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These headlines are annoying and what I consider to be "fake news". -- EG They are blowing up some factoid or partial fact to make a false impression. Here's t
by rothbardrand 9y ago
These headlines are annoying and what I consider to be "fake news". -- EG They are blowing up some factoid or partial fact to make a false impression.
Here's the reality--
-- Ethereum is going to PoS soon. Even if it doesn't fully switchover it will decline in profitability for miners quite a bit.
-- Ethereum is down %50 in the past couple weeks. The GPU boom is over (for now) and supply should be loosening.
-- There are just not that many coins out there that are GPU mineable to support really massive operations, like a full 747 of GPUs. BTC is $45B and ETH is $18B market cap. As far as GPU mineable coins looking at the top hundred on CoinMarketCap I see about $2-$3B market cap for them all combined. You aren't going to take the hash power of securing ETH at $18B and dump it into ETC and ZEC without thinking twice, and if you do you aren't going to be shipping 27,000 GPUS in at a time 2 months before you have to jump from your big pond into those tiny ponds.
-- And if there were, the labor to bring that many machines up, even if you already have the physical and electrical capacity is weeks of work, unless you're employing a very large labor force which you are going to turn around and fire right after they've built your very cost intensive and valuable and hard to secure warehouse full of miners.
Reality is, the industry may be buying one 747 worth over the next several months but they are all getting them a few at at time and constrained by electrical and physical capacity and labor availability, and parts of everything else.
At even low scale these are non-trivial issues, when you start building 10 rigs at a time it is at least 10 times harder, 10 times more likely a part is out, etc etc.
- mrb 9y agoYou severly underestimate the number of GPUs mining other cryptos. For example ZEC has half a million GPUs right now (200 MSol/s).
- rothbardrand 9y agoI'm not sure what your point is. Do a similar calculation for the ETH difficulty and there are a lot more GPUs mining ETH....which are going to crowd into ZEC and ETC. IF you have 10,000 GPUS mining ETH and you have to move them in a few months, are you going to now be adding another 1,000 GPUS?
- mrb 9y agoI was replying to "There are just not that many coins out there that are GPU mineable to support really massive operations, like a full 747 of GPUs." And I pointed out that's not true because 1 airplane-load of GPUs represent only a tiny minority of the mining power of just 1 cryptocurrency like ZEC. Also you seemed to assume this airplane-load of GPUs is meant for Ethereum, but Genesis Mining (the miner who rented a 747) already mine ZEC and other alts. Finally, I would wager there are probably more (at least as many) GPUs mining all other coins combined than GPUs mining Ethereum (2 millions or so).
- rothbardrand 9y agoI'm assuming most GPUS are mining ethereum and that this will change. (not the airplane load, I don't think the airplane load even exists) But you are right there's a huge number of GPUs out there. My main point is there is going to be a big shift to the others from ethereum when ethereum becomes less profitable...
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoCryptocurrency news should always be taken with a grain of salt; there are a lot of people and investors with a lot of interest in hyping the thing so more people get on board and buy crypto. /r/ethtrader is full of posts like that, bringing positivity and "pls have faith" posts when the price goes down, excited memes when the price goes up, etc. Imagine efforts like that, but done by multi-million companies.