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I'm in your boat, when it was first explained to me in a hacker space at college when it was first growing and priced at a few cents per 100++ Bitcoin. All I co
by doctorwho42 6y ago
I'm in your boat, when it was first explained to me in a hacker space at college when it was first growing and priced at a few cents per 100++ Bitcoin. All I could see was a waste of energy and resources (time, energy, hardware).
It will always be a drain on society, and it scares me that it hasn't failed because we see it draining our GPU industry to the point that market prices have gone insane and availability is practically non-existent / all left up to chance.
It does take a rocket science to see the trends, as long as it's tied to needing hardware to compute arbitrary calculations to work... It's going to waste computer resources and energy. Both which are finite resources... Yes finite, solar cells aren't free to make, they don't last forever after you make them. Same with any other green technology. Maybe if fusion was our only power source it would be less of a concern, but we still haven't cracked Q=1, so... Yes it is a waste of finite resources.
- dieortin 6y agoIt’s not draining the GPU industry. No one buys GPUs for mining Bitcoin anymore, they use ASICs.
- totalZero 6y agoI'm not sure about that...Search "best GPU mining 2021" on Google and you'll get several hits.
- jefftk 6y agoNone of those seem to be about Bitcoin? For example https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/best-mining-gpu-in-2021 https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/best-mining-gpu-in-2021 lists a "DaggerHashimoto" hashrate which would be for Etherium.
- shawabawa3 6y agoMost people mining use something like NiceHash, which rents out your hashpower to people who use it to mine the currently most efficient asset (usually ethereum/monero/doge+ltc) Mining bitcoin with a GPU would take around 5000 years in the best case scenario to pay off _with free electricity_
- MrApathy 6y agoIn the specific context of Bitcoin it may be true that the preference is for ASIC, but (1) some Bitcoin is still mined using GPU's and (2) there are several thousand active digital currencies, many of them favoring GPU's. Grandparent's wider assertion is absolutely true, the GPU market is skewed by miners. Purchasing a 3000 series GPU is not easy right now.
- shawabawa3 6y agoDo you have a source for (1)? I'm pretty sure GPU mining btc is inefficient even with free electricity (depreciation of the PC/GPU will outweigh benefits) edit: was curious so checked the math Using a 3060TI GPU (one of the most cost-efficient for performance gpu's available) would generate about $0.0002/day, or take ~5000 years to pay itself off even with free electricity
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Stupulous 6y agoDoesn't bitcoin compute time go up with computational advances also? If so, any answer greater than a few years can be transposed to infinite time to cover costs.
- Taek 6y agoEven as just ASICs there's something of a drain, Bitcoin ASICs consume fab production which means less remaining production capacity for GPUs. This is an equilibrium that should eventually fix itself, but while Bitcoin and crypto mining is growing they are making a material dent in the global semiconductor economy.
- westurner 6y agoCryptoasset mining creates demand for custom chip fab (how different are mining rigs from SSL/TLS accelerator expansion cards), which is definitely not zero sum: more revenue = more opportunities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_supply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_supply With insufficient demand, a market does not develop into a sustainable market. "Rule of three (economics)" says that markets are stable with 3 major competitors and many smaller competitors; nonlinearity and game theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(economics) We've always had custom chip fab, but the prices used to be much higher. Proof of Work (and Proof of Research) incentivize microchip and software energy efficiency; whereas we had observed and been most concerned with doublings in transistor density. FWIU, it's now more sustainable and profitable to mine rare earth elements from recycled electronics than actually digging real value out of the earth? Compared to creating real value by digging for gold, how do we value financial services?
- oblio 6y agoThey're mining it with malware on CPUs, don't underestimate human stupidity when faced with large numbers of people...
- celticninja 6y agoThey may be mining Montero but they definitely are not mining bitcoin
- AnonsLadder 6y agoYou're looking at it from a totally wrong perspective. The U.S. government can print as much dollars as they want, whereas BTC cannot. The government does not care about green energy unless they can profit from it. To say that you did not buy BTC because of "wasting energy" is a very odd way to cope. You guys are so hung up on energy consumption, a meme, that you're forgetting the real intrinsic value of Bitcoin.
- okprod 6y agoI understand the value of blockchain tech, but what's the intrinsic value of Bitcoin?
- sparkie 6y agoValue which cannot be stolen or debased. Also, "blockchain" is just a data structure that has practically no use besides bitcoin.
- wetmore 6y agoSeems like there have been numerous stories about bitcoin being stolen?
- sparkie 6y agoPrivate keys can be stolen if you leave them lying around. Nobody can steal your bitcoin if your private keys are well protected. And of course, the best protection is a brain wallet. If a State attempts to implement an EO6102 equivalent for Bitcoin, they will be unable to enforce it.
- sodality2 6y agoBrain wallets are hilariously bad, if you make it up yourself; a randomly generated key is far superior and can still be memorized. Search up "brainflayer" for just one example of a brain wallet cracker.
- biolurker1 6y agoIn the end GPUs are better off using energy to play counterstrike than to generate sound money right?!