of co2 alone every year https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com] . If bitcoin mining did produce millions of tons of green house gases (I have no idea how much it produced) it certainly wouldn't change m
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Humanity produces thousands of millions of tons of co2 alone every year.
From the electricity used by GPU's??? Really????
Idiot. Come back when you get out of high school and have better reading comprehension.
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Since he specifically did not state that those billions all came from mining, I suggest that you go back to K-12 to remedy your reading comprehension.
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Some one already commented on this but I thought your comment was so rich I can't help myself. At no point did I say GPUs did that. I very clearly state, humanity in general does. It literally reads as such in your own post where you quote me saying "humanity" and not "GPU". They're not even spelled similarly. Clearly you're the one with a reading comprehension problem. I mean really, twice in a row with this shit really looks bad for you.
Pro-tip: If you're going to act like a jackass by calling people name
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Oh shit, that graph was just for the US so the parent really was most like spot on. Way to go dumbass.
What are you smoking ? (Score:2)
Hardly, carbon cycle is natural 750 gigaton per year, as for human it is around 30 gigaton (or that order of magnitude). A million tons CO2 is not even a sizzling drop on a hot stone in the sahara.
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There is no reason those cards will not last 10x longer than a GPU in the average PC sold to someone in a dusty house.
Did you ever see those tiny screws on the card fan cover? They are there to taken off to clean the cooling hardware once in a while. It gets pretty packed with dust after a while indeed. After a cleanup, the cards are as good as new.
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Not only has millions of tonnes of greenhouses gases been produced due to mining, it has also produced millions of graphics cards that are now useless due to being fried alive by mining, which will now be in a third world waste dump now as they are too hard to recycle. meanwhile bona fide users of graphics cards have had their supplies disrupted, had their prices more than doubled and have had to wait an extra year for new hardare to come out because nvidia was too busy making mining cards to do r&d. Anyone who made “money” from mining should have it seized under environmental protection laws.
Actually NVidia got lots of money by selling their cards for cryptocurrency mining which they then used to hire more engineers to do R&D for their next generation of cards.
Like almost every company that was producing chips for mining, they are now pivoting to AI.
Re:The true cost of mining (Score:5, Informative)
There are dozens of other human activities which produce nothing but greenhouse gases.
Unlike gamers who make their GPUs go through 0-100% use cycles, with temperatures ranging from 18 to 100C, most miners, on the the other hand, reduce voltage by default (this greatly increases efficiency) and keep their GPUs constantly loaded, under constant moderate temperatures (below 70C) which does not affect the GPU core lifespan in any significant way. Also mining rigs are usually open and well-ventilated, unlike gamers' PCs which are filled with dust and operate under extreme temperatures.
Or they might be resold.
NVIDIA has never stopped R&D and they did not allocate any significant additional resources to producing cards meant for miners.
People waste money and resources on far more negative things.
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There are dozens of other human activities which produce nothing but greenhouse gases.
Posting on Slashdot, for example.
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There are dozens of other human activities which produce nothing but greenhouse gases.
Yeah I know. So we should just give up now. Excuse me I need to go turn on the heater and the AC at the same time because someone else somewhere is wasting power so clearly there's no reason at all for me not to do the same.
People waste money and resources on far more negative things.
Next time you post about this topic remember the scales that are involved. I may waste a bit of power by leaving the bathroom light on, but cyptomining has achieved zero and uses more power than the nation of Austria. There's few useless activities that people do at scale that if stopped
Re:The true cost of mining (Score:4, Informative)
Not only has millions of tonnes of greenhouses gases been produced due to mining
Where did THAT come from?
, it has also produced millions of graphics cards that are now useless due to being fried alive by mining
Citation needed. This is simply false. It's the typical case of incomplete information being blown completely out of proportion and twisted to carry someone's agenda.
While a graphics card used 24/7 would indeed carry a higher risk of becoming defective (by the way, this is the only correct information being flung around like poo by cryptohaters), there isn't much talk about everything else which counterbalances this risk.
The vast majority of miners take better care of their cards than regular gamers. The mining cards are undervolted and have power limits set. They are also better cooled than their gaming counterparts, located in open cases and with plenty airflow around them. I suggest researching this topic a bit before vomiting nonsense, but I guess it's simpler to vomit nonsense, isn't it? Fuck being objective.
, which will now be in a third world waste dump now as they are too hard to recycle.
What you fail to mention is that a GPU is much easier to recycle than, say, a mobile phone or a tablet, or a laptop, or a TV for that matter. A GPU's cooling solution has two main components: Aluminium and plastic. Both can be easily separated and melted. What remains is a 200-grams PCB which is flat and has components that can easily be separated.
meanwhile bona fide users of graphics cards have had their supplies disrupted, had their prices more than doubled and have had to wait an extra year for new hardare to come out because nvidia was too busy making mining cards to do r&d. Anyone who made “money” from mining should have it seized under environmental protection laws.
Again, you're either misinformed or carry an agenda.
nVidia wasn't the main perpetrator here. They clearly mentioned, more than once, that they can and would ramp up chip production if needed. The issue was integrators (Gigabyte, Asus, MSI and the like) were reluctant to boost chip orders and build many cards, out of fear they're going to be left with huge overstocks. Price jacking happened solely at third party sellers and was boosted by Vnand prices going up like crazy. For THAT you gotta blame Apple, they're buying about 20% of ALL vNand production every year. Guess what they put it in? Yeah, that phone you're carrying.
As I kept saying for quite some time now, it's easier to talk out of your ass and fling misinformation around like poo.
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Not only has millions of tonnes of greenhouses gases been produced due to mining
Where did THAT come from?
There were a couple of articles about Bitcoin and emissions last year.
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Clicked the Nature article. It says Some estimate that the combined electricity consumption for bitcoin and ethereum mining, which together represent 88% of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization (G. Hileman and M. Rauchs http://doi.org/cj22 [doi.org]; 2017), has already reached a staggering 47 terawatt-hours per year and is on the rise”. Checking source, it says As a reference, it is estmated that Bitcoin alone currently consumes about 10.41 TWh per year, which is close to the yearly energy consumpton
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Not only has millions of tonnes of greenhouses gases been produced due to mining
Sink the profits into building solar farms, it should work out fine.
millions of graphics cards that are now useless due to being fried alive by mining
Right, just wore out all those wires? Maybe melted some solder? Or could it be, those cards on eBay were just superseded by the more efficient generation. For the right price, I will be happy to pick up a cast-off 580, thanks.
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Actually, you would be surprised how many of the big miners are using renewable energy to power their miners. I know a guy in Washington that has a farm which is 100% hydro electricity. And from what hes told me there are a few others in the area, and around the world.
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(There are also rumors of miners somehow loading custom firmware/microcode to GPUs, thereby making them useless for games, but I have no idea how true that is.)
Semi-true. AMD cards do require a custom BIOS, but its just tightening memory timing, and it actually boosts performance in video games. The part about making them useless for gamers is a lie though. I wouldn't believe another word that person told me if I was you.
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I have struggled to understand the environmental impact of cryptomining, but I took a hard look at physical gold mining companies like AngloGold and Barrick.
By far, the cryptomining "industry" produces far fewer greenhouse gases and resource consumption (by electricity) than traditional, physical gold mining.
In short, it's a wash. Both are equally damaging to our environment. At least cryptomining doesn't scar the landscape like physical gold mining does.
Re:The true cost of mining (Score:5, Informative)
Finite currencies have their own problems. They are subject to deflation, and wild price swings. There is a reason all major governments moved away from a gold standard.
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That being that it's hard to hide what you're doing with people's money if it's easy enough for them to UNDERSTAND it.
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That being that it's hard to hide what you're doing with people's money if it's easy enough for them to UNDERSTAND it.
You know economics and accounting are actually professional fields. When you are bleeding out do you also reject life threatening surgery because you don't know exactly how it works?
Let's not cater to ignorance, lest we still be hitting each other over the head with sticks while making grunting noises because no one is interested in this "fire thing" that was too confusing to understand.
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so banks can loan out 10 times or more depending on regulations of what they have in accounts
Technically banks can not loan out any more money than they have, the can not just say they have extra money. It does work out that the amount of money in the economy is 10 time more however. Here is a simplified example: Say there is $100 or gold coins in the economy that is all in a bank (say there is only 1 bank). the bank can lend out say 90% so now there is $190, then that $90 goes back into the bank so the bank can lend 90% out of that. Keep going for ever. So the total amount of money in the econo
Re: The true cost of mining (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The true cost of mining (Score:5, Funny)
Which is why hyperinflation from "printing" too much money has been a persistent problem with all fiat currencies around the world, hitting every nation repeatedly, including of course the United States. We desperately need blockchain to finally rein in the incessant hyperinflation!
Oh wait... this hasn't happened. Only a few failed (or near-failed) states have actually experienced anything like this. Never mind.
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Only because every single bank started printing or even just making handwritten currency notes in order to keep their customers happy due to the high inflation of the economy. Which was being caused by banks printing currency as fast as they could In the end the solution to the hyperinflation was to issue a new standard set of bank notes and stop the banks from printing money.
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people wouldn't have to resort to cryptocurrencies.
People aren't resorting to cryptocurrencies because of inflation. They attempt instantly to convert to a stable tradable currency, often the USD. What kind of an idiot would swap hyperinflation for insane instability?
Because even cryptocurrencies developed by 15 year olds have set number of coins that can be mined
Then the immediate following year those 15 year olds take a high-school economics class and find out why deflation at scale is an incredibly bad thing for an economy and why central banks work to keep inflation rates where they do.
NVidia is terrible (Score:2)
2) NVidia has b
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sounds like butt-hurt miner talk
nvidia doesn't need a market that has small saturation point
bitcoin too illiquid to be useful as money because of its bottlenecked architecture.
maybe someday someone will design a cryptocurrency that is actually useful to the masses, but that day is not now
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nvidia doesn't need a market that has small saturation point
They will take any market they can get. The problem is, miners don't want nVidia GPUs because they are less power efficient for the hashing load than AMD. Why exactly that is... I only looked at that superficially, but it seems one big point is that nVideo optimized their architecture heavily for the most popular gaming GPU load, that is, 32 bit floating point. For double, half or integer, AMD delivers better ops per watt.
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no they will not take a niche market with no future. bitcoin is deeply flawed for it's claimed purpose. there are alternative better scaling crypto coin architectures in the works. BTC will finally auger into the ground because of its flaws.
Impractical (Score:1)
This is because people are finally realizing how impractical cryptocurrencies are. There are simply too many variables. Too many things that can go wrong. Security measures continue to prove ineffectual as more and more high profile thefts persist. And let's not forget that for something that was supposed to "set people free" from fiat currencies, they fail to realize that government controls the manufacture of the technology and the infrastructure on which it depends (i.e. power grids, communication transp
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If people truly want a new way of doing things, look to the old ways: commodities, practical skills, and the bartering and trading of such.
I know right! And we should go back to horse and carriage too! I bet you voted for Trump.
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This is because people are finally realizing how impractical cryptocurrencies are.
The problem is cryptocoins have very few legitimate applications beyond resale to the next bigger fool. Once the fool pool is depleted, the value has nowhere to go but down. It will probably never reach $0 though, as there will always be illegal uses (money laundering, drug money, ransomware, etc.) propping up the value.
Also, there are new fools being born every minute. The fool pool can never be depleted because the supply of fools is virtually infinite.
Yes, yes! (Score:2)
Let it die already! Or at least move to coins a bit more practical then proof-of-work with their race to build ever more specialised hardware.
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Totally agree, the notion of wastefully burning energy to verify transactions is absurd. What if bitcoin didn't crash, and people kept mining and mining more and more, until it was basically the only way to make money, and every single person was mining. Eventually it causes so much pollution it is what kills off all of the animals, destroys the environment, and ends civilization on earth. Might make for a good drama, it clearly illustrates the conflict between greed and the environment.
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Bubbles are a well understood economic phenomenon. The price of something is rising, so people want to buy it as an investment, which drives the price up higher, which causes more people to want to invest. It could be what's happened w ith bitcoin. How many people are actually spending bitcoin on goods and services, rather than just hoarding it to watch their wealth grow?
I dabbled in mining myself on a tiny scale as a hobby, never intending to make any money off it. I eventually made enough to just barely p
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We could only be so lucky..
NB (Score:2)
Crypto has not disappeared, it's just you can barely break even with it nowadays. The reason it's not as profitable as it was in the past 12 months is not even due to the depreciation of crypto-currencies, it's because mining difficulty has increased several-fold (it's increased/decreased automatically following the changes in network hashing rate). It's quite possible that the next crypto-craze will again make mining prof
The cost of video cards is still pretty high (Score:2)
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I'm looking forward to seeing what Intel does in a few years, but they're a long way off...
Probably expand their partnership with AMD, it's just more cost effective than putting in all the R&D necessary to come up with something competitive with vega/navi. Isn't that weird?
Understanding Bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)
Some Twitter wag gave the best explanation of Bitcoin I've ever seen:
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Those of us who have been around Slashdot a while know that there are car analogies for every technology. Without exception. But keep coming back. It works if you work it.
Re:Understanding Bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you even read the analogy? The car is idling. It's not driving anywhere. It's up on blocks. Stationary.
Fuck, do I have to explain everything to the Anonymous Coward? As much as he's on here, you'd think he'd have developed some reading skills by now.
I never knew they bought into it (Score:2)
"We project no cryptomining" (Score:2)
So they're short selling.
When mining jumps on the new devices, swallows the entire available supply, burps, and screams for more, while regular owners are asked to pay $1000 for a mid-range device, they can laugh all the way to the bank.
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First post I've read that makes much sense.
Good! (Score:2)
Nvidia Mining? (Score:2)
My understanding was that Nvidia's kit was terrible for GPU mining. That might be outdated, but I know it was the case in 2013.
Nobody didn't see this coming (Score:2)
Nobody didn't see this coming, unless they were wildly misinformed and/or stupid.
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Crypto-boom is still felt. Prices are going down slowly from being much higher than MSRP. Additionally there's a large amount of unsold stock, because higher prices blocked people who were planning to update from updating. And now, the same people are waiting for the next gen and not updating. All while no manufacturer wants to sell at a much lower price than everyone else and crash the market for everyone.
So we end up in status quo.
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are the previous generation (launched early '17) graphics cards still selling for above the original launch
Previous gen is now back at roughly MSRP, which is still distorted. Prices should fall rapidly over the coming weeks with perhaps a bit of overshoot, maybe great value for games. RX 580 remains highly respectable, especially for Vulkan/DX12 games. Current gen Vega 64 is running about 10% over MSRP right now, way down from what it was. I'm one of those fuck nVidia guys (with good reason) so I don't much care what they cost, but for what it's worth, nVideo MSRP is following about the same trajectory.
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Define burned out? Youre better off buying a used mining card than a used gaming card.
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You realize lower core voltage and adequate cooling(no hot cold cycles) your hardware lasts 10x as long right? Learn something before you spout your bullshit. Also "Full tilt" you realize when it is bashing it is literally using a tiny fraction of the circuitry on the silicon right? This is the problem with slashdot. People who have no fucking clue how shit works wants to chime in and tell someone they're wrong about something. Moron.
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Sorry, I horde electronics. You would never catch me selling a GPU. In fact I hope a lot of the population is as dumb as you so I can get a bunch of cheap cards and PSU's. Have fun buying your $2000 Consumer(lol) GPU. You are why Nvidia thinks they can sell the 2080 for double what the 1080 debuted at.
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They're predicting that the cryptominsers won't use NVidia hardware. That seems a reasonably safe bet, and rather than spending more of their research and production on chpsets or cards aimed at a very small market segment for NVidia. New, politically exciting markets may be interesting to examine or even participate in, but they're not necessarily _profitable_.