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Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced proc

Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each additional GPU added to the mining networks only makes the overall system less efficient. Mining difficulty is automatically adjusted upward to cancel out the additional computing power. The networks processed just as many transactions last year as they do now, but countless new GPUs have been added to the mining network due to the incentive structure of mining. It’s a race to the bottom, consuming ever more GPUs and energy until equilibrium is reached. It’s frustrating to watch so much of the output of our most advanced chip manufacturing be diverted straight into making arbitrary proof-of-work systems less efficient so someone can capture incrementally more coins. And now we must all pay higher prices for everything.

officialchicken 5y ago
I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. It's important to recognize when consumers are being squeezed by multiple market forces.
- zpeti 5y ago
  Not just ML, with everything moving to cloud services, while consumers still use phones plus laptops, the number of chips used per person more and more.
  - HanaShiratori 5y ago
    I'm not an advocate for cloud services by all means, but aren't they generally much more efficient in using their resources than traditional on premise solutions due to the sharing of the underlying infrastructure?
- Leader2light 5y ago
  It's being blamed because cryptocurrency is pointless trash. How can governments print money with a entire new currency in existence outside their control. They can't, the system would collapse upon which we all depend. Thankfully cryptocurrency simply does not function as a currency and is a tool to get rich in normal currency.
- qeternity 5y ago
  Datacenters are not deploying consumer GPUs.
  - skohan 5y ago
    It's still mediated by the same bottlenecks right? NVidia would be able to produce more consumer GPU's if they weren't competing for capacity at TSMC and Samsung
  - positr0n 5y ago
    But datacenter CPU/GPUs take the same wafers, machines, and factory time slots as consumer GPUs. Which that is the price increase this article is about.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      Ok - I wasn’t replying to the article - I was replying to a comment about crypto-induced price increases of consumer gear being blamed on datacenters, which just isn’t true. It’s not that OEM prices are going up, it’s that retail prices are. Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU which is immediately resold on the retail market at 100% markup. This is driven by crypto, not DL.
      - londons_explore 5y ago
        > Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU which is immediately resold on the retail market at 100% markup. The same might be said of event ticket resellers making a big markup. But the reality is that, in the case of event tickets at least, it's very common for the original sellers and the resellers either to be secretly the same party, or at least have some kind of profit sharing agreement. It's simply that the original seller doesn't want to be seen to be price gouging, so doesn't want to put the list price of an item up, but still wants to gain. That's frequently done by it being very expensive to become an 'approved seller' or similar.
        qeternity 5y ago
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  The issue is that crypto mining is the only system designed to have negative marginal utility for each GPU consumed. It literally pays people to take energy and GPUs away from the open market for zero incremental gain to the network. The difference is that each additional iPhone or ML accelerator or cloud server CPU provides incrementally more utility. More ML accelerators means more ML processing. Proof-of-work mining is the only system designed to get less efficient with each additional unit of compute power. Add another GPU to the mining network and the network will automatically become less efficient. More GPUs doesn’t mean more transactions, but the system pays people to essentially burn these GPUs. That’s the complaint. Not that chips are being used, but that the marginal output of each additional GPU is negative.
  - officialchicken 5y ago
    I have capital I want to deploy. Zero/Negative interest rates are a reality. Traditional broker managed investments are a hot zone for fees. Newer tools for access to markets is covered by reddit day traders; real estate is also highly competitive due to airbnb businesses and other forces. Capital will always find the easiest path, and right now that's crypto and no one on HN is complaining about micro-VC activity.
  - dkersten 5y ago
    > more ML processing I would argue that most ML processing by most "big data" companies also has marginal negative output for each additional GPU. Certainly anything to do with social media or adtech and a lot of analytics in general is a net negative for the world, while consuming electricity and processing hardware.
    - thehappypm 5y ago
      If you are this reductionist you can argue all electricity consumption is net negative.
      - yholio 5y ago
        They are not being reductionist. Each additional hashing unit cancels out at the next difficulty adjustment, having a net effect of zero on the overall working of the network. Yes, the hash rate of the network increases, thus the difficulty for an attacker to perform a double spend. But, arguably, that's an already insane level of resources, many orders of magnitude higher than what a bitcoin-like payment system would reasonably require. So even if you consider the network socially useful, pouring thousands of times more hashing power that the network actually requires to perform its task securely is still a waste of resources.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. I don't see this at all. All these GPUs for non gaming use are a tiny drop in the ocean in comparison to the mainstream market.
- Taek 5y ago
  It's mostly not ML either. There were production hiccups do to covid, increased consumer demand for chips due to covid, increased demand of mobile chips because the mobile industry is still massively growing, among other issues. Crypto and ML are each rather small aspects of the issue at hand.
cletus 5y ago
I agree with this but it's even worse than that. Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina. Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap hydro power, the miners can use so much power they end up making power more expensive for everyone. I'd be more OK with this if crypto in fact solved a problem for most people. We should start by stopping calling them "currencies". They're not. They're assets. They lack all the useful properties of a currency (eg being massively deflationary) The only thing cryptos really do is allow a temporary medium of exchange for traditional currencies. Some uses of this are entirely legitimate (eg escaping capital controls in certain currencies). Some are not (ie all the illegal usages). I really wonder what happens to Bitcoin (or any PoW coin) when it no longer becomes economical to mine new coins. Does all the computing power just move on to the next coin? If so, won't this make the network vulnerable to attack? What is the incentive for people to contribute computing power without the prospect of economical new coins?
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  > Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. Even if true (iirc there is a lot of doubt whether it is, see Iran), it's still moronic, because consuming renewable energy for shits and giggles obviously means that other energy demands are being met with your usual energy mix instead of that renewable energy that went into shits and giggles as assumed. In terms of net emissions it simply doesn't really matter whether you A) use non-renewable energy for BS or B) use renewable energy for BS, displacing other energy users to non-renewables. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.
  - raisedbyninjas 5y ago
    Proof of work cryptos are a pox on society. That said they are some of the most location neutral energy consumers. This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission. 1TW is around 20% of global energy production. This is enough of a factor to impact manufacturing of renewable energy equipment. It allows them to achieve economies of scale faster and accelerate the transition to cleaner energy that we need.
pW9GLKxm9taFEhz 5y ago
Are people mining crypto on PS5s and Xboxes?
- officialchicken 5y ago
  No love for automotive infotainment systems and dashboard gauges? Those have actually caused real economic damage due to manufacturing shutdowns.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    Cars cost tens of thousands of dollars, so I think they should be somewhat entitled to use whatever tech they want. I’m more upset at every fridge and light bulb and oven having WiFi.
  - bigbillheck 5y ago
    > No love for automotive infotainment systems None at all, I hate those big display things.
zip1234 5y ago
While Crypto is certainly a contributor to demand, I think a large part of the problem is related to a demand spike similar to the 'toilet paper shortage', where companies try to stockpile because they hear there will be a shortage, which in turn makes the problem worse. Additionally, COVID stoppages caused chaos in supply.
- ATsch 5y ago
  The toilet paper shortage is kind of a bad example, because it was caused by a very real and sudden shift in demand from the very seperate commercial and personal toilet paper manufacturing markets.
  - lobochrome 5y ago
    Is there a source for this?
    - xxs 5y ago
      look for companies retooling their output - company toilet paper rolls are quite different than home use
    - bewaretheirs 5y ago
      All over the place. From April 2020: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/04/08/coronavirus-shortage-where-has-all-the-toilet-paper-gone/2964143001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/04/08/coronavirus-...
  - smhost 5y ago
    demand shift and panic buying are not mutually exclusive. and it also keeps happening (from this week: https://www.businessinsider.com/costco-shoppers-stockpiling-toilet-paper-worsen-supply-chain-issues-2021-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/costco-shoppers-stockpiling-...)
  - stefan_ 5y ago
    So is GPUs for crypto mining demand, though. GPU makers don't hate it because they have a conscience, they hate it because it can collapse any moment when a bubble unrelated to their product bursts (or someone makes an ASIC, for some of them).
cwizou 5y ago
> I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50 years in Taiwan) has really affected them, and various sources seem to confirm it, here's one : https://fortune.com/2021/06/12/chip-shortage-taiwan-drought-tsmc-water-usage/ https://fortune.com/2021/06/12/chip-shortage-taiwan-drought-... And while I wholeheartedly agree with the crypto/GPU issue, all in all, the GPU market is overall fairly tiny compared to TSMC's total output. Most of the GPU issue is linked to massive demand and conservative allocations that were bought by GPU makers a while back. Adding extra allocation because of demand is really hard specifically on constrained high end nodes like GPU uses. Car makers and others in the industry don't use those nodes, they use older ones and those are equally constrained. The GPU/crypto issue is the cherry on top of an already very constrained TSMC, it seems.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > And while I wholeheartedly agree with the crypto/GPU issue, all in all, the GPU market is overall fairly tiny compared to TSMC's total output. From an economics perspective, it doesn’t really matter. The price of a market-rate good is the marginal price of producing one more unit. As long as cryptocurrency is financially incentivizing people to consume 100% of the marginal production, prices will continue to go up. This also cascades down their lineup: Vendors who would like to use 7nm for their chip will instead choose 10nm, which will bump some of the customers who wanted to use 10nm back to the 12nm or 16nm nodes and so on.
  - 1980phipsi 5y ago
    GPU's are market-rate goods?
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Crypto mining is a market rate good.
      - 5y ago
_huayra_ 5y ago
Honest question: is it possible to make a cryptocurrency that does not rely on some real-world scarce resource (e.g. chips, electricity, drive space)? This seems to be a cornerstone of what makes any crypto valuable in the first place (scarcity), and as long as that scarcity has real-world consequences, it seems like it would have the same result. Chia claimed to "Save the world from proof-of-work wastage", but it would just turn a GPU crunch into a HDD crunch.
- akircher 5y ago
  “Work” doesn’t have to be wasteful. It could be based on the number of pieces of litter that were collected, the number of meals to the homeless that were served. It’s just easier to measure when work is something wasteful.
  - _huayra_ 5y ago
    Let's hope someone comes up with a coin staked on the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere!
    - xxs 5y ago
      how would you prove that it has happened?
      - Hjfrf 5y ago
        Atmospheric data, pay an average to each person in the country.
    - nrp 5y ago
      Kim Stanley Robinson proposes this in his recent novel, The Ministry for the Future. He mostly skips the details around how it would actually work though, beyond needing an enormous amount of human labor for verification. In real life, that would break the decentralization of it.
    - mrfusion 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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Haga 5y ago
We do not talk about the offerings to the paperclip optimizer aka the crypto cracker aka rokos basilisk in this house in this way young man.
simonh 5y ago
GPUs are a marginal factor in this. The main factors are several impacts from Covid-19, US trade restrictions on SMIC chip exports from China (a big supplier of low and mid-range chips which this is actually all about), and the Taiwan drought. The Covid-19 impact itself is multi-pronged. Many chip plants closed or reduced output due to the lockdowns, but also the silicon used in chip production is the same material used to manufacture vials so vaccine production also impacts high quality silicon availability. Finally early in the epidemic a lot of manufacturers that consume chips, such as car makers, cut production. This lead to some chip foundries being closed as they were non-viable and it's taking a long time for those foundries to get re-commissioned or other foundries to expand to make up the gap in capacity.
- another_story 5y ago
  Taiwan drought has been over for awhile now.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Nevertheless any impact on production would set them behind their production targets which would need to be caught up. Even if it didn't impact production, it would certainly have impacted costs, hence contributing to the price hike.
cle 5y ago
According to TSMC's chairman, the shortages are mainly due to: - Covid-19 effects on production - US-China trade war - Increased demand due to the pandemic - Increased 5G demand - Increased HPC demand https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/TSMC-head-says-drive-to-onshore-chip-supply-chain-is-unrealistic https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/TSMC-he... https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2021/05/26/tsmcs-chairman-real-reasons-for-the-global-chip-shortage/43430/ https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2021/05/26/tsmcs-chair...
wiz21c 5y ago
> It’s frustrating to watch so much of the output well, frustrating maybe. But you know what, chips production is not like gravity, there are human controlling who gets what chip... Someone, somewhere could better arbitrate things... And it's not the invisible hand which is, as often, well, invisible.
drcode 5y ago
Cryptocurrency miners are handing TSMCs boatloads of money that they are using to grow their R&D efforts. Cryptocurrency, in the long term, will be amazing for the advancement of GPU technology. (though we should still move crypto away from GPU mining for environmental and security reasons)
nivenkos 5y ago
I wish some governments would start shutting down the fiat exchanges.
- neb_b 5y ago
  If they shut those down you can still purchase through decentralized exchanges. https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    Sure, but 99% of people will sell, and the price will crash.
    - neb_b 5y ago
      The people that need it won't sell. Bitcoin is most useful in countries already living under authoritarian rule with no access to traditional banking.
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        Almost none of bitcoins usage is by the people that need it.
        neb_b 5y ago
        Do you have a source for that?
        rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
        What makes you say this? Nigeria, a country with a currency that loses purchasing parity power every year, has the highest per capita usage of Bitcoin in the world. Sounds like the people that need it ARE using it...
        babypuncher 5y ago
nsxwolf 5y ago
This could be a possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Advanced civilizations almost become space faring, but at around the same time they discover cryptocurrencies and funnel all their planets resources into it, until they become stranded and die out.
beiller 5y ago
Are they also raising prices of CPUs? Arm chips? Your argument is based on an assertion that sounds like it could be right, but is it? Hasn't every country in the world been injecting cash stimulus into people's hands in an epic attempt to boost demand across all industries? Also why are miners the target here. Are there not deep learning, gamers, anything else who also want to use these monsterous compute units? (GPUs specifically). Raising the price is temporary because someday another chip maker can be born. Every day the lithography tech is getting cheaper and cheaper is just a matter of time till this resolves itself. And let me ask, are chips a human right like water and food? We're getting close but honestly life can go on without GPUs can't it?
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  Miners are the target of anger not (necessarily) because it’s wasted energy,[a] but because them using GPUs creates a self serving cycle: Difficulty goes up, more GPUs are bought to counteract that, repeat. This isn’t helped my the monetary reward for doing so.[b] Deep learning, gaming, etc. are different in that someone doing 2 way SLI doesn’t make others need to do the same. If my online opponents are playing on RTX 3090s, I’m not forced to upgrade to play with them. [a]: The energy usage is a byproduct of the proof-of-work system [b]: hence why things like Folding@home, SETI@home, etc. never gained massive popularity like coins did; they don’t reward you except in feel-good thoughts
  - qeternity 5y ago
    > using GPUs creates a self serving cycle: Difficulty goes up, more GPUs are bought to counteract that, repeat. This isn’t helped my the monetary reward for doing so. Not quite. Price continues to go up, courtesy of Tether, which makes the mining rewards more valuable. This encourages new miners to join the network which pushes difficulty higher, until the difficulty level rises such that every unit of output costs more to produce than its worth. Then it's no longer profitable to mine. But again, Tether has no choice but to keep things pumping.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ErikVandeWater 5y ago
"Shortage" is a technical term to describe a situation where outside influence is preventing supply from meeting demand at the market clearing price. I do think crypto falls into this category, as well as numerous government policies (every tax creates a shortage).
dannyobrien 5y ago
Is there any evidence for this claim?
Tenoke 5y ago
BTC GPU mining hasn't been profitable for years. ETH GPU mining (the main one) has gotten way less profitable recently and is scheduled to not be a thing in 6 months to a year. The GPU demand for mining has already lessened in the last months and you can see decreased 2nd hand prices.. Every comment that blames BTC for chip shortages is likely largely incorrect and looking in the wrong place.
- Hjfrf 5y ago
  What do you think ASICs are made of?
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    TSMC has Bitmain as a low-priority client, and the first one to be cut when demand is high like earlier this year[0]. Bitmain itself is having even bigger reduction in orders to TSMC currently[1] so again, that's the wrong place to look for increased chip demand. At any rate, I was mostly responding to claims about 'GPUs are profitable for mining' in the parent. 0. https://www.chinamoneynetwork.com/2021/03/05/tsmc-reportedly-limits-supply-to-bitcoin-mining-players-as-demand-surges-amid-crypto-frenzy https://www.chinamoneynetwork.com/2021/03/05/tsmc-reportedly... 1. https://techtaiwan.com/20210628/bitcoin-mining-rig-bitmain-tsmc/ https://techtaiwan.com/20210628/bitcoin-mining-rig-bitmain-t...
  - serg_chernata 5y ago
    But is TSMC producing these ASIC chips?
    - Hjfrf 5y ago
      Yes, but more generally they use the same raw materials.
makotech222 5y ago
Yeah this is literally capitalism. Apply the same logic to housing: Its so sad that we are all paying the price for the commodification of housing; We have 10x homes for every single homeless person, and rent continues to skyrocket upward, all because we have a system where people are incentivized to buy houses so that they can rent them out for a profit. If only we decommodified housing, we could end homelessness and reduce cost of housing for everyone else.
pkulak 5y ago
Can we say "Bitcoin" when we're talking about Bitcoin and not lump all proof of stake and other very efficient systems in with proof of work coins?
alpineidyll3 5y ago
Don't forget the main advantage of mining over buying coin is to avoid all fiat associated regulations. So it's not just about slightly cheaper tokens, it's really about distributing the cost of tax evasion and money laundering.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dcow 5y ago
Is it tragedy of the commons, then? Once things settle, won’t people learn that adding 1 additional GPU only increases my cost by 1 and doesn't increase my reward? Can’t we design a system where the number of transactions processed scales with the compute power of the system rather than striving to always keeping block time constant?
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has existed for more than a decade. This is yet another way we're all forced to pay the price for COVID-19. When everybody started working from home, companies whose employees had desktops had to buy them all laptops. People with old home computers bought newer ones once they started using them 14 hours a day instead of two. Demand went up. A bunch of car manufacturers thought the pandemic was going to crush demand for cars, so they canceled all their chip contracts. Then it didn't and they bid up the price of chips trying to source all the ones they canceled the contracts on. The primary cost of Bitcoin mining is the electricity, not the hardware. If there is more demand for hardware, the world can build more fabs. Assuming we're given some advance notice, which this year we haven't had because COVID-19. And the reason the electricity consumption is bad is that we don't have a carbon tax, so people are burning coal to mine Bitcoin, which is Very Bad. But it's also Very Bad that people are burning coal to power electric heaters or elevators or anything else, because the problem is burning coal. If people were mining Bitcoin by building wind turbines, nobody would care. It might even improve the world by increasing the economies of scale for renewable energy production.
- f6v 5y ago
  > Bitcoin has existed for more than a decade. But I haven't seen "buy bitcoin here" signs in the cities(that aren't tech hubs) until recently. Now people are randomly asking "what's the next big crypto?" trying to make quick money.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    People have been trying to make quick money since the invention of money. "The easiest way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one." It has nothing to do with Bitcoin energy consumption, which is only a real problem because we're not pricing carbon as we ought to be.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Cryptomining incentivizes green energy investment
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
GPUs are not used to mine Bitcoin, they are used to mine Ethereum. Bitcoin is mined by different chips, also made by TSMC, but in far smaller quantities.
Taek 5y ago
Cryptocurrency chips are less than 5% of TSMCs total production, it's not the major driving force in the shortage.
machiaweliczny 5y ago
Yes, but efficiency is opposite of roboustness/resiliency.
- babypuncher 5y ago
  This is just plain untrue
anabis 5y ago
I am hoping that someone comes up with a semi-reusable proof-of-work system , like chess board positions, Mersenne primes, or protein folding. Kind of like Re-captcha.
zabatuvajdka 5y ago
Well Bitcoin will die anyway because Ethereum actually does something useful and they’re onto Proof of stake. Honestly folks should pull their money out and invest in something tangible like starting a business that ACTUALLY CREATES VALUE.
wskish 5y ago
There is an ugly feedback loop scenario where the crypto bubble accelerates inflation due to the high demand crypto places on energy and semiconductors and the proportion of global GDP downstream from energy and semi. Inflation then loops in more demand for crypto assets (as an inflation hedge) creating ugly feedback loop until governments act to break it.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
I agree that it is simply an excess of demand, the whole bitcoin rant though. Really? There is a demand for semiconductors that exceeds supply. You have made a leap that the current demand driver is bitcoin and its consumption of GPUS. As much as I appreciate the sentiment that Bitcoin is a waste, that leap doesn't hold up when you look at the actual numbers for semiconductor demand. The number one demand item for 7nm semiconductors is cell phones. If you read the various analysts reports you will find this sums it up well: It(demand) is mainly driven by the increasing demand for consumer electronics and the integration of semiconductor into several devices across sectors like automotive, industrial, communications, military, and others. (that is from this report[1] that for $2500 you too could read it (https://www.marketreportsworld.com/global-semiconductor-market-15660994 https://www.marketreportsworld.com/global-semiconductor-mark...)) During the pandemic it appears that everyone upgraded their TV (at least in the US) which, not surprisingly, consumes a lot of semi-conductors. The pandemic has also botched a lot of logistics which will sort itself out but these small bumps can cause unusually large ripples in the supply chain because so many industries are built around "just in time" delivery of raw materials. Semiconductor manufacturing is a process that is intolerant of frequent line starts/stops. So TSMC, knowing that new fabs cannot come online instantly, has chosen to risk alienating their customers a bit by raising prices to capture the value associated with their assets (productive plants) during this period. [1] To be clear, I didn't pony up the $2500, I looked at a number of sites that reported on the contents of the reports and pulled quotes from them. Market information is itself a market.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
> As long as GPUs are profitable for mining What crypto currencies are still profitable to mine with GPUs? Not bitcoin - mining btc went to ASICs long ago. Not Ether which is now POS.
- polux33 5y ago
  Ether is not POS yet.
jonathanpeterwu 5y ago
I highly doubt the chip shortage a la increased chip demand from a company perspective has to do with gaming/mining GPU demand. Much of the supply demand can be traced to increased car chip demand (Toyota cutting production by 40%) as well as general device chip demand across many sectors.
polux33 5y ago
What ? Those GPUs are being useful for securing a network hosting close to $100B of stablecoins. https://stablecoinindex.com/marketcap https://stablecoinindex.com/marketcap Not talking about other more volatile crypto as you'd be tempted to assert their values should be 0 in a perfect world. You can argue all day that's wasting energy, the crypto-ecosystem, chip manufacturers, miners, energy providers, users, developers, traders, bankers and companies driving billion of dollars of revenue (Aka value for human beings who will produce and consume goods in the real World with this revenue ) out of it are proving that you're missing the bigger picture. I've never understood HN's concerns with crypto. Following the same logic, people are literally burning petrol in their cars while it could be used for <insert supposedly better use case> Is it for ecological reasons ? You're still moving 2 tons of metal everywhere you go, and eating meat. Cryptos are not less moral or valuable than plenty of things you do or cherish. Let people mine crypto, eat meat at Wendy's driving their F150, because the world is not black and white.
exporectomy 5y ago
It's no fun before supply catches up with demand, but when it does, we'll be in a world that has higher chip production capacity and maybe some advances will come from all that extra money chip makers will be making. It seems more promising long term than, some under-produced stagnant technology like nuclear power plants.
ayngg 5y ago
The state of cryptocurrencies is nothing more than a visible symptom of larger systemic issues that have clearly gotten out of control. It would be much more beneficial to try and understand why the market has decided to consider it valuable in spite of everything you have said rather than just blame and dismiss it based on its impact. We aren't paying the price for cryptocurrency, we are paying the price for policy that has made cryptocurrency attractive.
- fukmbas 5y ago
  Yeah exactly. It's not going anywhere at this point and only becomes more attractive to lazy investors

officialchicken 5y ago

I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. It's important to recognize when consumers are being squeezed by multiple market forces.

zpeti 5y ago
Not just ML, with everything moving to cloud services, while consumers still use phones plus laptops, the number of chips used per person more and more.
- HanaShiratori 5y ago
  I'm not an advocate for cloud services by all means, but aren't they generally much more efficient in using their resources than traditional on premise solutions due to the sharing of the underlying infrastructure?
Leader2light 5y ago
It's being blamed because cryptocurrency is pointless trash. How can governments print money with a entire new currency in existence outside their control. They can't, the system would collapse upon which we all depend. Thankfully cryptocurrency simply does not function as a currency and is a tool to get rich in normal currency.
qeternity 5y ago
Datacenters are not deploying consumer GPUs.
- skohan 5y ago
  It's still mediated by the same bottlenecks right? NVidia would be able to produce more consumer GPU's if they weren't competing for capacity at TSMC and Samsung
- positr0n 5y ago
  But datacenter CPU/GPUs take the same wafers, machines, and factory time slots as consumer GPUs. Which that is the price increase this article is about.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    Ok - I wasn’t replying to the article - I was replying to a comment about crypto-induced price increases of consumer gear being blamed on datacenters, which just isn’t true. It’s not that OEM prices are going up, it’s that retail prices are. Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU which is immediately resold on the retail market at 100% markup. This is driven by crypto, not DL.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      > Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU which is immediately resold on the retail market at 100% markup. The same might be said of event ticket resellers making a big markup. But the reality is that, in the case of event tickets at least, it's very common for the original sellers and the resellers either to be secretly the same party, or at least have some kind of profit sharing agreement. It's simply that the original seller doesn't want to be seen to be price gouging, so doesn't want to put the list price of an item up, but still wants to gain. That's frequently done by it being very expensive to become an 'approved seller' or similar.
      - qeternity 5y ago
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
The issue is that crypto mining is the only system designed to have negative marginal utility for each GPU consumed. It literally pays people to take energy and GPUs away from the open market for zero incremental gain to the network. The difference is that each additional iPhone or ML accelerator or cloud server CPU provides incrementally more utility. More ML accelerators means more ML processing. Proof-of-work mining is the only system designed to get less efficient with each additional unit of compute power. Add another GPU to the mining network and the network will automatically become less efficient. More GPUs doesn’t mean more transactions, but the system pays people to essentially burn these GPUs. That’s the complaint. Not that chips are being used, but that the marginal output of each additional GPU is negative.
- officialchicken 5y ago
  I have capital I want to deploy. Zero/Negative interest rates are a reality. Traditional broker managed investments are a hot zone for fees. Newer tools for access to markets is covered by reddit day traders; real estate is also highly competitive due to airbnb businesses and other forces. Capital will always find the easiest path, and right now that's crypto and no one on HN is complaining about micro-VC activity.
- dkersten 5y ago
  > more ML processing I would argue that most ML processing by most "big data" companies also has marginal negative output for each additional GPU. Certainly anything to do with social media or adtech and a lot of analytics in general is a net negative for the world, while consuming electricity and processing hardware.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    If you are this reductionist you can argue all electricity consumption is net negative.
    - yholio 5y ago
      They are not being reductionist. Each additional hashing unit cancels out at the next difficulty adjustment, having a net effect of zero on the overall working of the network. Yes, the hash rate of the network increases, thus the difficulty for an attacker to perform a double spend. But, arguably, that's an already insane level of resources, many orders of magnitude higher than what a bitcoin-like payment system would reasonably require. So even if you consider the network socially useful, pouring thousands of times more hashing power that the network actually requires to perform its task securely is still a waste of resources.
baybal2 5y ago
> when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. I don't see this at all. All these GPUs for non gaming use are a tiny drop in the ocean in comparison to the mainstream market.
Taek 5y ago
It's mostly not ML either. There were production hiccups do to covid, increased consumer demand for chips due to covid, increased demand of mobile chips because the mobile industry is still massively growing, among other issues. Crypto and ML are each rather small aspects of the issue at hand.

cletus 5y ago

I agree with this but it's even worse than that. Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina. Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap hydro power, the miners can use so much power they end up making power more expensive for everyone. I'd be more OK with this if crypto in fact solved a problem for most people. We should start by stopping calling them "currencies". They're not. They're assets. They lack all the useful properties of a currency (eg being massively deflationary) The only thing cryptos really do is allow a temporary medium of exchange for traditional currencies. Some uses of this are entirely legitimate (eg escaping capital controls in certain currencies). Some are not (ie all the illegal usages). I really wonder what happens to Bitcoin (or any PoW coin) when it no longer becomes economical to mine new coins. Does all the computing power just move on to the next coin? If so, won't this make the network vulnerable to attack? What is the incentive for people to contribute computing power without the prospect of economical new coins?

formerly_proven 5y ago
> Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is renewable. Even if true (iirc there is a lot of doubt whether it is, see Iran), it's still moronic, because consuming renewable energy for shits and giggles obviously means that other energy demands are being met with your usual energy mix instead of that renewable energy that went into shits and giggles as assumed. In terms of net emissions it simply doesn't really matter whether you A) use non-renewable energy for BS or B) use renewable energy for BS, displacing other energy users to non-renewables. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.
- raisedbyninjas 5y ago
  Proof of work cryptos are a pox on society. That said they are some of the most location neutral energy consumers. This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission. 1TW is around 20% of global energy production. This is enough of a factor to impact manufacturing of renewable energy equipment. It allows them to achieve economies of scale faster and accelerate the transition to cleaner energy that we need.

pW9GLKxm9taFEhz 5y ago

Are people mining crypto on PS5s and Xboxes?

officialchicken 5y ago
No love for automotive infotainment systems and dashboard gauges? Those have actually caused real economic damage due to manufacturing shutdowns.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  Cars cost tens of thousands of dollars, so I think they should be somewhat entitled to use whatever tech they want. I’m more upset at every fridge and light bulb and oven having WiFi.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  > No love for automotive infotainment systems None at all, I hate those big display things.

zip1234 5y ago

While Crypto is certainly a contributor to demand, I think a large part of the problem is related to a demand spike similar to the 'toilet paper shortage', where companies try to stockpile because they hear there will be a shortage, which in turn makes the problem worse. Additionally, COVID stoppages caused chaos in supply.

ATsch 5y ago
The toilet paper shortage is kind of a bad example, because it was caused by a very real and sudden shift in demand from the very seperate commercial and personal toilet paper manufacturing markets.
- lobochrome 5y ago
  Is there a source for this?
  - xxs 5y ago
    look for companies retooling their output - company toilet paper rolls are quite different than home use
  - bewaretheirs 5y ago
    All over the place. From April 2020: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/04/08/coronavirus-shortage-where-has-all-the-toilet-paper-gone/2964143001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/04/08/coronavirus-...
- smhost 5y ago
  demand shift and panic buying are not mutually exclusive. and it also keeps happening (from this week: https://www.businessinsider.com/costco-shoppers-stockpiling-toilet-paper-worsen-supply-chain-issues-2021-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/costco-shoppers-stockpiling-...)
- stefan_ 5y ago
  So is GPUs for crypto mining demand, though. GPU makers don't hate it because they have a conscience, they hate it because it can collapse any moment when a bubble unrelated to their product bursts (or someone makes an ASIC, for some of them).

cwizou 5y ago

> I don’t see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand. One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50 years in Taiwan) has really affected them, and various sources seem to confirm it, here's one : https://fortune.com/2021/06/12/chip-shortage-taiwan-drought-tsmc-water-usage/ https://fortune.com/2021/06/12/chip-shortage-taiwan-drought-... And while I wholeheartedly agree with the crypto/GPU issue, all in all, the GPU market is overall fairly tiny compared to TSMC's total output. Most of the GPU issue is linked to massive demand and conservative allocations that were bought by GPU makers a while back. Adding extra allocation because of demand is really hard specifically on constrained high end nodes like GPU uses. Car makers and others in the industry don't use those nodes, they use older ones and those are equally constrained. The GPU/crypto issue is the cherry on top of an already very constrained TSMC, it seems.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> And while I wholeheartedly agree with the crypto/GPU issue, all in all, the GPU market is overall fairly tiny compared to TSMC's total output. From an economics perspective, it doesn’t really matter. The price of a market-rate good is the marginal price of producing one more unit. As long as cryptocurrency is financially incentivizing people to consume 100% of the marginal production, prices will continue to go up. This also cascades down their lineup: Vendors who would like to use 7nm for their chip will instead choose 10nm, which will bump some of the customers who wanted to use 10nm back to the 12nm or 16nm nodes and so on.
- 1980phipsi 5y ago
  GPU's are market-rate goods?
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Crypto mining is a market rate good.
    - 5y ago

_huayra_ 5y ago

Honest question: is it possible to make a cryptocurrency that does not rely on some real-world scarce resource (e.g. chips, electricity, drive space)? This seems to be a cornerstone of what makes any crypto valuable in the first place (scarcity), and as long as that scarcity has real-world consequences, it seems like it would have the same result. Chia claimed to "Save the world from proof-of-work wastage", but it would just turn a GPU crunch into a HDD crunch.

akircher 5y ago
“Work” doesn’t have to be wasteful. It could be based on the number of pieces of litter that were collected, the number of meals to the homeless that were served. It’s just easier to measure when work is something wasteful.
- _huayra_ 5y ago
  Let's hope someone comes up with a coin staked on the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere!
  - xxs 5y ago
    how would you prove that it has happened?
    - Hjfrf 5y ago
      Atmospheric data, pay an average to each person in the country.
  - nrp 5y ago
    Kim Stanley Robinson proposes this in his recent novel, The Ministry for the Future. He mostly skips the details around how it would actually work though, beyond needing an enormous amount of human labor for verification. In real life, that would break the decentralization of it.
  - mrfusion 5y ago

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Haga 5y ago

We do not talk about the offerings to the paperclip optimizer aka the crypto cracker aka rokos basilisk in this house in this way young man.

simonh 5y ago

GPUs are a marginal factor in this. The main factors are several impacts from Covid-19, US trade restrictions on SMIC chip exports from China (a big supplier of low and mid-range chips which this is actually all about), and the Taiwan drought. The Covid-19 impact itself is multi-pronged. Many chip plants closed or reduced output due to the lockdowns, but also the silicon used in chip production is the same material used to manufacture vials so vaccine production also impacts high quality silicon availability. Finally early in the epidemic a lot of manufacturers that consume chips, such as car makers, cut production. This lead to some chip foundries being closed as they were non-viable and it's taking a long time for those foundries to get re-commissioned or other foundries to expand to make up the gap in capacity.

another_story 5y ago
Taiwan drought has been over for awhile now.
- simonh 5y ago
  Nevertheless any impact on production would set them behind their production targets which would need to be caught up. Even if it didn't impact production, it would certainly have impacted costs, hence contributing to the price hike.

cle 5y ago

According to TSMC's chairman, the shortages are mainly due to: - Covid-19 effects on production - US-China trade war - Increased demand due to the pandemic - Increased 5G demand - Increased HPC demand https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/TSMC-head-says-drive-to-onshore-chip-supply-chain-is-unrealistic https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/TSMC-he... https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2021/05/26/tsmcs-chairman-real-reasons-for-the-global-chip-shortage/43430/ https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2021/05/26/tsmcs-chair...

wiz21c 5y ago

> It’s frustrating to watch so much of the output well, frustrating maybe. But you know what, chips production is not like gravity, there are human controlling who gets what chip... Someone, somewhere could better arbitrate things... And it's not the invisible hand which is, as often, well, invisible.

drcode 5y ago

Cryptocurrency miners are handing TSMCs boatloads of money that they are using to grow their R&D efforts. Cryptocurrency, in the long term, will be amazing for the advancement of GPU technology. (though we should still move crypto away from GPU mining for environmental and security reasons)

nivenkos 5y ago

I wish some governments would start shutting down the fiat exchanges.

neb_b 5y ago
If they shut those down you can still purchase through decentralized exchanges. https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/
- nivenkos 5y ago
  Sure, but 99% of people will sell, and the price will crash.
  - neb_b 5y ago
    The people that need it won't sell. Bitcoin is most useful in countries already living under authoritarian rule with no access to traditional banking.
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      Almost none of bitcoins usage is by the people that need it.
      - neb_b 5y ago
        Do you have a source for that?
      - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
        What makes you say this? Nigeria, a country with a currency that loses purchasing parity power every year, has the highest per capita usage of Bitcoin in the world. Sounds like the people that need it ARE using it...
        babypuncher 5y ago

nsxwolf 5y ago

This could be a possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Advanced civilizations almost become space faring, but at around the same time they discover cryptocurrencies and funnel all their planets resources into it, until they become stranded and die out.

beiller 5y ago

Are they also raising prices of CPUs? Arm chips? Your argument is based on an assertion that sounds like it could be right, but is it? Hasn't every country in the world been injecting cash stimulus into people's hands in an epic attempt to boost demand across all industries? Also why are miners the target here. Are there not deep learning, gamers, anything else who also want to use these monsterous compute units? (GPUs specifically). Raising the price is temporary because someday another chip maker can be born. Every day the lithography tech is getting cheaper and cheaper is just a matter of time till this resolves itself. And let me ask, are chips a human right like water and food? We're getting close but honestly life can go on without GPUs can't it?

colejohnson66 5y ago
Miners are the target of anger not (necessarily) because it’s wasted energy,[a] but because them using GPUs creates a self serving cycle: Difficulty goes up, more GPUs are bought to counteract that, repeat. This isn’t helped my the monetary reward for doing so.[b] Deep learning, gaming, etc. are different in that someone doing 2 way SLI doesn’t make others need to do the same. If my online opponents are playing on RTX 3090s, I’m not forced to upgrade to play with them. [a]: The energy usage is a byproduct of the proof-of-work system [b]: hence why things like Folding@home, SETI@home, etc. never gained massive popularity like coins did; they don’t reward you except in feel-good thoughts
- qeternity 5y ago
  > using GPUs creates a self serving cycle: Difficulty goes up, more GPUs are bought to counteract that, repeat. This isn’t helped my the monetary reward for doing so. Not quite. Price continues to go up, courtesy of Tether, which makes the mining rewards more valuable. This encourages new miners to join the network which pushes difficulty higher, until the difficulty level rises such that every unit of output costs more to produce than its worth. Then it's no longer profitable to mine. But again, Tether has no choice but to keep things pumping.
deleted 5y ago
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ErikVandeWater 5y ago

"Shortage" is a technical term to describe a situation where outside influence is preventing supply from meeting demand at the market clearing price. I do think crypto falls into this category, as well as numerous government policies (every tax creates a shortage).

dannyobrien 5y ago

Is there any evidence for this claim?

Tenoke 5y ago

BTC GPU mining hasn't been profitable for years. ETH GPU mining (the main one) has gotten way less profitable recently and is scheduled to not be a thing in 6 months to a year. The GPU demand for mining has already lessened in the last months and you can see decreased 2nd hand prices.. Every comment that blames BTC for chip shortages is likely largely incorrect and looking in the wrong place.

Hjfrf 5y ago
What do you think ASICs are made of?
- Tenoke 5y ago
  TSMC has Bitmain as a low-priority client, and the first one to be cut when demand is high like earlier this year[0]. Bitmain itself is having even bigger reduction in orders to TSMC currently[1] so again, that's the wrong place to look for increased chip demand. At any rate, I was mostly responding to claims about 'GPUs are profitable for mining' in the parent. 0. https://www.chinamoneynetwork.com/2021/03/05/tsmc-reportedly-limits-supply-to-bitcoin-mining-players-as-demand-surges-amid-crypto-frenzy https://www.chinamoneynetwork.com/2021/03/05/tsmc-reportedly... 1. https://techtaiwan.com/20210628/bitcoin-mining-rig-bitmain-tsmc/ https://techtaiwan.com/20210628/bitcoin-mining-rig-bitmain-t...
- serg_chernata 5y ago
  But is TSMC producing these ASIC chips?
  - Hjfrf 5y ago
    Yes, but more generally they use the same raw materials.

makotech222 5y ago

Yeah this is literally capitalism. Apply the same logic to housing: Its so sad that we are all paying the price for the commodification of housing; We have 10x homes for every single homeless person, and rent continues to skyrocket upward, all because we have a system where people are incentivized to buy houses so that they can rent them out for a profit. If only we decommodified housing, we could end homelessness and reduce cost of housing for everyone else.

pkulak 5y ago

Can we say "Bitcoin" when we're talking about Bitcoin and not lump all proof of stake and other very efficient systems in with proof of work coins?

alpineidyll3 5y ago

Don't forget the main advantage of mining over buying coin is to avoid all fiat associated regulations. So it's not just about slightly cheaper tokens, it's really about distributing the cost of tax evasion and money laundering.

deleted 5y ago

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dcow 5y ago

Is it tragedy of the commons, then? Once things settle, won’t people learn that adding 1 additional GPU only increases my cost by 1 and doesn't increase my reward? Can’t we design a system where the number of transactions processed scales with the compute power of the system rather than striving to always keeping block time constant?

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> This is yet another way we’re all forced to pay the price for cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has existed for more than a decade. This is yet another way we're all forced to pay the price for COVID-19. When everybody started working from home, companies whose employees had desktops had to buy them all laptops. People with old home computers bought newer ones once they started using them 14 hours a day instead of two. Demand went up. A bunch of car manufacturers thought the pandemic was going to crush demand for cars, so they canceled all their chip contracts. Then it didn't and they bid up the price of chips trying to source all the ones they canceled the contracts on. The primary cost of Bitcoin mining is the electricity, not the hardware. If there is more demand for hardware, the world can build more fabs. Assuming we're given some advance notice, which this year we haven't had because COVID-19. And the reason the electricity consumption is bad is that we don't have a carbon tax, so people are burning coal to mine Bitcoin, which is Very Bad. But it's also Very Bad that people are burning coal to power electric heaters or elevators or anything else, because the problem is burning coal. If people were mining Bitcoin by building wind turbines, nobody would care. It might even improve the world by increasing the economies of scale for renewable energy production.

f6v 5y ago
> Bitcoin has existed for more than a decade. But I haven't seen "buy bitcoin here" signs in the cities(that aren't tech hubs) until recently. Now people are randomly asking "what's the next big crypto?" trying to make quick money.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  People have been trying to make quick money since the invention of money. "The easiest way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one." It has nothing to do with Bitcoin energy consumption, which is only a real problem because we're not pricing carbon as we ought to be.
cwkoss 5y ago
Cryptomining incentivizes green energy investment

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

GPUs are not used to mine Bitcoin, they are used to mine Ethereum. Bitcoin is mined by different chips, also made by TSMC, but in far smaller quantities.

Taek 5y ago

Cryptocurrency chips are less than 5% of TSMCs total production, it's not the major driving force in the shortage.

machiaweliczny 5y ago

Yes, but efficiency is opposite of roboustness/resiliency.

babypuncher 5y ago
This is just plain untrue

anabis 5y ago

I am hoping that someone comes up with a semi-reusable proof-of-work system , like chess board positions, Mersenne primes, or protein folding. Kind of like Re-captcha.

zabatuvajdka 5y ago

Well Bitcoin will die anyway because Ethereum actually does something useful and they’re onto Proof of stake. Honestly folks should pull their money out and invest in something tangible like starting a business that ACTUALLY CREATES VALUE.

wskish 5y ago

There is an ugly feedback loop scenario where the crypto bubble accelerates inflation due to the high demand crypto places on energy and semiconductors and the proportion of global GDP downstream from energy and semi. Inflation then loops in more demand for crypto assets (as an inflation hedge) creating ugly feedback loop until governments act to break it.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

I agree that it is simply an excess of demand, the whole bitcoin rant though. Really? There is a demand for semiconductors that exceeds supply. You have made a leap that the current demand driver is bitcoin and its consumption of GPUS. As much as I appreciate the sentiment that Bitcoin is a waste, that leap doesn't hold up when you look at the actual numbers for semiconductor demand. The number one demand item for 7nm semiconductors is cell phones. If you read the various analysts reports you will find this sums it up well: It(demand) is mainly driven by the increasing demand for consumer electronics and the integration of semiconductor into several devices across sectors like automotive, industrial, communications, military, and others. (that is from this report[1] that for $2500 you too could read it (https://www.marketreportsworld.com/global-semiconductor-market-15660994 https://www.marketreportsworld.com/global-semiconductor-mark...)) During the pandemic it appears that everyone upgraded their TV (at least in the US) which, not surprisingly, consumes a lot of semi-conductors. The pandemic has also botched a lot of logistics which will sort itself out but these small bumps can cause unusually large ripples in the supply chain because so many industries are built around "just in time" delivery of raw materials. Semiconductor manufacturing is a process that is intolerant of frequent line starts/stops. So TSMC, knowing that new fabs cannot come online instantly, has chosen to risk alienating their customers a bit by raising prices to capture the value associated with their assets (productive plants) during this period. [1] To be clear, I didn't pony up the $2500, I looked at a number of sites that reported on the contents of the reports and pulled quotes from them. Market information is itself a market.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

> As long as GPUs are profitable for mining What crypto currencies are still profitable to mine with GPUs? Not bitcoin - mining btc went to ASICs long ago. Not Ether which is now POS.

polux33 5y ago
Ether is not POS yet.

jonathanpeterwu 5y ago

I highly doubt the chip shortage a la increased chip demand from a company perspective has to do with gaming/mining GPU demand. Much of the supply demand can be traced to increased car chip demand (Toyota cutting production by 40%) as well as general device chip demand across many sectors.

polux33 5y ago

What ? Those GPUs are being useful for securing a network hosting close to $100B of stablecoins. https://stablecoinindex.com/marketcap https://stablecoinindex.com/marketcap Not talking about other more volatile crypto as you'd be tempted to assert their values should be 0 in a perfect world. You can argue all day that's wasting energy, the crypto-ecosystem, chip manufacturers, miners, energy providers, users, developers, traders, bankers and companies driving billion of dollars of revenue (Aka value for human beings who will produce and consume goods in the real World with this revenue ) out of it are proving that you're missing the bigger picture. I've never understood HN's concerns with crypto. Following the same logic, people are literally burning petrol in their cars while it could be used for <insert supposedly better use case> Is it for ecological reasons ? You're still moving 2 tons of metal everywhere you go, and eating meat. Cryptos are not less moral or valuable than plenty of things you do or cherish. Let people mine crypto, eat meat at Wendy's driving their F150, because the world is not black and white.

exporectomy 5y ago

It's no fun before supply catches up with demand, but when it does, we'll be in a world that has higher chip production capacity and maybe some advances will come from all that extra money chip makers will be making. It seems more promising long term than, some under-produced stagnant technology like nuclear power plants.

ayngg 5y ago

The state of cryptocurrencies is nothing more than a visible symptom of larger systemic issues that have clearly gotten out of control. It would be much more beneficial to try and understand why the market has decided to consider it valuable in spite of everything you have said rather than just blame and dismiss it based on its impact. We aren't paying the price for cryptocurrency, we are paying the price for policy that has made cryptocurrency attractive.

fukmbas 5y ago
Yeah exactly. It's not going anywhere at this point and only becomes more attractive to lazy investors