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This seems like a temporary problem given the difficulty adjusts? https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoins-sinking-price-pushes-hashrate-below-200-exahash-mining-diffi

This seems like a temporary problem given the difficulty adjusts? https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoins-sinking-price-pushes-hashrate-below-200-exahash-mining-difficulty-expected-to-slide-2-8-lower/ https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoins-sinking-price-pushes-hashr...

mlyle 4y ago
It's a market. As bitcoin goes down, amount supplied of mining/hashing goes down. Difficulty adjusts downward which shifts the supply curve a little, but nowhere near enough to make it worth it to all the miners who mined before. A few percent change in difficulty doesn't make a 50% drop in bitcoin all better.
DeathArrow 4y ago
The used market is flooded with ASICS and GPUs so it seems the adjustment isn't working well. Also, many large miners didn't sell their coins and instead they borrowed real money to expand and fund their new mining operations. As the interest rates are climbing and crypto prices are going down, that's not possible any more.
- RL_Quine 4y ago
  Nobody has used a GPU to mine Bitcoin in a decade now.
  - sumy23 4y ago
    GPUs are used for eth. There is clearly a broad downturn in the mining sector.
    - RL_Quine 4y ago
      Ethereum is mostly mined using custom hardware, it's not graphics cards really, certainly nothing you could re-sell to anybody who expects to play Bioshock or whatever. Very small operations are people buying and using actual consumer GPUs, but they tend to be absolutely destroyed by the process and then sold to unwitting buyers. I've sorted through literal milk crates of GPUs before to find a single one which could reliably display a video output after they had been used in a mining operation.
      - latchkey 4y ago
        > Ethereum is mostly mined using custom hardware Very large ETH miner here, we use GPUs. Mostly 4-5 year old tech too. Unlike BTC, ETH does not require the latest hardware because the algo, ethash, is memory bound. This is a great explainer [1]. You may be implying that the majority of the network is custom ASICs. I doubt it is more than about 30%, if that. Come august, all the ones with 5gb of ram will also disappear off the network because of DAG growth. GPUs are also not destroyed by using them. I've got GPUs sitting in the worst possible conditions, running just fine for many years now. We have started to change the thermal paste on the hot ones though... it dries out. I don't know what you were dealing with, but that sounds like something else caused the failures as the chips themselves don't wear out like that. [1] https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memory-hardness-explained https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor...
        RL_Quine 4y ago
        It does absolutely destroy the hardware through, even very early mining farms had the sole issue of the fans in the cards burning through their bearings. A local electronics recycler had an entire crate of burned out ATX PSUs from some local mining operation, every single one of them had the fan melted off the hub. It's worth being aware that all silicon chips are temporary anyway, they all die to electron migration eventually.
        latchkey 4y ago
        I don't have fans on my cards. PSUs are generally shit (hand soldered) and that's not what we are talking about here.
        dropnerd 4y ago
        do most miners choose to run cards without fans because of known issues?
        latchkey 4y ago
  - bradknowles 4y ago
    Not in bulk, no. But I'm sure there's at least a few people playing around with it on GPUs.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      That's like saying people mine BTC with pencil and paper [1]. [1] http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.html http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and...
      - bradknowles 4y ago
        Not at all. It's people who want to play around with the technology, but can't afford FPGAs or ASICS to do the job. Or maybe they could afford FPGAs or ASICS, but they want to be able to see more of what's going on behind the curtain. Not a huge number of people, no. But then a lot of services on the Internet have a long tail.
        thaumasiotes 4y ago
        But from what you describe, it's an open question whether anyone has used a GPU to mine bitcoin in the last ten years, as opposed to just setting a GPU to work on the kinds of problems involved in mining bitcoin. If you never mine any bitcoin, are your tools being used to mine bitcoin?
        bradknowles 4y ago
        The bitcoin market is big enough, and there are enough places where power is free and the hardware is already paid for, that I am quite certain there's at least a few people still mining bitcoin today on GPUs. Then there's the educational market, where it's less important that people mine bitcoin to earn money, and more about learning how bitcoin works by actually running the code. So, no -- I don't think that's actually an open question at all. I don't have any proof, but then neither do you. And all I'd have to do to create my proof would be to spin up my own machine with a GPU and use it to mine bitcoin for a while. Maybe on a free AWS account or something. Not that I'd actually do that, but it would be possible.
  - _0w8t 4y ago
    In Norway until recently the electricity was cheap. So many apartments and even houses in suburbs use resistive heating as installing heat pumps was not profitable. But then in winter one can just mine crypto coins on GPU for free to heat the home. Granted the wast majority of miners work on alt coins but some do try their luck with bitcoins.
    - TomSwirly 4y ago
      Stealing from society and burning fossil fuels in order to profit yourself. It's disgusting.
      - rag-hav 4y ago
        How are they stealing from soceity?
      - icoder 4y ago
        This is achtually the nichest of niches where mining bitcoin is not stealing from Society: the existing alternative resisting heating, would produce as much heat per watt as mining bitcoin would. Sure, there's the question of using the hardware for this purpose, and possibly this dampens the transition to heat pumps, but it's the 'least immoral' mining situation I've heard of so far.
      - kzrdude 4y ago
        Norwegian power production is to 90%+ hydro power. Norway is under the NO column in this table. https://www.statnett.no/en/for-stakeholders-in-the-power-industry/data-from-the-power-system/#nordic-power-balance https://www.statnett.no/en/for-stakeholders-in-the-power-ind...
      - mahkeiro 4y ago
        It's not in Norway that they are burning fuel to produce electricity…
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- viraptor 4y ago
  The selling also has its own "difficulty adjustment". The miners who managed to sell their extra hardware early at the inflated prices made a good decision. Now that you can buy GPUs at below msrp again, there won't be a many exits.
- jimmydorry 4y ago
  The difficulty adjustment is deliberately slow (once every 2016 blocks) to prevent volatility in block hardness. That the hash rate is not dropping off a cliff over the last 6 months is testament to that. https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty
  - RL_Quine 4y ago
    > to prevent volatility in block hardness Kind of, it's to prevent an attack where nodes could be isolated and then duped to believe that the network difficulty is substantially lower than it should be. If we adjusted difficulty with every block (some altcoins do this), we could simply disrupt your connection to the network, wait until you would accept a block with a very low difficulty because 8 hours have passed with no blocks, and then mine that.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      ETH adjusts every block. Your attack scenario is inaccurate. There is no single point of disruption to be had.
    - rrrrro 4y ago
      The block difficulty is calculated from the time between previous blocks. The time since you last received a block is not taken into account. Because not everyone clock is exactly the same, you could end up with different difficulties.
      - RL_Quine 4y ago
        No, some altcoins actually do adjust like this to prevent their networks being "stuck" at a high difficulty.
    - AndrewDucker 4y ago
      You'd only get the isolated nodes to accept that block though, most nodes would reject it. So I'm not sure what you'd gain.
foepys 4y ago
Many miners are currently finding themselves in an interesting situation. Money was cheap. So if a miner thought that their cryptocurrency was going "to the moon", it was better to borrow money at low interest rates and stash the CC away for later. Now that interest rates are increasing and the CC market is crashing, they cannot offload their CC quickly to cover their (future) costs and payments on their loans.
- wruza 4y ago
  Is that true? Mining business has mostly fiat-based balance, and one doesn’t simply mix currencies in a business without hedging. I mean it is plausible that people could leave profits in crypto, but that’s just an intersection of a businessman and a crazy tothemooner.

mlyle 4y ago

It's a market. As bitcoin goes down, amount supplied of mining/hashing goes down. Difficulty adjusts downward which shifts the supply curve a little, but nowhere near enough to make it worth it to all the miners who mined before. A few percent change in difficulty doesn't make a 50% drop in bitcoin all better.

DeathArrow 4y ago

The used market is flooded with ASICS and GPUs so it seems the adjustment isn't working well. Also, many large miners didn't sell their coins and instead they borrowed real money to expand and fund their new mining operations. As the interest rates are climbing and crypto prices are going down, that's not possible any more.

RL_Quine 4y ago
Nobody has used a GPU to mine Bitcoin in a decade now.
- sumy23 4y ago
  GPUs are used for eth. There is clearly a broad downturn in the mining sector.
  - RL_Quine 4y ago
    Ethereum is mostly mined using custom hardware, it's not graphics cards really, certainly nothing you could re-sell to anybody who expects to play Bioshock or whatever. Very small operations are people buying and using actual consumer GPUs, but they tend to be absolutely destroyed by the process and then sold to unwitting buyers. I've sorted through literal milk crates of GPUs before to find a single one which could reliably display a video output after they had been used in a mining operation.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      > Ethereum is mostly mined using custom hardware Very large ETH miner here, we use GPUs. Mostly 4-5 year old tech too. Unlike BTC, ETH does not require the latest hardware because the algo, ethash, is memory bound. This is a great explainer [1]. You may be implying that the majority of the network is custom ASICs. I doubt it is more than about 30%, if that. Come august, all the ones with 5gb of ram will also disappear off the network because of DAG growth. GPUs are also not destroyed by using them. I've got GPUs sitting in the worst possible conditions, running just fine for many years now. We have started to change the thermal paste on the hot ones though... it dries out. I don't know what you were dealing with, but that sounds like something else caused the failures as the chips themselves don't wear out like that. [1] https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memory-hardness-explained https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor...
      - RL_Quine 4y ago
        It does absolutely destroy the hardware through, even very early mining farms had the sole issue of the fans in the cards burning through their bearings. A local electronics recycler had an entire crate of burned out ATX PSUs from some local mining operation, every single one of them had the fan melted off the hub. It's worth being aware that all silicon chips are temporary anyway, they all die to electron migration eventually.
        latchkey 4y ago
        I don't have fans on my cards. PSUs are generally shit (hand soldered) and that's not what we are talking about here.
        dropnerd 4y ago
        do most miners choose to run cards without fans because of known issues?
        latchkey 4y ago
- bradknowles 4y ago
  Not in bulk, no. But I'm sure there's at least a few people playing around with it on GPUs.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    That's like saying people mine BTC with pencil and paper [1]. [1] http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.html http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and...
    - bradknowles 4y ago
      Not at all. It's people who want to play around with the technology, but can't afford FPGAs or ASICS to do the job. Or maybe they could afford FPGAs or ASICS, but they want to be able to see more of what's going on behind the curtain. Not a huge number of people, no. But then a lot of services on the Internet have a long tail.
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        But from what you describe, it's an open question whether anyone has used a GPU to mine bitcoin in the last ten years, as opposed to just setting a GPU to work on the kinds of problems involved in mining bitcoin. If you never mine any bitcoin, are your tools being used to mine bitcoin?
        bradknowles 4y ago
        The bitcoin market is big enough, and there are enough places where power is free and the hardware is already paid for, that I am quite certain there's at least a few people still mining bitcoin today on GPUs. Then there's the educational market, where it's less important that people mine bitcoin to earn money, and more about learning how bitcoin works by actually running the code. So, no -- I don't think that's actually an open question at all. I don't have any proof, but then neither do you. And all I'd have to do to create my proof would be to spin up my own machine with a GPU and use it to mine bitcoin for a while. Maybe on a free AWS account or something. Not that I'd actually do that, but it would be possible.
- _0w8t 4y ago
  In Norway until recently the electricity was cheap. So many apartments and even houses in suburbs use resistive heating as installing heat pumps was not profitable. But then in winter one can just mine crypto coins on GPU for free to heat the home. Granted the wast majority of miners work on alt coins but some do try their luck with bitcoins.
  - TomSwirly 4y ago
    Stealing from society and burning fossil fuels in order to profit yourself. It's disgusting.
    - rag-hav 4y ago
      How are they stealing from soceity?
    - icoder 4y ago
      This is achtually the nichest of niches where mining bitcoin is not stealing from Society: the existing alternative resisting heating, would produce as much heat per watt as mining bitcoin would. Sure, there's the question of using the hardware for this purpose, and possibly this dampens the transition to heat pumps, but it's the 'least immoral' mining situation I've heard of so far.
    - kzrdude 4y ago
      Norwegian power production is to 90%+ hydro power. Norway is under the NO column in this table. https://www.statnett.no/en/for-stakeholders-in-the-power-industry/data-from-the-power-system/#nordic-power-balance https://www.statnett.no/en/for-stakeholders-in-the-power-ind...
    - mahkeiro 4y ago
      It's not in Norway that they are burning fuel to produce electricity…
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
viraptor 4y ago
The selling also has its own "difficulty adjustment". The miners who managed to sell their extra hardware early at the inflated prices made a good decision. Now that you can buy GPUs at below msrp again, there won't be a many exits.
jimmydorry 4y ago
The difficulty adjustment is deliberately slow (once every 2016 blocks) to prevent volatility in block hardness. That the hash rate is not dropping off a cliff over the last 6 months is testament to that. https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty
- RL_Quine 4y ago
  > to prevent volatility in block hardness Kind of, it's to prevent an attack where nodes could be isolated and then duped to believe that the network difficulty is substantially lower than it should be. If we adjusted difficulty with every block (some altcoins do this), we could simply disrupt your connection to the network, wait until you would accept a block with a very low difficulty because 8 hours have passed with no blocks, and then mine that.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    ETH adjusts every block. Your attack scenario is inaccurate. There is no single point of disruption to be had.
  - rrrrro 4y ago
    The block difficulty is calculated from the time between previous blocks. The time since you last received a block is not taken into account. Because not everyone clock is exactly the same, you could end up with different difficulties.
    - RL_Quine 4y ago
      No, some altcoins actually do adjust like this to prevent their networks being "stuck" at a high difficulty.
  - AndrewDucker 4y ago
    You'd only get the isolated nodes to accept that block though, most nodes would reject it. So I'm not sure what you'd gain.

foepys 4y ago

Many miners are currently finding themselves in an interesting situation. Money was cheap. So if a miner thought that their cryptocurrency was going "to the moon", it was better to borrow money at low interest rates and stash the CC away for later. Now that interest rates are increasing and the CC market is crashing, they cannot offload their CC quickly to cover their (future) costs and payments on their loans.

wruza 4y ago
Is that true? Mining business has mostly fiat-based balance, and one doesn’t simply mix currencies in a business without hedging. I mean it is plausible that people could leave profits in crypto, but that’s just an intersection of a businessman and a crazy tothemooner.