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I have no idea how much of the chip supply is soaked by cryptos, but I have a feeling the pop is going to be ugly
by nikanj 5y ago
I have no idea how much of the chip supply is soaked by cryptos, but I have a feeling the pop is going to be ugly
- wyager 5y agoOne upside of Bitcoin style mining is that its mining chips can't be used for anything else (no GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs, or SSDs used for Bitcoin mining - only special SHA256 ASICs), so it doesn't have much effect on the supply of semiconductors outside of a small number of older foundries allocating some capacity to BTC chips. Other projects like Ethereum intentionally used GPU-optimized mining algorithms, with the idea that this would help decentralization (which hasn't really worked for various reasons).
- bcrl 5y agoBitcoin ASICs are hardly on older process nodes. Intel's just announced chips are using their 7nm process, Bitmain is on TSMC 7nm and 5nm, while Microbit is on Samsung's 8nm.