26 ms·

I remember I was short the stock via puts quite a bit and they kept saying crypto was 5% of the business which I knew was a lie. It turned out great for me. Fas

by lvl102 4y ago

I remember I was short the stock via puts quite a bit and they kept saying crypto was 5% of the business which I knew was a lie. It turned out great for me. Fast forward to 2022, you see how much of the GPU “shortage” was due to crypto mining especially in Russia (there are enough anecdotes of people in Siberia heating their kitchens with GPUs).

daniel-cussen 4y ago
Right so using waste heat that way is more ecological.
- wffurr 4y ago
  If only the computing hardware generating that waste heat was doing something useful like serving funny cat pictures.
- IAmEveryone 4y ago
  I have some doubts that any significant amount of cryptomining is actually done in Siberia. Part of that would include a few questions of the definition of “Siberia”, a deep examination (i. e. a suggestion to google) people’s ideas of the weather condition at that hypothetical place, and maybe a comparison of efficiency of heating a typical rural Russian home with coal vs. burning coal to generate electricity to run GPUs, after transmission over sowjet-era grids. Considering how cryptocurrencies seem to attract the get-rich-quick crowd, it’s impressive to see the levels of motivated reasoning they are capable of, since neither motivation nor reasoning alone seem to be among their usual strengths.
- varenc 4y ago
  If and only if you would have used electrical heating anyway, then using a GPU's waste heat for heating your home is one of the best things you can do with it and it's "100% efficient". That is, 100% of all the energy your GPU consumes also ends up as heat in your house and it's thermodynamically equivalent to any other type of resistive electric heater. Of course, the energy consumed by any even semi-serious mining operation far exceeds a home's heating needs.
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    However, resistive heating is 3-4 times less efficient then ground/air source heating, so if your actual aim is to heat the house, you can do a lot better[1]. It's just better, if you're generating heat anyway, to also use the waste heat than to dump it outside. [1] YMMV in permafrost regions, and the hardware is too expensive for many people.
    - vehementi 4y ago
      Not really a "however", that was the origin of the "If and only if"
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    They do use little electric heaters some of the time. And there's smaller mining operations, the economies of scale aren't that great, more the difficulty of finding GPUs. You can lend it to neighbors and give them a cut of the proceeds, you could do the whole town. So in fact ordinary mining operations waste the heat, this would not. Plus power there is cheap, I would guess nuclear.
    - alisonkisk 4y ago
      How can you lend your miner to a neighbor for heat? You all need heat at exactly the same time. Are you going to move the rig to a different home every hour?
      - daniel-cussen 4y ago
        Well right, you can't. Very good point. But perhaps you have guests for a month and when they leave they have guests, that means more of the house has to be heated instead of sealed off. I've seen that in huge houses.
    - daniel-cussen 4y ago
      I want to answer the other poster who shows up dead: how can you lend a miner? Like lending a little heater. Like lending a cow, one guy needs milk the other wants the meat and hide. So if you already have all the electrical heat you really need for your house but want to mine more, you won't benefit from more heat for your own house. Whereas maybe across the street a neighbor is still using little electrical heaters a lot, doesn't understand crypto very well. So they work something out, the neighbor gets heat, pays the electric bill, and gets a cut of the mining, and the original miner provides the GPU through his contacts and gets a share too. So that way the heat doesn't go to waste, and the miner can scale.
- xxs 4y ago
  Except using heat pumps is a lot more efficient than resistive heating... and/or adding a proper insulation.
  - lkbm 4y ago
    Sure, but what % of heating is just natural gas furnaces? We should evaluate things against what the actual, real world alternative would be, not just against the best possible world. (That said, I should acknowledge that a large part of that electricity comes from burning natural gas at an efficiency loss, so resistive heating is still worse than the natural gas furnace.)
    - freemint 4y ago
      Heat pump based heating from burned natural gas is better than burning natural gas for heating though.
      - nkurz 4y ago
        Here in the US, I don't think these are in common use. At least, I've never seen one in person. Are they used much wherever you are? They do seem like an interesting idea. Here's a US Dept of Energy page about them: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/absorption-heat-pumps https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/absorption-heat-pumps
        freemint 4y ago
        From what i have heard it varies a lot on a state by state basis. I suppressed my urge to look up heat pump statistics because frankly i should work on more important things. Just uhhmmm please don't act like i am supposed to research for you unpaid. I might fall for it and hate myself for it later.
        Loughla 4y ago
        Depends on where you live. The rural area where I am have a nearly 100% install of heat pump or geothermal units on any and all new builds.
- kimburgess 4y ago
  See: https://blog.qarnot.com/introducing-the-qc-1-crypto-heater/ https://blog.qarnot.com/introducing-the-qc-1-crypto-heater/ (2018) Such a beautiful idea, if only the computation was actually useful.
  - px43 4y ago
    It's useful for the millions of people who participate every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy, but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't directly benefit you personally must be "useless". Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work, especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS, etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth. Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it. Proof of Stake can work alright in certain market conditions, but those didn't exist on any blockchain until relatively recently. Look at the utter chaos going on with Terra validators. The validating token goes to approximately zero, so bad actors can cheaply buy up the staking asset and hijack validation, further destabilizing the network, allowing the next attackers to buy in even cheaper. It's a hard problem, and Satoshi's solution is an incredibly elegant one. If you've got a better idea than PoW, then do share. Whoever figures it out stands to make billions of dollars. You should know that it's mostly considered to be a solved problem at this point, and nearly everyone has moved on to other hard problems in the space.
    - Feritiuuu 4y ago
      For most people the affects of climate change costs more and have higher impact than what crypto provides. Better solution: PoS. Do you know who is using already a highly tuned modern fast currency system based on PoS? You do. I do. Everyone else does. It's called us dollar, euro and other stable fiats. And yes inflation problem doesn't go away just because you use Bitcoin.
    - Kbelicius 4y ago
      > It's useful for the millions of people who participate every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy, but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't directly benefit you personally must be "useless". The calculation itself, once removed from bitcoin ecosystem, is quite useless. > Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work, especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS, etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth. How is "find the nonce" PoW better for democracy than "fold proteins" or "find a chain of primes" PoW? In what way does calculating primes or folding proteins require global registry of every human on earth? > Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it. What about internet and expensive hardware, don't you need those also? What would you need besides those to do "fold protein" or "find chain of primes" PoW.
legutierr 4y ago
> there are enough anecdotes of people in Siberia heating their kitchens with GPUs Hey, all you blockchain skeptics, here’s what you are always asking about: a practical use for blockchain tech.
- co_dh 4y ago
  Is this the reason of global warming?
  - Y-bar 4y ago
    The Russian energy grid doesn't really have a reputation for being carbon neutral...
    - peterpost2 4y ago
      Don't they have more nuclear poweplants than most places in the west?
      - lkbm 4y ago
        Might be more, but it's still a minority of their grid. Wikipedia has a graph for 2016: 18.1% nuclear, 47.9% natural gas, and 15.7% coal.[0] "Energy Matters" says that EU energy production was 26% nuclear in 2015, but only 12% for consumption[1], so I'm not sure how to look at that comparison. Either way, that's probably mostly France (~80%[2]). US around 8-9%[1]. TL;DR: Yes, most western countries probably have less nuclear, but it's a low bar. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Russia#Mode_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Russia#M... [1] http://euanmearns.com/primary-energy-in-the-european-union-and-usa-compared/ http://euanmearns.com/primary-energy-in-the-european-union-a... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#Mode_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#M...
      - hwillis 4y ago
        Russian nuclear is ~17% (compare US at 19%). Overall it is slightly less CO2-intensive than the US, as it uses less coal. They have almost as much hydroelectric power as the entire US renewable sector.
paganel 4y ago
> due to crypto mining especially in Russia When the war started in neighbouring Ukraine (I live in Romania) the local market started seeing graphics cards again which, previously, had been marked by local official resellers as "not in stock for the near future". This is for business procurement, so not even retail.
- vkou 4y ago
  Card supply/demand delta has already been slowly easing up over the months leading up to the war.
px43 4y ago
Do you think it's more than 5%? Maybe it is, but it seems like every place that offers GPU rental services (Amazon, Vast, etc) they are being used almost exclusively for machine learning applications. The rate they can be rented out is 3-4 times higher than would be profitable for any cryptocurrency mining, which should be a pretty solid indicator of where the demand is actually coming from. I know I'm in the minority, but my GPUs are used almost exclusively for password cracking. I've got ASICs for the crypto mining.
- lvl102 4y ago
  I think the overall impact of crypto is 30-35% of their business.
- rytill 4y ago
  What software do you use for GPU password cracking? Custom? And for what purpose?
  - gaspard234 4y ago
    I worked at a security consulting firm that had an 8 GPU password cracking rig. Teams would be able to send it hashes obtained during assessments/red teams and try to discover passwords. I was not doing that type of work so I'm not sure what type of software was used but I think it had multiple open source programs available.
  - h4waii 4y ago
    hashcat.
  - px43 4y ago
    Like others said, hashcat. Doing pentest/red team stuff, you quite often stumble across password hashes that can do some pretty cool stuff if you can crack them. Did you know that if you're on a Windows network, random machines all around you will just try to authenticate to you, and disclose the hash of the user on the system? Plug in on a Ethernet jack in the lobby, or conference room, get onto the wifi, compromise any machine on the network and run responder or inveigh, and you just get dumps of user passwords, and if you can crack any of them, its a pretty quick path up to Domain Admin on the network, which then can dump everyone's hashes.
thesausageking 4y ago
If, at the time, you had bought the stock instead of shorting and held onto it, you'd be up 64% today.
- lvl102 4y ago
  I made something like 100x on that trade so I think I did OK.

by lvl102 4y ago

daniel-cussen 4y ago

Right so using waste heat that way is more ecological.

wffurr 4y ago
If only the computing hardware generating that waste heat was doing something useful like serving funny cat pictures.
IAmEveryone 4y ago
I have some doubts that any significant amount of cryptomining is actually done in Siberia. Part of that would include a few questions of the definition of “Siberia”, a deep examination (i. e. a suggestion to google) people’s ideas of the weather condition at that hypothetical place, and maybe a comparison of efficiency of heating a typical rural Russian home with coal vs. burning coal to generate electricity to run GPUs, after transmission over sowjet-era grids. Considering how cryptocurrencies seem to attract the get-rich-quick crowd, it’s impressive to see the levels of motivated reasoning they are capable of, since neither motivation nor reasoning alone seem to be among their usual strengths.
varenc 4y ago
If and only if you would have used electrical heating anyway, then using a GPU's waste heat for heating your home is one of the best things you can do with it and it's "100% efficient". That is, 100% of all the energy your GPU consumes also ends up as heat in your house and it's thermodynamically equivalent to any other type of resistive electric heater. Of course, the energy consumed by any even semi-serious mining operation far exceeds a home's heating needs.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  However, resistive heating is 3-4 times less efficient then ground/air source heating, so if your actual aim is to heat the house, you can do a lot better[1]. It's just better, if you're generating heat anyway, to also use the waste heat than to dump it outside. [1] YMMV in permafrost regions, and the hardware is too expensive for many people.
  - vehementi 4y ago
    Not really a "however", that was the origin of the "If and only if"
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  They do use little electric heaters some of the time. And there's smaller mining operations, the economies of scale aren't that great, more the difficulty of finding GPUs. You can lend it to neighbors and give them a cut of the proceeds, you could do the whole town. So in fact ordinary mining operations waste the heat, this would not. Plus power there is cheap, I would guess nuclear.
  - alisonkisk 4y ago
    How can you lend your miner to a neighbor for heat? You all need heat at exactly the same time. Are you going to move the rig to a different home every hour?
    - daniel-cussen 4y ago
      Well right, you can't. Very good point. But perhaps you have guests for a month and when they leave they have guests, that means more of the house has to be heated instead of sealed off. I've seen that in huge houses.
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    I want to answer the other poster who shows up dead: how can you lend a miner? Like lending a little heater. Like lending a cow, one guy needs milk the other wants the meat and hide. So if you already have all the electrical heat you really need for your house but want to mine more, you won't benefit from more heat for your own house. Whereas maybe across the street a neighbor is still using little electrical heaters a lot, doesn't understand crypto very well. So they work something out, the neighbor gets heat, pays the electric bill, and gets a cut of the mining, and the original miner provides the GPU through his contacts and gets a share too. So that way the heat doesn't go to waste, and the miner can scale.
xxs 4y ago
Except using heat pumps is a lot more efficient than resistive heating... and/or adding a proper insulation.
- lkbm 4y ago
  Sure, but what % of heating is just natural gas furnaces? We should evaluate things against what the actual, real world alternative would be, not just against the best possible world. (That said, I should acknowledge that a large part of that electricity comes from burning natural gas at an efficiency loss, so resistive heating is still worse than the natural gas furnace.)
  - freemint 4y ago
    Heat pump based heating from burned natural gas is better than burning natural gas for heating though.
    - nkurz 4y ago
      Here in the US, I don't think these are in common use. At least, I've never seen one in person. Are they used much wherever you are? They do seem like an interesting idea. Here's a US Dept of Energy page about them: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/absorption-heat-pumps https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/absorption-heat-pumps
      - freemint 4y ago
        From what i have heard it varies a lot on a state by state basis. I suppressed my urge to look up heat pump statistics because frankly i should work on more important things. Just uhhmmm please don't act like i am supposed to research for you unpaid. I might fall for it and hate myself for it later.
      - Loughla 4y ago
        Depends on where you live. The rural area where I am have a nearly 100% install of heat pump or geothermal units on any and all new builds.
kimburgess 4y ago
See: https://blog.qarnot.com/introducing-the-qc-1-crypto-heater/ https://blog.qarnot.com/introducing-the-qc-1-crypto-heater/ (2018) Such a beautiful idea, if only the computation was actually useful.
- px43 4y ago
  It's useful for the millions of people who participate every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy, but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't directly benefit you personally must be "useless". Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work, especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS, etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth. Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it. Proof of Stake can work alright in certain market conditions, but those didn't exist on any blockchain until relatively recently. Look at the utter chaos going on with Terra validators. The validating token goes to approximately zero, so bad actors can cheaply buy up the staking asset and hijack validation, further destabilizing the network, allowing the next attackers to buy in even cheaper. It's a hard problem, and Satoshi's solution is an incredibly elegant one. If you've got a better idea than PoW, then do share. Whoever figures it out stands to make billions of dollars. You should know that it's mostly considered to be a solved problem at this point, and nearly everyone has moved on to other hard problems in the space.
  - Feritiuuu 4y ago
    For most people the affects of climate change costs more and have higher impact than what crypto provides. Better solution: PoS. Do you know who is using already a highly tuned modern fast currency system based on PoS? You do. I do. Everyone else does. It's called us dollar, euro and other stable fiats. And yes inflation problem doesn't go away just because you use Bitcoin.
  - Kbelicius 4y ago
    > It's useful for the millions of people who participate every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy, but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't directly benefit you personally must be "useless". The calculation itself, once removed from bitcoin ecosystem, is quite useless. > Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work, especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS, etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that doesn't require some global registry of every human on earth. How is "find the nonce" PoW better for democracy than "fold proteins" or "find a chain of primes" PoW? In what way does calculating primes or folding proteins require global registry of every human on earth? > Anyone with access to electricity can participate in ensuring the global security of the network, and be fairly compensated for it. What about internet and expensive hardware, don't you need those also? What would you need besides those to do "fold protein" or "find chain of primes" PoW.

legutierr 4y ago

> there are enough anecdotes of people in Siberia heating their kitchens with GPUs Hey, all you blockchain skeptics, here’s what you are always asking about: a practical use for blockchain tech.

co_dh 4y ago
Is this the reason of global warming?
- Y-bar 4y ago
  The Russian energy grid doesn't really have a reputation for being carbon neutral...
  - peterpost2 4y ago
    Don't they have more nuclear poweplants than most places in the west?
    - lkbm 4y ago
      Might be more, but it's still a minority of their grid. Wikipedia has a graph for 2016: 18.1% nuclear, 47.9% natural gas, and 15.7% coal.[0] "Energy Matters" says that EU energy production was 26% nuclear in 2015, but only 12% for consumption[1], so I'm not sure how to look at that comparison. Either way, that's probably mostly France (~80%[2]). US around 8-9%[1]. TL;DR: Yes, most western countries probably have less nuclear, but it's a low bar. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Russia#Mode_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Russia#M... [1] http://euanmearns.com/primary-energy-in-the-european-union-and-usa-compared/ http://euanmearns.com/primary-energy-in-the-european-union-a... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#Mode_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#M...
    - hwillis 4y ago
      Russian nuclear is ~17% (compare US at 19%). Overall it is slightly less CO2-intensive than the US, as it uses less coal. They have almost as much hydroelectric power as the entire US renewable sector.

paganel 4y ago

> due to crypto mining especially in Russia When the war started in neighbouring Ukraine (I live in Romania) the local market started seeing graphics cards again which, previously, had been marked by local official resellers as "not in stock for the near future". This is for business procurement, so not even retail.

vkou 4y ago
Card supply/demand delta has already been slowly easing up over the months leading up to the war.

px43 4y ago

Do you think it's more than 5%? Maybe it is, but it seems like every place that offers GPU rental services (Amazon, Vast, etc) they are being used almost exclusively for machine learning applications. The rate they can be rented out is 3-4 times higher than would be profitable for any cryptocurrency mining, which should be a pretty solid indicator of where the demand is actually coming from. I know I'm in the minority, but my GPUs are used almost exclusively for password cracking. I've got ASICs for the crypto mining.

lvl102 4y ago
I think the overall impact of crypto is 30-35% of their business.
rytill 4y ago
What software do you use for GPU password cracking? Custom? And for what purpose?
- gaspard234 4y ago
  I worked at a security consulting firm that had an 8 GPU password cracking rig. Teams would be able to send it hashes obtained during assessments/red teams and try to discover passwords. I was not doing that type of work so I'm not sure what type of software was used but I think it had multiple open source programs available.
- h4waii 4y ago
  hashcat.
- px43 4y ago
  Like others said, hashcat. Doing pentest/red team stuff, you quite often stumble across password hashes that can do some pretty cool stuff if you can crack them. Did you know that if you're on a Windows network, random machines all around you will just try to authenticate to you, and disclose the hash of the user on the system? Plug in on a Ethernet jack in the lobby, or conference room, get onto the wifi, compromise any machine on the network and run responder or inveigh, and you just get dumps of user passwords, and if you can crack any of them, its a pretty quick path up to Domain Admin on the network, which then can dump everyone's hashes.

thesausageking 4y ago

If, at the time, you had bought the stock instead of shorting and held onto it, you'd be up 64% today.

lvl102 4y ago
I made something like 100x on that trade so I think I did OK.