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

408 points by striking 9y ago

geff82 9y ago
And then they'll buy back at horrendous prices when the Price goes up again? Seems like shortsighted people do this. At least they could play some tremendous video games in the mean time ;)
- jimminy 9y ago
  They can still profit off the GPU's at current rates, if a glut is coming. For personal use I bought some brand new R9 390's last year @$270. If I had wanted to sell them used about 2 weeks ago I could have sold them for about $700 pretty easily. Lots of room for margin in selling them early and getting back in after the glut if you're looking long-term. Just take a few weeks out of mining.
- iak8god 9y ago
  It's not just the price, but the rising difficulty[1]. Since last month the price of ETH dropped by more than 50% (from a record high bubble). In the same time span, difficulty - how much ETH you can expect to get per whatever your GPU's hashrate is - has nearly doubled. A whole bunch of people bought in last month when mining profitability calculators were saying you could make $X per month per card, where X is a significant percentage of the card's retail price. Now it's $X/4, the difficulty continues its steady rise, and the fiat price of ETH is totally unpredictable but appears to be on a downward trend. Unless the price of ETH returns to record highs, the cards people bought last month will never pay for themselves. That's why they're flooding eBay. [1] https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficulty-chart https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficul...
- netsharc 9y ago
  It's a 21st century gold rush... the prices of shovels rocketed up that the money hungry-people now see selling used shovels is more profitable than digging up the gold. Econ 101 obviously says the price of shovels will now go down...
the_end 9y ago
Welcome to the end. Ethereum crasheses, bringing NVDA down. Bringing the NASDAQ down. Down and down it all goes. This house of cards, these castles in the sky.
- tasty_freeze 9y ago
  If you really believe that, then put your money into a short position and profit handsomely. But I suspect you are just talking, and don't believe what you say enough to risk a dollar.
  - the_end 9y ago
    I do believe. Wait for it. Goes go drink symmore. This is not investment advice
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- fred_is_fred 9y ago
  no.
- ping010pong 9y ago
  what happens you only consume popular media and can't self express without cliche
  - Animats 9y ago
    Become President?
    - s_m_t 9y ago
      Trump invented his own cliches
    - jjt-yn_t 9y ago
      s/Become/TestExpresslyBeingAPoet/g ; s/Presi/resi/g; flagged-all-I-can-say-isMeToo; A place to mine the poem As blockchain over my Lanes do roam and profits if ever some arise from the noisecorner my Cat does despise. - ha ha
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
DanBlake 9y ago
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 spot with the right facility, this is still profitable. The question is of course for how long. You also need to factor in the cost of equipment, datacenter, employees and difficulty/price. But even if you dont have a facility in washington and just mine from your apartment, your power cost would probably be $100 a month. So its still 'profitable', just not nearly as much as it was in the run up. Cliffnotes: 'professional' miners dont care. Even with the 'crash' today, they are making more per day than they were before the entire run up. For instance the 'worst' time for mining was December 2016 where you would only make $7.50 a day gross in ETH.
- pfooti 9y ago
  But that's 385 / month revenue? On a setup that's what, $3400 to buy, for seven 1070s? Seems like asking for 10 months to cover capex is a bit thin, given the price instability.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > On a setup that's what, $3400 to buy, for seven 1070s? Well you can always resell them on the used market after stopping the mining operation and get a decent chunk of the money back...
    - beedogs 9y ago
      Or just, you know, buy ETH with money right now.
      - jameskegel 9y ago
        That would have got you in trouble a week ago.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dawnerd 9y ago
Good, maybe video cards will start to come back in stock at their MSRP.
- mjevans 9y ago
  Or maybe people will actually develop things that //require// generic algorithms, and multiple diversity of them so that it /forces/ generic hardware proliferation.
  - jrockway 9y ago
    I think he just wants the video card to play games. Gamers have suffered from low supply of graphics cards because of the mining fad. With that dying down, they should be able to buy a card now.
    - dawnerd 9y ago
      Kinda, I needed a new card to power two 4k monitors for my office setup. Needed it that day, so amazon was out of the question. All the local stores had 1060s for basically what 1080s run at. Ended up just buying a 1080 for a few bucks more, because why not. Apparently the 1060s are really good for ethereum...
      - ChoGGi 9y ago
        1060/70s (GDDR5) use faster ram than the 1080s (GDDR5X). Faster for mining ETH that is.
      - joshvm 9y ago
        The 1060s are quite efficient for mining, you can run them at a power target of 60W and they'll still give you baseline performance (around 20MH/s).
    - mjevans 9y ago
      I dislike the idea of a crypto-currency that is biased towards specific configurations of silicon because it dis-proportionately assigns value and encourages cabals to form to amplify that distortion of value. These cards also signify the use of electric generation towards 'mining' for virtual currency instead of more productive uses for society: even including entertainment. The mining raises the overall cost of electricity for everyone.
corporateslave2 9y ago
GPU trading? More profitable than buying the underlying currency since GPU's in relatively good condition always hold a certain value? High levels of correlation with BTC and ETH, along with other cryptocurrency, but a floor on how low it can go. Pays off while holding by mining coins. Much like a dividend.
- WatchDog 9y ago
  Computer hardware depreciates rapidly, and is expensive to trade(shipping/testing/labour).
  - TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
    Also, said depreciation is intensified by cryptocurrency mining. It's basically GPU torture and buyers in the used market are (rightly) distrustful of GPUs that appear to have been used for mining.
  - zanny 9y ago
    It depreciates to a point. An i7 2600 depreciated about half its value when the next generation came out, but 5 years later it still sells used for 40% of its MSRP. The era of older chips being downright worthless passed circa anything since ~2006. The start of that era for GPUs was much more recent because they matured much more into recent times, but I would easily say anything from the AMD 4000 series or the Nvidia 400 series and up has held value long term. There is also some "classic" rebound for parts once they drop off the retail market. If a specific component in a system from 2012 dies, be it the motherboard; processor; or ram, the supply of replacement parts will gradually dwindle over time as old hardware breaks down. It makes what you have all the more valuable. I still have a near-complete Nehalem desktop with the original i7 920, which has a used retail price of around $30 (it depreciated a lot more than the aforementioned i7 2600k because there were still substantial IPC improvements between their generations) but my x58 deluxe motherboard can still be sold used for about $150-200. It has had a depreciation in 9 years of only about 30% from what I paid for it. Meanwhile the ram is almost worthless, mostly because DDR3 is still available in retail. This is also why its usually recommended to either buy new or buy the immediate last generation hardware on the cheap. Anything older becomes a scarce resource for repair purposes and can maintain value as such.
crypt1d 9y ago
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.)
- milkey_mouse 9y ago
  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?
  - Tom1971 9y ago
    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.
vortico 9y ago
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?
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  The network collectively determines the difficulty based on how much compute power is being used. Specifically, it adjusts the difficulty up or down based on whether blocks are being found (relative to a constant expected duration) too quickly or too slowly respectively, which ensures the time taken to find blocks stays within a small interval. The specifics of how Bitcoin does it can be found here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
  - ue_ 9y ago
    How does "the network" decide this? And what's stopping me from setting the constant to something lower in my own mining code? Does it follow that if most people in the network are duped into a ridiculously high difficulty, that it will be impossible to mine more BTC?
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      The difficulty calculation is built into the software. Solutions to the meaningless problem that must be solved to "win" a block are rejected if they don't match the network difficulty, so setting it low on your computer just wastes your computation entirely.
    - ufo 9y ago
      > And what's stopping me from setting the constant to something lower in my own mining code? The difficulty constant is determined by an algorithm that takes into account the average time that it currently takes for a new block to be mined. It tries to balance difficulty so one block is mined every 10 minutes, on average (if blocks are being mined too fast the difficulty increases, if blocks are taking too long to mine it decreases). This algorithm is part of the "bitcoin protocol" and you can't just change it in your own mining code because the other nodes in the network will not recognize your blocks as valid if you use the wrong difficulty constant > Does it follow that if most people in the network are duped into a ridiculously high difficulty, that it will be impossible to mine more BTC? This is kind of what has already happened. Nowadays there is specialized bitcoin mining hardware out there which is has driven the difficulty into the stratosphere. Bitcoin mining using CPUs and GPUs has become unprofitable, which is why the small miners have moved on to alternative cryptocurrencies where they won't need to compete with specialized hardware.
Thriptic 9y ago
A quick search of eBay shows no good deals on gtx 1070s. Used cards are selling for what I bought my cards new for a month ago or more (380).
- lasc4r 9y ago
  Yeah I was just checking this myself, nothing great there. I did look to see what my 1070 was selling for recently at various online sites. Looks like they did spike in value starting in June, going from $380 to $500 and being sold at fewer places. https://pcpartpicker.com/product/fKp323/msi-geforce-gtx-1070-8gb-video-card-gtx-1070-gaming-x-8g?history_days=365 https://pcpartpicker.com/product/fKp323/msi-geforce-gtx-1070... In a couple weeks maybe prices will be back to normal or even drop lower.
- segmondy 9y ago
  There's a demand from the deep learning field for those 1070 and 1080. They go as fast as they show up if priced correctly.
ryanSrich 9y ago
Maybe this is an incredibly uneducated comment, but won't they have to buy those GPUs back when the price of ETH inevitability goes up again? This is all just FUD from August 1st, ICO instability, and lack of Ethereum use cases. All of these issues have resolutions planned. So one would be stupid to think Ethereum stays at $150 for even a year.
- twblalock 9y ago
  > All of these issues have resolutions planned. So one would be stupid to think Ethereum stays at $150 for even a year. Honestly, there is nothing anyone can do to convincingly predict the future price of something like Ethereum or Bitcoin, because they are purely speculative investments.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  > when the price of ETH inevitability goes up again ETH has been around less than 2 years; it spent only 2 months over $150. I don't see how any analysis that it will rise is better than a coin flip.
  - kukabynd 9y ago
    It certainly will. With a number of participants in EEA and attention from governments like Russia and Singapore. Plus, eventual Casper update that does facilitate ETH staking as a decent form of position in the crypto market that will only grow down the road. It’s a long term approach but one has to believe in tech itself of course.
- nugget 9y ago
  Look at Tezos - they used the success of Bitcoin (and Ethereum) against itself, by the way they funded a totally competing blockchain. You can be bullish on the future of crypto and a bear on BTC and ETH prices, if you envision a future where dozens of tier 1 blockchains compete (and interoperate).
zanny 9y ago
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 period of time and just holding it until it reaches all time highs to cash out - is probably really easy money. Probably most relevantly is how crypto valuations are bound together. Bitcoin is also down about 20% from its ATH, and will certainly drop more as long as eth pulls it down. The entire market will rise and fall on the hype of just one blockchain. Coins nobody even cared about like peercoin saw 5x returns on miners during this eth bubble.
- pdog 9y ago
  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.
  - Jessica454 9y ago
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  - notsofastbuddy 9y ago
    This is a very optimistic timeline for PoS.
  - johnohara 9y ago
    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.
schiffern 9y ago
Off topic, but the "ETH/USD" label on the price graph bothers me. Shouldn't it be USD/ETH? https://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2017/07/16083553143l.jpg https://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2017/07/16083553143... 150 ETH/USD would mean that you can get 150 coins per 1 USD. On the other hand, 150 USD/ETH correctly captures the mathematical relationship.
- coolguy4 9y ago
  150 ETH/USD is normal forex notation. The graph shows a currency pair. So one currency is being sold in exchange for the other. When you see currency pairs like this, ETH/USD, the first currency (ETH) is the one being bought, the second currency (USD) is the one being sold. If the chart is going up, the first currency is becoming stronger against the second. If the chart is going down, the first currency is becoming weaker against the second. In that light it does make sense mathematically. The currency being sold is the denominator and the currency being bought is the numerator. The value of the currency being bought, the numerator is directly proportional to the exchange value of the pair. The value of the currency being sold, the denominator, is inversely proportional to the exchange value of the pair
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    That it took you that much to explain kind of illustrates the point, I think.
- crazydoggers 9y ago
  It comes from the currency markets. What you really care about is the relative value of the first currency. The last or bottom currency is the base currency which is what your using to gauge the value of the first relative to other pairs with the same base. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_pair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_pair
- solidsnack9000 9y ago
abalone 9y ago
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.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  Is the energy expended in crypto currency mining less valuable than that expended by the traditional financial sector?
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    It seems likely that crypto currencies transfer much less value per kilowatt-hour consumed.
  - nodesocket 9y ago
    With general stocks though at least you're investing in companies which make products, hire people, and hopefully stimulate the overall economy. A few Chinese guys in an old apartment building wasting power and compute/GPU resources... Not so much.
    - sand500 9y ago
      How does investing in a stock benefit a company unless you are buying from that company directly?
      - hueving 9y ago
        By supporting the share price when they want to have a secondary offering.
      - PacketPaul 9y ago
        The purpose (and only purpose) of the company is to increase shareholder value. That is done via dividend and stock price appreciation. Buying the stock of a company increases demand of that stock and hopefully share price.
rdl 9y ago
At least the NV cards, if they become non-viable for crypto mining, are useful for a lot of other GPU computation (or just as graphics cards).
j_s 9y ago
In case anyone is not aware, there are user-friendly tools (that take their cut) which ensure maximum mining profitability for available hardware. NiceHash, MinerGate, Awesome Miner and others - many have an affiliate program and fight against botnets (and antivirus often block the actual mining programs they download).
- jameskegel 9y ago
  Minergate is not generally advisable. [1] [2] [1] - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0 [2] - https://forum.getmonero.org/3/merchants-and-marketplace/2516/gingeropolous-s-list-of-trusted-monero-services https://forum.getmonero.org/3/merchants-and-marketplace/2516...
  - j_s 9y ago
    Thanks for the heads-up! I saw NiceHash and MinerGate mentioned off-hand in a random well-SEO'd article as easier alternatives instead of setting up everything manually[1] (before that I didn't even realize this was a thing!), and Awesome Miner came up recently as an option that appears to be freemium with a one-time purchase instead of a percentage. I chose NiceHash personally because it is open source. It was literally download, click 'Benchmark', then after that finished, click 'Start'. They even transferred the ~$3 I had earned when the Bitcoin transaction fees dropped low enough to make it "worth it" even well below their normal minimum payout threshold. Do you have time to provide a bit of context for your links? The first one doesn't even mention "MinerGate" on the first page of the 30 page discussion, and the second is just a yes/no list with no explanation of why things are where they are on the list or credentials for who made the list. There doesn't seem to be any recent or ongoing massive backlash against MinerGate anywhere online. [1]https://www.bestvpn.com/ethereum-mining/ https://www.bestvpn.com/ethereum-mining/ -- Maybe https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4bx1td/im_just_gonna_come_out_and_say_it_minergate_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4bx1td/im_just_gonn... > "not as strong" connection between MinerGate + bytecoin scam And the list is by an /r/Monero moderator; all about 1 year ago.
waspear 9y ago
Ethereum's Casper protocol upgrade (Proof of Stake) might have a long term affect on GPU market as well.
foota 9y ago
Maybe I should have sold the R9 Fury I got for gaming a few months ago...
wunderg 9y ago
I thought ethereum would move to Proof of State from Proof of Work which will make mining as it's obsolete. https://www.ethnews.com/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-explained https://www.ethnews.com/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-expl...
- e79 9y ago
  Yes, although my understanding is that the transition will be gradual. PoW rewards will gradually decrease while PoS rewards gradually increase, facilitating the tranisitioon without all miners jumping ship. Miners who are invested in Ethereum may choose to convert their mining profits into stake.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
tossandturn 9y ago
Worst place to ask this, I know, but... If I wanted to upgrade my old machine that currently has an HD 4770 (PCI Express 2.0 x16), where exactly could I find a worthwhile upgrade for less than $20?
- jjcm 9y ago
  Reddit's r/buildapc is probably your best starting point. It has a bunch of helpful tips/guides even for super low end builds.
- ryan-allen 9y ago
  And there's this place, too: http://www.logicalincrements.com/ http://www.logicalincrements.com/
strictnein 9y ago
I sold my hardware last week. GTX 1060s, a 1080, an AMD R9 290X, some other stuff. Unless I'm missing something, there's no huge flood of video cards on ebay. There's maybe ~20% more than there was a week ago. All told, for the in demand mining hardware, you're only talking about a couple thousand cards.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  Bitcoin is down 20% over past 7 days; Ethereum, 30-40%. That said, I don't think people sell that fast. Back when I GPU mined Bitcoin (2011), when the price fell from $35 to $2, I turned my miners off and waited a few months before selling. (If only I had kept them going, but that's a sad and off-topic story ....)
  - alok99 9y ago
    The 2011 mining wave was great. I sold a couple 7950s I had for double the price of what I bought them for only about a month prior. Sadly I missed the Ethereum wave
- stOneskull 9y ago
  it's a made-up article.
zo7 9y ago
Interesting, looking at the price graph Ethereum's price seems to correlate with Bitcoin's, which lost about %20 of value ($500) recently. In case anyone's wondering, the crash seems mainly driven by anxiety of an upcoming blockchain fork splitting the currency in two next month. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-15/bitcoin-battered-below-2000-ether-tumbles-august-1st-scaling-deadline-looms http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-15/bitcoin-battered-be...
- j_s 9y ago
  HN discussion: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758587 An interesting comment there mentioned the need to control private keys (as opposed to leaving them with an exchange) to take advantage of a split by selling coins on both sides of the split.
- joshschreuder 9y ago
  The prices of all cryptocurrencies are strongly correlated with Bitcoin (ETH included). Partly because it is the most publicly known, but also because a lot of places still need to transfer fiat -> BTC -> othercoin
nsxwolf 9y ago
I see an ebay buy it now for four 8GB RX 480s for $360. $90 a piece seems pretty crazy low - does that mean there's a high likelyhood of hardware failure after these things were used for mining?
- rasz 9y ago
  no, it means you should read everything couple of times before clicking buy now
- PascLeRasc 9y ago
  I found that in a few seconds too. Did you not read the six different sentences saying that they're being sold individually?
stOneskull 9y ago
this 'flooding the market' claim seems to be made up.
kushankpoddar 9y ago
There is a point of view out there that Europe's higher than average reliance on renewables has bumped up electricity prices there and contributed in making the place less competitive for industries. You can see that argument in action when European miners are losing out to others due to high power costs.
- leroman 9y ago
  If this is really the case (I am not informed enough), is that so bad in the face of global warming?
  - dmichulke 9y ago
    Generally speaking, any slowdown in economic activity will lead to a slowdown in global warming. The question is always: is the new equilibrium better or worse for all involved? (Think of the unemployed) I think a better metric would be $GDP / ton CO2 to see who's efficient and who's not. Unfortunately, GDP numbers are not really standardized, at least countrys' individual way of calculation GDP varies greatly.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      Wikipedia have a list of the numbers, with or without PPP compensation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_GDP_to_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_... It seems the keys to doing well on that scale are: - be a small African country without oil (low CO2/low GDP) - be a financial services exporter (Switzerland, Ireland, UK) The countries which are doing badly seem to be central Asian former USSR states, petro-states, China, and Zimbabwe.
- blattimwind 9y ago
  That point of view seems rather uninformed, because industrial and residential pricing of electricity, gas etc. are virtually unrelated, and the former doesn't include new extra taxes for renewables in any country I know.
kushankpoddar 9y ago
There is a point of view out there that Europe's higher than average reliance on renewables has bumped up electricity prices there and contributed in making the place less competitive for industries. You can see that argument in action when European miners are losing out to others due to high power costs.
aussieguy123 9y ago
Anyone doing deep learning?
- joshvm 9y ago
  This is the primary reason I bought NVIDIA cards, rather than AMD. Mining is still profitable now, but if it all went to nothing tomorrow I'd still have a pretty competent CUDA box to develop on.
Shinchy 9y ago
Annoying as all hell, I am in the market for a 1080ti and the prices have rocketed up in the past two weeks.
Nursie 9y ago
Excellent, my partner is looking for a card right now, a (lighly) used 1060, 1070 or 580 might be just the thing! In the meantime, my machine which is a gaming rig that is mostly idle, may as well do a bit of mining...
- NTripleOne 9y ago
  This is just me talking, but I'd never buy a GPU that's been used for mining.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  > a (lighly) used 1060, 1070 or 580 might be just the thing I'm not really sure I'd call a card that's been used for cryptocurrency mining "lightly used".
horusthecat 9y ago
Does anyone know where the money that initially went into the cryptocoins during the run-up this year came from, or where it went?
- rb808 9y ago
  It works like a Ponzi scheme. The people who are buying now give their money to the people who got in earlier. As long as more and more people buy its great but eventually you run out of buyers - optimistically the price will level off but more realistically it'll crash.
  - SippinLean 9y ago
    >The people who are buying now give their money to the people who got in earlier. This is entirely incorrect, no users are paid dividends.
    - rb808 9y ago
      No Dividends, the early people sell their currency to the new buyers.
  - billmalarky 9y ago
    This isn't correct and is downright misleading. There are many possible scenarios. IE people will hold the Ether under the assumption that it will be more valuable in the future. If the supply of "sellers" goes down and the number of "buyers" stays constant, the price will continue to go up (ignoring new ETH being created for simplicity). As to how ETH could become valuable? Well if the network really does scale and the possibility for decentralized apps really does come to pass, then this is an incredibly transformative technology with a lot of potential, that runs on ETH. Ponzi schemes are scams because there is no value created, and it is known to the scammers that there is no value being created. With crypto currencies the value is big "unknown" which is why it's speculative, but it certainly isn't a "scam" sense there is true potential there.
    - 9y ago
Temasik 9y ago
Mining has no future
justforFranz 9y ago
Cryptocurrency noob here. Isn't the ability to "mine" a cryptocurrency a design failure of the cryptocurrency?

408 points by striking 9y ago

And then they'll buy back at horrendous prices when the Price goes up again? Seems like shortsighted people do this. At least they could play some tremendous video games in the mean time ;)

jimminy 9y ago
They can still profit off the GPU's at current rates, if a glut is coming. For personal use I bought some brand new R9 390's last year @$270. If I had wanted to sell them used about 2 weeks ago I could have sold them for about $700 pretty easily. Lots of room for margin in selling them early and getting back in after the glut if you're looking long-term. Just take a few weeks out of mining.
iak8god 9y ago
It's not just the price, but the rising difficulty[1]. Since last month the price of ETH dropped by more than 50% (from a record high bubble). In the same time span, difficulty - how much ETH you can expect to get per whatever your GPU's hashrate is - has nearly doubled. A whole bunch of people bought in last month when mining profitability calculators were saying you could make $X per month per card, where X is a significant percentage of the card's retail price. Now it's $X/4, the difficulty continues its steady rise, and the fiat price of ETH is totally unpredictable but appears to be on a downward trend. Unless the price of ETH returns to record highs, the cards people bought last month will never pay for themselves. That's why they're flooding eBay. [1] https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficulty-chart https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficul...
netsharc 9y ago
It's a 21st century gold rush... the prices of shovels rocketed up that the money hungry-people now see selling used shovels is more profitable than digging up the gold. Econ 101 obviously says the price of shovels will now go down...

the_end 9y ago

Welcome to the end. Ethereum crasheses, bringing NVDA down. Bringing the NASDAQ down. Down and down it all goes. This house of cards, these castles in the sky.

tasty_freeze 9y ago
If you really believe that, then put your money into a short position and profit handsomely. But I suspect you are just talking, and don't believe what you say enough to risk a dollar.
- the_end 9y ago
  I do believe. Wait for it. Goes go drink symmore. This is not investment advice
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
fred_is_fred 9y ago
no.
ping010pong 9y ago
what happens you only consume popular media and can't self express without cliche
- Animats 9y ago
  Become President?
  - s_m_t 9y ago
    Trump invented his own cliches
  - jjt-yn_t 9y ago
    s/Become/TestExpresslyBeingAPoet/g ; s/Presi/resi/g; flagged-all-I-can-say-isMeToo; A place to mine the poem As blockchain over my Lanes do roam and profits if ever some arise from the noisecorner my Cat does despise. - ha ha

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

DanBlake 9y ago

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 spot with the right facility, this is still profitable. The question is of course for how long. You also need to factor in the cost of equipment, datacenter, employees and difficulty/price. But even if you dont have a facility in washington and just mine from your apartment, your power cost would probably be $100 a month. So its still 'profitable', just not nearly as much as it was in the run up. Cliffnotes: 'professional' miners dont care. Even with the 'crash' today, they are making more per day than they were before the entire run up. For instance the 'worst' time for mining was December 2016 where you would only make $7.50 a day gross in ETH.

pfooti 9y ago
But that's 385 / month revenue? On a setup that's what, $3400 to buy, for seven 1070s? Seems like asking for 10 months to cover capex is a bit thin, given the price instability.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > On a setup that's what, $3400 to buy, for seven 1070s? Well you can always resell them on the used market after stopping the mining operation and get a decent chunk of the money back...
  - beedogs 9y ago
    Or just, you know, buy ETH with money right now.
    - jameskegel 9y ago
      That would have got you in trouble a week ago.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dawnerd 9y ago

Good, maybe video cards will start to come back in stock at their MSRP.

mjevans 9y ago
Or maybe people will actually develop things that //require// generic algorithms, and multiple diversity of them so that it /forces/ generic hardware proliferation.
- jrockway 9y ago
  I think he just wants the video card to play games. Gamers have suffered from low supply of graphics cards because of the mining fad. With that dying down, they should be able to buy a card now.
  - dawnerd 9y ago
    Kinda, I needed a new card to power two 4k monitors for my office setup. Needed it that day, so amazon was out of the question. All the local stores had 1060s for basically what 1080s run at. Ended up just buying a 1080 for a few bucks more, because why not. Apparently the 1060s are really good for ethereum...
    - ChoGGi 9y ago
      1060/70s (GDDR5) use faster ram than the 1080s (GDDR5X). Faster for mining ETH that is.
    - joshvm 9y ago
      The 1060s are quite efficient for mining, you can run them at a power target of 60W and they'll still give you baseline performance (around 20MH/s).
  - mjevans 9y ago
    I dislike the idea of a crypto-currency that is biased towards specific configurations of silicon because it dis-proportionately assigns value and encourages cabals to form to amplify that distortion of value. These cards also signify the use of electric generation towards 'mining' for virtual currency instead of more productive uses for society: even including entertainment. The mining raises the overall cost of electricity for everyone.

corporateslave2 9y ago

GPU trading? More profitable than buying the underlying currency since GPU's in relatively good condition always hold a certain value? High levels of correlation with BTC and ETH, along with other cryptocurrency, but a floor on how low it can go. Pays off while holding by mining coins. Much like a dividend.

WatchDog 9y ago
Computer hardware depreciates rapidly, and is expensive to trade(shipping/testing/labour).
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  Also, said depreciation is intensified by cryptocurrency mining. It's basically GPU torture and buyers in the used market are (rightly) distrustful of GPUs that appear to have been used for mining.
- zanny 9y ago
  It depreciates to a point. An i7 2600 depreciated about half its value when the next generation came out, but 5 years later it still sells used for 40% of its MSRP. The era of older chips being downright worthless passed circa anything since ~2006. The start of that era for GPUs was much more recent because they matured much more into recent times, but I would easily say anything from the AMD 4000 series or the Nvidia 400 series and up has held value long term. There is also some "classic" rebound for parts once they drop off the retail market. If a specific component in a system from 2012 dies, be it the motherboard; processor; or ram, the supply of replacement parts will gradually dwindle over time as old hardware breaks down. It makes what you have all the more valuable. I still have a near-complete Nehalem desktop with the original i7 920, which has a used retail price of around $30 (it depreciated a lot more than the aforementioned i7 2600k because there were still substantial IPC improvements between their generations) but my x58 deluxe motherboard can still be sold used for about $150-200. It has had a depreciation in 9 years of only about 30% from what I paid for it. Meanwhile the ram is almost worthless, mostly because DDR3 is still available in retail. This is also why its usually recommended to either buy new or buy the immediate last generation hardware on the cheap. Anything older becomes a scarce resource for repair purposes and can maintain value as such.

crypt1d 9y ago

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.)

milkey_mouse 9y ago
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?
- Tom1971 9y ago
  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.

vortico 9y ago

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?

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
The network collectively determines the difficulty based on how much compute power is being used. Specifically, it adjusts the difficulty up or down based on whether blocks are being found (relative to a constant expected duration) too quickly or too slowly respectively, which ensures the time taken to find blocks stays within a small interval. The specifics of how Bitcoin does it can be found here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
- ue_ 9y ago
  How does "the network" decide this? And what's stopping me from setting the constant to something lower in my own mining code? Does it follow that if most people in the network are duped into a ridiculously high difficulty, that it will be impossible to mine more BTC?
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    The difficulty calculation is built into the software. Solutions to the meaningless problem that must be solved to "win" a block are rejected if they don't match the network difficulty, so setting it low on your computer just wastes your computation entirely.
  - ufo 9y ago
    > And what's stopping me from setting the constant to something lower in my own mining code? The difficulty constant is determined by an algorithm that takes into account the average time that it currently takes for a new block to be mined. It tries to balance difficulty so one block is mined every 10 minutes, on average (if blocks are being mined too fast the difficulty increases, if blocks are taking too long to mine it decreases). This algorithm is part of the "bitcoin protocol" and you can't just change it in your own mining code because the other nodes in the network will not recognize your blocks as valid if you use the wrong difficulty constant > Does it follow that if most people in the network are duped into a ridiculously high difficulty, that it will be impossible to mine more BTC? This is kind of what has already happened. Nowadays there is specialized bitcoin mining hardware out there which is has driven the difficulty into the stratosphere. Bitcoin mining using CPUs and GPUs has become unprofitable, which is why the small miners have moved on to alternative cryptocurrencies where they won't need to compete with specialized hardware.

Thriptic 9y ago

A quick search of eBay shows no good deals on gtx 1070s. Used cards are selling for what I bought my cards new for a month ago or more (380).

lasc4r 9y ago
Yeah I was just checking this myself, nothing great there. I did look to see what my 1070 was selling for recently at various online sites. Looks like they did spike in value starting in June, going from $380 to $500 and being sold at fewer places. https://pcpartpicker.com/product/fKp323/msi-geforce-gtx-1070-8gb-video-card-gtx-1070-gaming-x-8g?history_days=365 https://pcpartpicker.com/product/fKp323/msi-geforce-gtx-1070... In a couple weeks maybe prices will be back to normal or even drop lower.
segmondy 9y ago
There's a demand from the deep learning field for those 1070 and 1080. They go as fast as they show up if priced correctly.

ryanSrich 9y ago

Maybe this is an incredibly uneducated comment, but won't they have to buy those GPUs back when the price of ETH inevitability goes up again? This is all just FUD from August 1st, ICO instability, and lack of Ethereum use cases. All of these issues have resolutions planned. So one would be stupid to think Ethereum stays at $150 for even a year.

twblalock 9y ago
> All of these issues have resolutions planned. So one would be stupid to think Ethereum stays at $150 for even a year. Honestly, there is nothing anyone can do to convincingly predict the future price of something like Ethereum or Bitcoin, because they are purely speculative investments.
bdcravens 9y ago
> when the price of ETH inevitability goes up again ETH has been around less than 2 years; it spent only 2 months over $150. I don't see how any analysis that it will rise is better than a coin flip.
- kukabynd 9y ago
  It certainly will. With a number of participants in EEA and attention from governments like Russia and Singapore. Plus, eventual Casper update that does facilitate ETH staking as a decent form of position in the crypto market that will only grow down the road. It’s a long term approach but one has to believe in tech itself of course.
nugget 9y ago
Look at Tezos - they used the success of Bitcoin (and Ethereum) against itself, by the way they funded a totally competing blockchain. You can be bullish on the future of crypto and a bear on BTC and ETH prices, if you envision a future where dozens of tier 1 blockchains compete (and interoperate).

zanny 9y ago

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 period of time and just holding it until it reaches all time highs to cash out - is probably really easy money. Probably most relevantly is how crypto valuations are bound together. Bitcoin is also down about 20% from its ATH, and will certainly drop more as long as eth pulls it down. The entire market will rise and fall on the hype of just one blockchain. Coins nobody even cared about like peercoin saw 5x returns on miners during this eth bubble.

pdog 9y ago
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.
- Jessica454 9y ago
  Im making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do, ====http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
- notsofastbuddy 9y ago
  This is a very optimistic timeline for PoS.
- johnohara 9y ago
  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.

schiffern 9y ago

Off topic, but the "ETH/USD" label on the price graph bothers me. Shouldn't it be USD/ETH? https://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2017/07/16083553143l.jpg https://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2017/07/16083553143... 150 ETH/USD would mean that you can get 150 coins per 1 USD. On the other hand, 150 USD/ETH correctly captures the mathematical relationship.

coolguy4 9y ago
150 ETH/USD is normal forex notation. The graph shows a currency pair. So one currency is being sold in exchange for the other. When you see currency pairs like this, ETH/USD, the first currency (ETH) is the one being bought, the second currency (USD) is the one being sold. If the chart is going up, the first currency is becoming stronger against the second. If the chart is going down, the first currency is becoming weaker against the second. In that light it does make sense mathematically. The currency being sold is the denominator and the currency being bought is the numerator. The value of the currency being bought, the numerator is directly proportional to the exchange value of the pair. The value of the currency being sold, the denominator, is inversely proportional to the exchange value of the pair
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  That it took you that much to explain kind of illustrates the point, I think.
crazydoggers 9y ago
It comes from the currency markets. What you really care about is the relative value of the first currency. The last or bottom currency is the base currency which is what your using to gauge the value of the first relative to other pairs with the same base. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_pair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_pair
solidsnack9000 9y ago

abalone 9y ago

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.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago
Is the energy expended in crypto currency mining less valuable than that expended by the traditional financial sector?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  It seems likely that crypto currencies transfer much less value per kilowatt-hour consumed.
- nodesocket 9y ago
  With general stocks though at least you're investing in companies which make products, hire people, and hopefully stimulate the overall economy. A few Chinese guys in an old apartment building wasting power and compute/GPU resources... Not so much.
  - sand500 9y ago
    How does investing in a stock benefit a company unless you are buying from that company directly?
    - hueving 9y ago
      By supporting the share price when they want to have a secondary offering.
    - PacketPaul 9y ago
      The purpose (and only purpose) of the company is to increase shareholder value. That is done via dividend and stock price appreciation. Buying the stock of a company increases demand of that stock and hopefully share price.

rdl 9y ago

At least the NV cards, if they become non-viable for crypto mining, are useful for a lot of other GPU computation (or just as graphics cards).

j_s 9y ago

In case anyone is not aware, there are user-friendly tools (that take their cut) which ensure maximum mining profitability for available hardware. NiceHash, MinerGate, Awesome Miner and others - many have an affiliate program and fight against botnets (and antivirus often block the actual mining programs they download).

jameskegel 9y ago
Minergate is not generally advisable. [1] [2] [1] - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0 [2] - https://forum.getmonero.org/3/merchants-and-marketplace/2516/gingeropolous-s-list-of-trusted-monero-services https://forum.getmonero.org/3/merchants-and-marketplace/2516...
- j_s 9y ago
  Thanks for the heads-up! I saw NiceHash and MinerGate mentioned off-hand in a random well-SEO'd article as easier alternatives instead of setting up everything manually[1] (before that I didn't even realize this was a thing!), and Awesome Miner came up recently as an option that appears to be freemium with a one-time purchase instead of a percentage. I chose NiceHash personally because it is open source. It was literally download, click 'Benchmark', then after that finished, click 'Start'. They even transferred the ~$3 I had earned when the Bitcoin transaction fees dropped low enough to make it "worth it" even well below their normal minimum payout threshold. Do you have time to provide a bit of context for your links? The first one doesn't even mention "MinerGate" on the first page of the 30 page discussion, and the second is just a yes/no list with no explanation of why things are where they are on the list or credentials for who made the list. There doesn't seem to be any recent or ongoing massive backlash against MinerGate anywhere online. [1]https://www.bestvpn.com/ethereum-mining/ https://www.bestvpn.com/ethereum-mining/ -- Maybe https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4bx1td/im_just_gonna_come_out_and_say_it_minergate_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4bx1td/im_just_gonn... > "not as strong" connection between MinerGate + bytecoin scam And the list is by an /r/Monero moderator; all about 1 year ago.

waspear 9y ago

Ethereum's Casper protocol upgrade (Proof of Stake) might have a long term affect on GPU market as well.

foota 9y ago

Maybe I should have sold the R9 Fury I got for gaming a few months ago...

wunderg 9y ago

I thought ethereum would move to Proof of State from Proof of Work which will make mining as it's obsolete. https://www.ethnews.com/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-explained https://www.ethnews.com/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-expl...

e79 9y ago
Yes, although my understanding is that the transition will be gradual. PoW rewards will gradually decrease while PoS rewards gradually increase, facilitating the tranisitioon without all miners jumping ship. Miners who are invested in Ethereum may choose to convert their mining profits into stake.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

tossandturn 9y ago

Worst place to ask this, I know, but... If I wanted to upgrade my old machine that currently has an HD 4770 (PCI Express 2.0 x16), where exactly could I find a worthwhile upgrade for less than $20?

jjcm 9y ago
Reddit's r/buildapc is probably your best starting point. It has a bunch of helpful tips/guides even for super low end builds.
ryan-allen 9y ago
And there's this place, too: http://www.logicalincrements.com/ http://www.logicalincrements.com/

strictnein 9y ago

I sold my hardware last week. GTX 1060s, a 1080, an AMD R9 290X, some other stuff. Unless I'm missing something, there's no huge flood of video cards on ebay. There's maybe ~20% more than there was a week ago. All told, for the in demand mining hardware, you're only talking about a couple thousand cards.

bdcravens 9y ago
Bitcoin is down 20% over past 7 days; Ethereum, 30-40%. That said, I don't think people sell that fast. Back when I GPU mined Bitcoin (2011), when the price fell from $35 to $2, I turned my miners off and waited a few months before selling. (If only I had kept them going, but that's a sad and off-topic story ....)
- alok99 9y ago
  The 2011 mining wave was great. I sold a couple 7950s I had for double the price of what I bought them for only about a month prior. Sadly I missed the Ethereum wave
stOneskull 9y ago
it's a made-up article.

zo7 9y ago

Interesting, looking at the price graph Ethereum's price seems to correlate with Bitcoin's, which lost about %20 of value ($500) recently. In case anyone's wondering, the crash seems mainly driven by anxiety of an upcoming blockchain fork splitting the currency in two next month. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-15/bitcoin-battered-below-2000-ether-tumbles-august-1st-scaling-deadline-looms http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-15/bitcoin-battered-be...

j_s 9y ago
HN discussion: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758587 An interesting comment there mentioned the need to control private keys (as opposed to leaving them with an exchange) to take advantage of a split by selling coins on both sides of the split.
joshschreuder 9y ago
The prices of all cryptocurrencies are strongly correlated with Bitcoin (ETH included). Partly because it is the most publicly known, but also because a lot of places still need to transfer fiat -> BTC -> othercoin

nsxwolf 9y ago

I see an ebay buy it now for four 8GB RX 480s for $360. $90 a piece seems pretty crazy low - does that mean there's a high likelyhood of hardware failure after these things were used for mining?

rasz 9y ago
no, it means you should read everything couple of times before clicking buy now
PascLeRasc 9y ago
I found that in a few seconds too. Did you not read the six different sentences saying that they're being sold individually?

stOneskull 9y ago

this 'flooding the market' claim seems to be made up.

kushankpoddar 9y ago

There is a point of view out there that Europe's higher than average reliance on renewables has bumped up electricity prices there and contributed in making the place less competitive for industries. You can see that argument in action when European miners are losing out to others due to high power costs.

leroman 9y ago
If this is really the case (I am not informed enough), is that so bad in the face of global warming?
- dmichulke 9y ago
  Generally speaking, any slowdown in economic activity will lead to a slowdown in global warming. The question is always: is the new equilibrium better or worse for all involved? (Think of the unemployed) I think a better metric would be $GDP / ton CO2 to see who's efficient and who's not. Unfortunately, GDP numbers are not really standardized, at least countrys' individual way of calculation GDP varies greatly.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Wikipedia have a list of the numbers, with or without PPP compensation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_GDP_to_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_... It seems the keys to doing well on that scale are: - be a small African country without oil (low CO2/low GDP) - be a financial services exporter (Switzerland, Ireland, UK) The countries which are doing badly seem to be central Asian former USSR states, petro-states, China, and Zimbabwe.
blattimwind 9y ago
That point of view seems rather uninformed, because industrial and residential pricing of electricity, gas etc. are virtually unrelated, and the former doesn't include new extra taxes for renewables in any country I know.

kushankpoddar 9y ago

aussieguy123 9y ago

Anyone doing deep learning?

joshvm 9y ago
This is the primary reason I bought NVIDIA cards, rather than AMD. Mining is still profitable now, but if it all went to nothing tomorrow I'd still have a pretty competent CUDA box to develop on.

Shinchy 9y ago

Annoying as all hell, I am in the market for a 1080ti and the prices have rocketed up in the past two weeks.

Nursie 9y ago

Excellent, my partner is looking for a card right now, a (lighly) used 1060, 1070 or 580 might be just the thing! In the meantime, my machine which is a gaming rig that is mostly idle, may as well do a bit of mining...

NTripleOne 9y ago
This is just me talking, but I'd never buy a GPU that's been used for mining.
Ajedi32 9y ago
> a (lighly) used 1060, 1070 or 580 might be just the thing I'm not really sure I'd call a card that's been used for cryptocurrency mining "lightly used".

horusthecat 9y ago

Does anyone know where the money that initially went into the cryptocoins during the run-up this year came from, or where it went?

rb808 9y ago
It works like a Ponzi scheme. The people who are buying now give their money to the people who got in earlier. As long as more and more people buy its great but eventually you run out of buyers - optimistically the price will level off but more realistically it'll crash.
- SippinLean 9y ago
  >The people who are buying now give their money to the people who got in earlier. This is entirely incorrect, no users are paid dividends.
  - rb808 9y ago
    No Dividends, the early people sell their currency to the new buyers.
- billmalarky 9y ago
  This isn't correct and is downright misleading. There are many possible scenarios. IE people will hold the Ether under the assumption that it will be more valuable in the future. If the supply of "sellers" goes down and the number of "buyers" stays constant, the price will continue to go up (ignoring new ETH being created for simplicity). As to how ETH could become valuable? Well if the network really does scale and the possibility for decentralized apps really does come to pass, then this is an incredibly transformative technology with a lot of potential, that runs on ETH. Ponzi schemes are scams because there is no value created, and it is known to the scammers that there is no value being created. With crypto currencies the value is big "unknown" which is why it's speculative, but it certainly isn't a "scam" sense there is true potential there.
  - 9y ago

Temasik 9y ago

Mining has no future

justforFranz 9y ago

Cryptocurrency noob here. Isn't the ability to "mine" a cryptocurrency a design failure of the cryptocurrency?