15 ms·
One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month
- guardiangod 9y agoFrom the article- Bitmain, the largest Bitcoin miner on the planet, is now buying a whopping 20,000 16nm wafers a month from TSMC! That's double as much as in the previous quarter and a higher volume than what NVIDIA orders from TSMC. Related material- https://www.gmo.jp/en/news/article/?id=764 https://www.gmo.jp/en/news/article/?id=764 A competitor to Bitmain just finished their prototype 12nm Bitcoin mining chip and is moving forward to their target 7nm mining chip.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> A competitor to Bitmain just finished their prototype 12nm Bitcoin mining chip and is moving forward to their target 7nm mining chip Huh, maybe the dark fibre of Bitcoin will be cheap silicon and subsidized fab research.
- PKop 9y agoApply that to energy efficiency research as well. The monetary incentives are too strong for it not to happen.
- 0x0 9y agoI don't think it's possible to be energy efficient in a proof-of-work blockchain? Whatever energy saving you come up with will be negated by having to match competing miners' increasing throughput. If you are not running on 100% you are losing out?
- hexscrews 9y agoThere are projects like gridcoin, uscore dot net, that use mining to compute scientific research. It is considering using a Proof Of Research approach.
- jgust 9y agoIt would be game changing if blockchain mining efforts could be applied like this to other uses as well, like someone needing huge datasets analyzed and formatted into a presentable state on an ad-hoc basis, sort of like AWS Athena.
- snuxoll 9y agoJust found out about Filecoin which is an interesting concept, you "mine" by storing and serving files people save to the network. Stuff like this is a much more interesting use of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in my opinion, instead of burning electricity for PoW you can do meaningful work while collecting a reward.
- ActsJuvenile 9y agoFileCoin and Upfiring both claim to have this PoW, but their Github repos are empty and their Reddit channels are drowning in shilling.
- snuxoll 9y agoUnfortunate, I like the concept - I wouldn’t mind giving up a couple TB of space on my FreeNAS rig that’s currently going unused.
- mozumder 9y agoAnd the point of blockchain is to set a minimum difficulty level of work, which translates to a minimum energy use.
- jstanley 9y agoIt translates to a maximum cost per hash calculation, which becomes a minimum level of energy efficiency.
- PKop 9y agoDoes the efficiencies discovered not get distributed to the rest of the economy? My point was that it could lead to developments in energy use beneficial in separate domains.
- maxerickson 9y agoThe more efficient your hardware is the more profit you make per block (because you buy less electricity per block reward). If all hardware was equivalent and an unlimited amount were available efficiency wouldn't matter, but neither of those things are true.
- fermuch 9y agoWouldn't the difficult per block rise, making it the same current usage as before?
- maxerickson 9y agoEventually. But newer hardware will tend to be the most efficient component of the hashrate and push out older hardware by generating more hashes per unit of electricity (hence the CPU->GPU->ASIC progression).
- 0wing 9y agoThat doesn't mean anything. Bitcoin network bandwidth remains the same, and energy usage has continued to increase in a race to the bottom in terms of work and waste for bitcoin mining - this is by design of how Satoshi's difficulty algorithm reduces efficiency with increase in hash rates.
- bigiain 9y agoThe difficulty rises with the total hashrate across all miners, not on the individual hashrate/efficiency of any particular miner - if you can eke out a temporary efficiency advantage over everybody else, you can profit nicely while they're trying to catch up.
- landryraccoon 9y agoYou're thinking from the perspective of the miners. From the perspective of the hardware manufacturers that's an advantage. If you're making the hardware and you come up with a 10% energy savings, everyone must now replace their old hardware or be left in the dust. Hardware manufacturers will make a killing. The prisoner's dilemma you are thinking of only applies to the miners, it's a benefit for the parties selling them the hardware.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> Hardware manufacturers will make a killing. The prisoner's dilemma you are thinking of only applies to the miners Something something shovels in a gold rush...
- redog 9y agoI think the only energy efficiency PoW can hope for is the demise of traditional banks and what energy they consume.
- microtherion 9y agoThere would definitely be a first mover advantage. On the other hand, for most other VLSI applications, improved energy usage is a PERMANENT advantage: If e.g. Apple improves energy efficiency of Annn chips, it enables them to build better devices, even if the rest of the industry catches up. For Bitcoin, my understanding is that this is not the case, because any cost improvement in the industry will attract more miners until difficulty adjusts to the previous equilibrium where (cost of mining a bitcoin) = (value of a bitcoin)-(some risk premium)
- bigiain 9y agoYeah - that "first mover advantage" can be lucrative though. Simplistically they're betting on: (cost to you of mining a bitcoin)-(cost to everybody else of mining a bitcoin) * (time it takes to reach equilibrium) being a very big number...
- monob 9y agoIt's first mover advantage in the same way surviving is a first mover advantage. You're fine if you're profitable, but with constant improvements that won't be the case for long, unless you too start moving to new technology.
- trhway 9y ago>Apply that to energy efficiency research as well. The monetary incentives are too strong for it not to happen. now i know where the fusion and cheap space access are to come from. Finally we've got real economic incentives for both.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- phkahler 9y ago>> Huh, maybe the dark fibre of Bitcoin will be cheap silicon and subsidized fab research. EUV lithography subsidized by a pyramid scheme based on a bubble in virtual currency!
- aphextron 9y ago>Huh, maybe the dark fibre of Bitcoin will be cheap silicon and subsidized fab research. If you think that the world needs ever more efficient ASICs for computing sha256 hashes, then sure.
- esmi 9y agoWhere is the source for how many wafers nvidia buys? That's usually confidential information.
- Simon_says 9y agoWell, it's bounded above by how many GPUs are sold, no?
- esmi 9y agoI suppose could estimate if I knew the number of GPUs sold but I've only seen estimates of that. As far as I know nVidia doesn't give their shipment numbers.
- cm2187 9y agoHow long do you think it takes them to amortize them?
- 6nf 9y agoAt current prices and difficulty probably on the order of 6-12 months.
- aphextron 9y ago>How long do you think it takes them to amortize them? About 6 months at current prices with cheap electricity (<$0.10/kWh) https://shop.bitmain.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020180109102414710EdNr3gMB067B https://shop.bitmain.com/productDetail.htm?pid=0002018010910... https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/btc?HashingPower=14&HashingUnit=TH%2Fs&PowerConsumption=1372&CostPerkWh=0.10&MiningPoolFee=1 https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/btc?HashingP...
- TD-Linux 9y agoKeep in mind, though, that the constraints for Bitcoin mining are a lot different. The Bitmain chips are far smaller than the NVIDIA ones to increase yield, so the absolute chip counts will be higher but NVIDIA is probably still ahead in terms of area shipped (latency is totally unimportant so no reason to have gigantic chips).
- thephyber 9y agoFor those that don't know, BitMain's miners are compact servers with an ARM processor and almost 190 SHA256-specialized ASIC chips: > the S9, which had 189 of the company’s BM1387 chips [1] [1] https://news.bitcoin.com/chinese-bitcoin-miner-might-be-trying-to-corner-asic-chip-market/ https://news.bitcoin.com/chinese-bitcoin-miner-might-be-tryi...
- kjullien 9y agoPretty sure quantum tunneling starts to come into play under ~6 nm (hard limit of usual consumer processor) Do these do anything different to be able to aim for 7nm so fast ?
- earenndil 9y agoI thought it was 4 or 5?
- yitchelle 9y agoJust a thought, if we use even 1% of all computing power that is currently being used for mining cryptocurrency, what can it be used to accomplished?
- whytaka 9y agoDistribute porn. Play video games. Or some other thing that has subjective value that you might not agree with.
- banachtarski 9y agoNot OP but that seems more useful. Even after digging for examples to prove a point, it's telling that this is all you can come up with.
- whytaka 9y ago> but that seems more useful. > Subjective There is no point in debating this. People are simply putting their money where their mouth is.
- nimchimpsky 9y ago> that this is all you can come up with. Its not though is it. He was making a point about the subjectivity of it.
- Neeek 9y agoHere's one, people want to use bitcoin for transactions, as these blocks of transactions fill up, new hashes are needed for each block. The miners are finding these hashes and facilitating the continued use of the blockchain. I'm hazier on this one, but I believe transaction fees go to the finder of the hash? Anyway, wouldn't the value be is the protocol/platform itself, that's what people are buying in to, they want a usable, distributed ledger.
- banachtarski 9y agoI think what confuses me is that the distributed ledger is nice and all, but will never be faster or even necessarily more secure than a central one (yes yes, some trust in government regulation like the SEC is required but if we put our antiestablishment pitchforks aside and consider that random actors MAY be more malicious than the people that regulate the financial markets). So what do you get? People trusting "centralized" front doors to something distributed. Like coinbase or any of the other exchanges. Now you have literally the worst of both worlds. Centralized but still slower and more expensive, + lack of regulation. I'm just not seeing it as ever being useful.
- resiros 9y agoIt seems these large players will do everything in their power to make sure this bubble does not pop. I do not know the size of such investment, but it seems to me that these players have the ability to keep the price from crashing and keep the bubble from popping.
- theandrewbailey 9y agoWouldn't that hasten and worsen the inevitable pop?
- raverbashing 9y agoYes But as the saying goes "The Market Can Remain Insane Longer Than Investors Can Remain Solvent"
- Phlarp 9y agohasten? No, delay the pop if anything. Worsen? Likely
- MatekCopatek 9y agoSee, I had a different thought here. If anything, mining new bitcoins reduces the value of current ones. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what's keeping the bubble from bursting is more dollars coming in - big miners aren't doing that, they don't buy their BTC. Unlike a clueless average Joe at home, they're running huge businesses, as this article suggests, so they're probably smarter. Does anyone know what the math here is? I'm assuming a) they aren't cashing out too much/too regularly because they're huge and this would drop the price too much and b) they aren't stupid to make huge investments like this, just hoping all would be well. Where am I wrong? Is the number of fresh "investors" still big enough for all of them to have a steady cashflow? Do they believe they can get out before everyone else? Are they just like all other believers, but with deeper pockets?
- legulere 9y agoBig buyers/sellers can influence the price and the price irrationally influences buyers.
- arkona 9y agoMoore’s Law will find a way to continue
- karambahh 9y agoHas it ever happened before that a consumer of chips is among the largest customers of what appears to be the biggest foundry in the world? (defining "consumer" as "we actually use & run that chip, we don't embed it or sell it"?)
- monocasa 9y agoI've heard that Google has a decent amount of custom silicon too.
- mehrdada 9y ago[I don't know about Google but] lots of people do relatively specialized silicon. However, rarely that happens at the most advanced processes (i.e. low nm).
- monocasa 9y agoThat's totally fair. Google's parts that I know about are security coprocessors (like a TPM) that wouldn't really need the newest process. They probably have NICs too that might make sense at that node though.
- Cyph0n 9y agoTheir NICs probably use off the shelf ICs from Broadcom or similar. In other words, Google would only handle PCB layout and up. Besides, modern analog ICs are usually fabbed using custom processes and in-house lower node fabs. Designing high-speed RF ICs is a huge effort, and as far as I know, Google does not have such capability.
- monocasa 9y agoIDK, they're still actively supporting the LLVM backend for Myricom's LANai chips, despite Myricom being sold off a few years ago. And the NICs don't really need custom high speed RF, the foundry has a SERDES block that'll work just fine for connecting to a phy.
- sevensor 9y agoI mean, yes 20k is a big order, but to put that in perspective, it's at most the output of one small production line for one month, and more likely they're balancing it with other orders (and doing a ramp to verify the process before going full bore). It's still a tiny fraction of the foundry industry overall.
- esmi 9y agoDefinitely a tiny fraction of the industry but also a tiny fraction of just TSMC. For reference, they claim they did 10 million wafers in 2016. http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/manufacturing/fab_capacity.htm http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/manufacturing/f...
- krasin 9y ago20k wafers / month = 240k wafers / year. So, 2.4%.
- aphextron 9y agoThe article is pretty light, are these whole wafers? What size?
- kingosticks 9y agoIs there even a reputable source for this info, I'm not familiar with the guy who tweeted it. But if I was trying to further inflate my bubble I'd probably tweet stuff like this.
- wmf 9y agoWhole 300 mm wafers; TSMC doesn't sell partials AFAIK.
- wmf 9y agoNote that Bitmain is mostly a hardware vendor, although they do mine using their own equipment. Most of these chips will be sold to other miners, not used by Bitmain themselves.
- guiomie 9y agoI was wondering about this, why do they sell them instead of mining them? They could sell the older model once the new chips they designed are ready no?
- jcomis 9y agoRumor is they do exactly that...
- wmf 9y agoThe cynical answer is that customers are willing to pay more than the hardware will ever mine over its lifetime. The non-cynical answer is that setting up gigawatts of data centers is not trivial and not Bitmain's core competency. Also, selling the hardware upfront locks in the profit even if the price of Bitcoin later crashes.
- nimos 9y agoThe % of the network they would control would be too high maybe? Fundamentally the value of their product is based on the price of bitcoin. A single miner that gets close to 50% might be seen a a huge risk and drive down the price.
- searine 9y agoWho makes money in a gold rush? It's the guy selling shovels.
- Someone1234 9y agoThat was my thinking too. There are a lot of replies in this thread talking about Bitmain like they're the miner, when in reality they're the mining supply store selling miners the shovels, hard hats, and so on. Mining itself may be profitable, or it may not. But no matter what, the supplier should come out with a fairly healthy profit if they play their cards right.
- icelancer 9y agoMaybe. The lead time on this stuff is not insignificant. It's not that simple. Bitmain/Jihan understand that; they take a varied approach.
- huffpopo 9y agoIf you mean Samuel Brannan, then you make money by diverting church funds to pay violent gangs to establish and maintain a shovel monopoly. Then you lose it all to a real estate crash and a divorce. So the real lesson is be immoral, break the law, diversify and don't get married. It's not like he is the only one who thought of selling shovels with huge markups.
- Animats 9y agoOn top of that, Etherium mining is eating the graphics board market. The price of NVidia's higher end boards has doubled in the last six months.[1] Etherium was supposed to require a general purpose CPU to mine, but now it's done on GPUs with large RAM. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/cryptocurrency-boom-creates-insane-global-graphics-card-shortage/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/cryptocurrency-b...
- semi-extrinsic 9y agoI bought an RX 570 three weeks ago; local prices have increased 30% since. In three weeks.
- icelancer 9y agoETH is going PoS soon enough, the other altcoins drive GPU mining significantly as well. Particularly the CryptoNight coins (Monero, Electroneum, etc) for the AMD market, and Equihash coins (Zcash, primarily) for Nvidia cards.
- Viper007Bond 9y agoAs a gamer, it sucks terribly. I want a 1080 Ti but they're impossible to find for a reasonable price.
- 21 9y agoI've bought a 1070 last year for machine learning and used it for a few days. Now I don't know what to do: sell it since Volta will be a game-changer for ML anyway, but what if when I will want to do ML again it will be impossible to buy any card?
- diimdeep 9y agoYou could have run miner on it 24/7 when not doing other work, by this time you could get price you paid more than 2x, maybe 3x
- ww520 9y agoNVDA is doing well. God, that company has nicely leveraged their core product to hit on all the growth cylinders.
- HN15718653 9y agoAs a cryptocurrency-confused individual, I read articles like this and wonder how I'm supposed to assign any meaning to the "value" being created here, and by blockchain PoW in general. So this company is buying a bunch of wafers... He's converting the value of the wafers into value on blockchain, I guess? Because I can't help but interpret these things as "some people are wasting a lot of electricity, and you should pay them for it!" But, I'm open to a better explanation.
- izuchukwu 9y agoPerhaps it might help to consider it equivalent to one converting the value of picks and buckets into value in gold. Just as the picks and buckets are worth what they’re worth, the gold is worth what someone else is willing to pay.
- greghatch 9y agoThis analogy is great, thanks.
- gambiting 9y agoWhy are banknotes worth anything? They are just pieces of paper with some ink on them, after all. They are "worth" something, because people are willing to do work or trade you stuff for them. The same with mining bitcoin - instead of printing banknotes, you make a "thing" that you can then trade for services and objects, because people want to have that "thing"(this part is crucial). Most importantly, people are willing to trade that "thing" for real actual dollars, and hence the mining craze.
- amalag 9y agoDo you see people printing banknotes out of feathers or some other randomly expensive material? No, and similarly mining bitcoin is some randomly expensive process. The process of securing a "coin" can be done very cheaply with minimal computing cost and the world will shift to that.
- whataretensors 9y agoAnything that mentions bitcoin mining gets people worked up and negative for some reason. More demand for compute is a good thing long-term. More demand for video cards is great for all parallel computing long-term, hopefully someone besides NVIDIA seriously moves into the space.
- cesarb 9y ago> Anything that mentions bitcoin mining [...] More demand for video cards is great [...] Bitcoin mining no longer uses video cards. More demand for bitcoin mining does not translate into more demand for video cards.
- IncRnd 9y agoVideo cards haven't been able to mine Bitcoin for several years.
- rcharles 9y agoOh I hope NVIDIA/AMD start mining themselves to end this abomination.
- topspin 9y agoI suppose that at some point it's going to become economically feasible to make integrated BPUs (...Bitcoin Processing Units...) and obviate the ASICs.
- blattimwind 9y agoBitcoin ASICs are literally "Bitcoin Processing Units".
- IncRnd 9y agoHow does a BPU obviate the ASICS?
- zython 9y agoBitcoin was mistake
- riku_iki 9y agoAnd these guys expect some ROI from this investment. When you buy bitcoin, you now know where your money goes.
- paul7986 9y agoIs this going to help BTC’s price as it’s been falling past two days?
- baybal2 9y agoWith each year, I think more and more that the whole bitcoin thingy was devised as an elaborate scheme to prop hash bruteforcing research. Another crazy thing that pops in mind now is now long forgotten rumor that Chiang is Satoshi.
- gigatexal 9y agoSo people with enough bitcoin can generate more bitcoin. Meh.
- blackrock 9y agoThe amount of waste of Bitcoin Mining is incredible. It is all about virtual digital mining, which is to race to find the first hash, that has X number of zeros in the front of it. And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. Can't there be a more useful usage of cryptocurrency mining to show proof of work? Something that is more relevant to humanity. Like protein folding? Or planet hunting? Or pattern analysis? Or something else, that can be used to build an AI brain?
- trhway 9y ago>And this burns an incredible amount of electricity. And all for what? Just to show proof of work. No. PoW is just an old name from the 199x spam fighting. The point here is planet-scale consensus, not "proof of work". One way to achieve distributed consensus in untrusted non-static environment is to randomly choose master for a given block. Imagine that everybody just throws a dice, and whoever gets 6 becomes that master. How we make sure that there is only one master for a given block, and that when you say 6 you really got 6 as i have no way of checking whether you even threw the dice at all? Satoshi's great insight was in building such a verifiable and statistically [for several minutes] single-master dice by using the good old hash based PoW. Now, if somebody could come up with more energy efficient way to achieve that consensus at such a scale...
- zeroxfe 9y ago> Now, if somebody could come up with more energy efficient way to achieve that consensus at such a scale... A handful of the top cryptos are using some variant of proof-of-stake (like dPoS, dBFT, etc.), all of which are energy efficient. Ethereum is currently experimenting with PoS in Casper.
- trhway 9y agoPoS basically increases energy efficiency by decreasing the degree of randomness and skewing the dice in favor of stakeholders to the degree depending on their stakes (at the limit you'd have just one entity verifying all the transactions, a very energy efficient situation we have today with fiat). In general PoS looks like a reasonable trade-off, and we're to see whether it gets accepted.
- ttul 9y agoAnd to think back in 2011 we couldn’t get an investor to back us with the $1M needed to produce just one BTC mining wafer. How times have changed.
- medius 9y agoMy wife and I were just talking about Bitcoin and I had this wild theory. This is obviously BS, but I had fun exploring this idea. Here it goes: What if Bitcoin/blockchain is a actually a strong AI? The AI manipulated humans via lucrative mining to spend ever increasing amount of electricity and other resources on running it. It's distributed and hence cannot be shut down easily. If there was an application taking up so much power and we didn't know what it did, it would be pretty suspicious. So instead of trying to be secret, the AI went public and promised wealth, no-regulations, etc. to humans to do its bidding. How else would you do it if you were a strong AI? Maybe the things we know about blockchain is just the surface level. What if all the hashes that are generated are part of code+data that runs and trains this AI? And hey, we don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is and if that person is even human. Disclaimer: I don't have any background in encryption, crypto currency, blockchain, have no stake in any *coin, etc. But I do love science fiction.
- mike4921 9y agoI love it! For all the bad things bitcoin has brought, I have to say it makes me feel like I'm living in a cyberpunk novel! Snow Crash...Neuromancer.... I think people are focusing on all the negatives and overlooking all the fascinating aspects of whats going on. The internet has basically spontaneously created an interesting and suspicious technology. I think it's really only been possible thanks to the increasingly effective and available means of energy production, such that almost a consumer commodity. Neal Stephenson, if you're reading this, this would make an amazing sci-fi novel.
- pbw 9y agoI think I've heard various sci-fi authors grousing it's hard to write these days because reality is so sci-fi and outlandish (Trump).
- pbw 9y agoThe end of George Dyson's classic article on Google goes: For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings: When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain." https://www.edge.org/conversation/turing-39s-cathedral https://www.edge.org/conversation/turing-39s-cathedral