4 ms·

I hope this is more successful than the last attempt (3060 Ti) where the "crippling" was just software and it was quickly circumvented, partly through NVidia's

by cletus 5y ago

I hope this is more successful than the last attempt (3060 Ti) where the "crippling" was just software and it was quickly circumvented, partly through NVidia's own screw up (they released a beta driver that didn't have that limitation). It's almost impossible to buy a GPU now. Anywhere you can occasionally buy them is heavily botted. Some sellers try and mitigate this eg Zotac has a queue system of questionable effect. Others do absolutely nothing (eg Amazon). You might say that's just supply and demand but it's not in NVidia's long term interest for crypto-miners to buy every GPU. Why? It kills the market for ML and gaming. What happens is as soon as the crypto market next crashes, those GPUs get offloaded and flood the market. I absolutely support NVidia in this, for several reasons. First, I'd actually like to buy a GPU for personal use. Second, there are real ethical questions around crypto, especially PoW. That will offend some people but it's true. Apologists will point to most crypto-mining using renewable energy. Yes, because hydro is the cheapest power. But all the hydro power use can actually limit the power and/or make it more expensive for everyone else. Wouldn't it be funny if crypto-mining is the solution to the Fermi Paradox where civilizations ultimately ended up cooking themselves in crypto-mining waste heat?

didericis 5y ago
> Apologists will point to most crypto-mining using renewable energy. Yes, because hydro is the cheapest power. But all the hydro power use can actually limit the power and/or make it more expensive for everyone else. As an admitted apologist, that's one of the weaker arguments. The most compelling to me is that power usage isn't properly compared to traditional banking. Sustaining all of the people and in person infrastructure required for traditional financial transactions requires more than just calculating the cost of transmitting the transaction. In fact those parts are comparatively cheap, it's the verification that's expensive, in both systems. All of the people employed in banks who play any kind of role have an enormous amount of cost associated with their employment. I'd like to see a comparison of heating and cooling costs for all of the banks in the world, which is just a small slice of the total cost of traditional banking, factored in to comparisons. The only one I've seen compared it to the computing cost for processing VISA transactions, which didn't seem like a proper comparison. I'm also generally suspicious of some people (not everyone) who's gut instinct to environmental impact are limiting the spread of innovative and extremely useful ideas rather than looking at how to decrease the impact, particularly when those ideas help to decrease reliance on powerful central authorities. Proof of work is the innovation that allowed cryptocurrencies to scale to the level they are today, and it's precisely that work that allows them to operate securely despite being decentralized. Abandoning it because of the impact rather than reducing the impact would be like abandoning cars rather than making them electric and more efficient.
- detaro 5y ago
  The focus is on transaction layer because that is what the crypto currencies provides. The blockchain doesn't run customer support, doesn't handle cash logistics, doesn't decide in conflicts involving the real world (e.g. if you do a blockchain escrow thing with multisig or smart contracts or whatever to give customers the equivalent of chargebacks in case of fraud, you still need humans to make the decision), ... so you can not just pretend all those human roles go away - and the people already working in blockchain ecosystems also aren't calculated against the blockchains in the calculations. Deciding which ones won't exist in the hypothetical all-blockchain world has far-reaching consequences, and probably something there is little consensus on. Proposals and estimations based on that would be interesting though.
  - didericis 5y ago
    Describing cryptocurrencies as a transaction layer does not describe the value. Communicating “Adam paid Bob X coins” is not hard. What’s hard is having everyone agree on the same history of transactions. That’s what cryptocurrencies provide. There is an enormous amount of accounting and verification work that goes on within banking systems to solve the verification problem. My argument was not that every human role has a cost that needs to be factored in, but that any human role has a high cost, and a large number of human roles require very large amounts of energy to support. A fair bit of what you describe also can in fact be done with just smart contracts where the contract and those who sign it (the human customers) makes the decision without any middleman (without a human escrow agent).

by cletus 5y ago

didericis 5y ago

> Apologists will point to most crypto-mining using renewable energy. Yes, because hydro is the cheapest power. But all the hydro power use can actually limit the power and/or make it more expensive for everyone else. As an admitted apologist, that's one of the weaker arguments. The most compelling to me is that power usage isn't properly compared to traditional banking. Sustaining all of the people and in person infrastructure required for traditional financial transactions requires more than just calculating the cost of transmitting the transaction. In fact those parts are comparatively cheap, it's the verification that's expensive, in both systems. All of the people employed in banks who play any kind of role have an enormous amount of cost associated with their employment. I'd like to see a comparison of heating and cooling costs for all of the banks in the world, which is just a small slice of the total cost of traditional banking, factored in to comparisons. The only one I've seen compared it to the computing cost for processing VISA transactions, which didn't seem like a proper comparison. I'm also generally suspicious of some people (not everyone) who's gut instinct to environmental impact are limiting the spread of innovative and extremely useful ideas rather than looking at how to decrease the impact, particularly when those ideas help to decrease reliance on powerful central authorities. Proof of work is the innovation that allowed cryptocurrencies to scale to the level they are today, and it's precisely that work that allows them to operate securely despite being decentralized. Abandoning it because of the impact rather than reducing the impact would be like abandoning cars rather than making them electric and more efficient.

detaro 5y ago
The focus is on transaction layer because that is what the crypto currencies provides. The blockchain doesn't run customer support, doesn't handle cash logistics, doesn't decide in conflicts involving the real world (e.g. if you do a blockchain escrow thing with multisig or smart contracts or whatever to give customers the equivalent of chargebacks in case of fraud, you still need humans to make the decision), ... so you can not just pretend all those human roles go away - and the people already working in blockchain ecosystems also aren't calculated against the blockchains in the calculations. Deciding which ones won't exist in the hypothetical all-blockchain world has far-reaching consequences, and probably something there is little consensus on. Proposals and estimations based on that would be interesting though.
- didericis 5y ago
  Describing cryptocurrencies as a transaction layer does not describe the value. Communicating “Adam paid Bob X coins” is not hard. What’s hard is having everyone agree on the same history of transactions. That’s what cryptocurrencies provide. There is an enormous amount of accounting and verification work that goes on within banking systems to solve the verification problem. My argument was not that every human role has a cost that needs to be factored in, but that any human role has a high cost, and a large number of human roles require very large amounts of energy to support. A fair bit of what you describe also can in fact be done with just smart contracts where the contract and those who sign it (the human customers) makes the decision without any middleman (without a human escrow agent).