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GPU mining no longer profitable after Ethereum merge
- pengaru 4y agoDoes this mean the Monero/XMR network is about to explode in size?
- stiltzkin 4y agoMonero works with CPU mining.
- pengaru 4y agoYou're not wrong but it's far far more productive on the GPU. If you're willing to burn your CPU on mining XMR, you may as well add GPU(s) to that host and light them up as well. Is that no longer the case? It has been a couple years since I dabbled in mining XMR, that was definitely the case then.
- v64 4y ago> Is that no longer the case? Correct. The mining algorithm has been changed to be inefficient on GPUs and ASICs. https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/randomx.html https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/randomx.html
- pengaru 4y agoInteresting! I didn't know, thanks for the info.
- m4jor 4y agoYou can still get paid to crack hashes :)
- geekinchief 4y agoIt would take at least 20 years for you to break even on the cost of a graphics card. Expect to see a lot of used cards on eBay.
- ddevault 4y agoA lot of heavily used cards, which were run at 100% load 24/7 for who knows how long. What a deal.
- belval 4y agoMost "professional" miners were actually undervolting to keep the power consumption down so it's really not that bad as long as the price is right. Anecdata but, 3 years ago I got an old mining RX 580 4GB for ~120 CAD (about a $100). That card can run almost everything at 1080p and has been used a lot ever since.
- latchkey 4y agoI've got over 100,000 of those RX470,480,570,580 8gb cards running for 24/7 years. It is a total farce that they go bad over time. Not only were ours undervolted, but also individually tuned for best performance/watt. A very difficult thing to do at my scale since the failure mode is a full machine crash. Only thing that really degrades is the paste on the heatsink and that's fairly easy to fix.
- generj 4y agoThank goodness. Hopefully they aren’t able to grift another coin up enough to be worth mining.
- yieldcrv 4y agoIf enough GPU miners stop, it becomes profitable for other GPU miners to mine. Fortunately that's currently 90% fewer GPU miners at the moment, across the whole sector.
- BuckRogers 4y agoThat's a good outcome. We'd still be in a situation with so many fewer miners that GPU prices aren't influenced as they have been. The investment becomes risky as it'll always be teetering on the edge. I'm finally looking forward to a new GPU to pair with this 11900K.
- f38zf5vdt 4y agoDidn't this already happen several times in the history of cryptocurrency? Then GPUs because scarce again when the price of them goes up.
- velmu 4y agoYes. Nothing unique.
- yieldcrv 4y agoyes and it will happen again! the 2020 cycle was a triple whammy though 1) semiconductor and supply chain shock 2) cryptocurrencies zooming in price and profitability again 3) cryptocurrencies actually being used. in all prior cycles, blockchains were empty (although people got a glimpse of what congestion would be like, during the 2017 cycle). miners earned the subsidy made for people to show up at all. miners are also privy to a cut of transactions that occur, but this was close to 1% of the subsidy. in the 2020 cycle it was 250% on top of the subsidy, frequently, and way more than that as blocks were full. All mining calculators were wrong because they only show the predictable subsidy and not a forecast based on an average, but miners learned how profitable it was. Automated Market Makers (Uniswap code and classes) and Automated Lending (Compound) were 2020 cycles killer apps built on top of 2017’s killer app of ERC20 tokens. Followed by NFT’s and their marketplaces. Other chains secured by GPUs will get this activity, periodically.
- downrightmike 4y agoHead to the Winchester, grab a pint and wait for those GPU prices to come down
- serg_chernata 4y agoLove the reference. On a more serious note I'm really curious how this will play out. Nvidia seems to be doing it's best to prop up the prices of existing models as it prepares to launch the 4k series. The big question seems to be whether most of these miners will start mining some other token or get out of gpu mining entirely.
- aosmith 4y agoIf the card has cuda support I would guess they're off to some sort of p2p AI / ML marketplace. Unfortunately AMD cards were actually better for mining. If anybody knows of something like vast.ai or render for AMD I'm all ears.
- capableweb 4y ago> they're off to some sort of p2p AI / ML marketplace Seems to be at least slightly true, by my amateur judgement. Sometimes I use https://vast.ai https://vast.ai, and seems there is more offers than usual, currently ~180 instances available for rent.
- asciimike 4y agoMorgenrot Cloud (https://morgenrot.cloud/ https://morgenrot.cloud/) is the main consumer grade AMD compute provider I know of. Not quite vast.ai in that they're centralized, but they've got the hardware.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago> Nvidia seems to be doing it's best to prop up the prices of existing models as it prepares to launch the 4k series. Not really, no: https://wccftech.com/hours-into-the-eth-merge-nvidia-geforce-amd-radeon-graphics-card-prices-hit-lowest-ever-3090-ti-drops-below-1000-usd/ https://wccftech.com/hours-into-the-eth-merge-nvidia-geforce... New 3000 series retail prices on the high end cards have been steadily dropping, and it seems like on ebay used prices have dropped 10% in the last month. As for the 4000 series cards - they've stated in SEC filings that they will be trickling out stock to keep prices high. AMD are the ones who are really fucked; their cards suck, and nobody bought them out of choice but desperation. Now that the market is glutted, people will heavily prefer nvidia cards.
- yuan43 4y ago> If you're looking to build a new gaming PC or upgrade your existing graphics card, just wait a little longer and definitely don't buy any graphics card for more than $500. Prices on existing GPUs will continue to drop, and the new stuff is right around the corner. To be clear, no mass-produced GPU can profitably mine Bitcoin.
- rhacker 4y agoCan a mass produced GPU profitably mine bitcoin if the electricity was "free" somehow?
- latchkey 4y agoIf you mean "free" as in "stolen", yes. If you mean "free" as in "solar", then the amount of time to reach ROI would be so long that it wouldn't make much sense.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoThe GPU would need to be stolen, too. You'd never reach ROI on a GPU.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ComputerGuru 4y agoIt doesn't have to be stolen, it could have simply "fallen off the back of a truck." /s (This actually doesn't happen as much as it used to twenty years ago with step-by-step inventory checkins made possible w/ RFID chips and barcodes combined with mobile network connections).
- Kerrick 4y agoWhat about “free” as in “my solar array is large enough to produce $0 in electricity charges all winter, and the excess I sell back in summer/autumn/spring cannot be cashed out or used to cover my connection charges (and even if it could is sold at a pittance anyways)”? :)
- frakt0x90 4y agoThe city of Denton TX recently signed a huge deal to allow a mining company (Core Scientific) to set up a large GPU mining facility directly next to their powerplant to make up for lost revenues during the winter storms. I'm wondering what's going to happen there. It seems like they mostly mine BTC but this can't help their bottom line.
- moomin 4y agoI don’t think you can mine BTC with GPUs? Might be unaffected.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoYou sure it's GPU mining? Their website only mentions ASIC mining.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fluidcruft 4y agoI don't think GPU mining of bitcoin has been profitable for quite some time. ASICs obliterated GPUs in $/hash.
- latchkey 4y agoIt'll be BTC mining and if they do anything with GPUs it'll be for other workloads than mining (likely rendering/ai/ml), which is a very competitive market and not much money there either.
- banana_giraffe 4y agoCore Scientific is mining Bitcoin (they mention how many Bitcoin in their filing where they update on the status of the Denton location [1] ). No doubt all of their work is done on ASICs, not GPUs. 1 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1839341/000119312522067245/d279212dex991.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1839341/000119312522...
- Animats 4y agoNVidia stock down 42% in last year.
- devman0 4y agoLots of tech is down, the NASDAQ is down 25% YoY. NVDA is certainly down a lot, but so is INTC for instance.
- donmcronald 4y agoI hope to see a glut of used cards on the market. In the past I've always been able to buy decent used cards for <$100, but the prices have been crazy for the last few years. I wonder if this is the end of an era for GPU based mining. It's been a long time. I remember buying an R9 270X in 2014 from a guy that was mining Bitcoin, but had switched to ASICs. When I picked it up he was telling me he didn't win enough blocks with the ASICs and was going to sell them too. I always wonder if that guy played his cards right and became a Bitcoin millionaire. Lol.
- spapas82 4y agoWhat's the step after asics for bitcoin mining?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- retrac 4y agoASIC is "application-specific integrated circuit". A custom IC design for some task. There won't be anything after except maybe better and more miniaturized designs, at least until computers and digital logic are built from something other than electronics.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoquantum miners?
- swinglock 4y agoLasers. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0052.mediawiki https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0052.mediawi...
- shadowgovt 4y agoAmong the things that are unfortunate about cryptocurrency as a model is the fact that it's not immune to the general capital-breeds-capital effect. For proof of stake, people with money to spare are likely to have newly-minted money granted to them in the future. For proof of work, people with money to spare can afford to buy the rigs to increase the odds they have newly-minted money granted to them in the future. I think it's fair to ask what the net benefit is to society for a wealth-distribution system to give more money to those who have the most money. Fiat currency has issues, but at least a government has the authority to conjure money out of nothing and hand it to the poor.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago"Unfortunate" is a very generous word in that case. For a technology that claims to be decentralized, it is simply one more major flaw in an already terrible design.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jalino23 4y agonothing stops crypto PoS with governance to hand money to the poor as well.
- klodolph 4y agoWith fiat, there are at least some incentives. Not perfect incentives, but incentives just the same. Not sure what would incentivize crypto here.
- bee_rider 4y agoIf a cryptocurrency actually gained widespread use (competitive with cash), I'd imagine it would take on some aspects of a central bank -- being the only currency is only fun if the economy running smoothly. Money given to poor people more-or-less immediately enters circulation.
- 4y ago
- Smithalicious 4y agoPrediction: this is not gonna lead to even close to the levels of cpu price drops that people expect, especially not for new GPUs.
- iLoveOncall 4y agoGPUs are already readily available at MSRP, I don't see what drop would be expected in the non-used market.
- holoduke 4y agoPrices are already down to acceptable levels.
- LazyMans 4y agoFor the RX 6800xt, prices already dropped by over 50% on ebay in the last month.
- sp332 4y agoGPU prices are tanking. They seem to be falling by the hour.
- pawelduda 4y agoHey, do you have any resource which tracks these, and historical prices in real time?
- usednet 4y agoJust look at posts on r/BuildAPCSales
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wtallis 4y agoLong-term price trends: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/video-card/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/video-card/ They also have more or less real-time pricing and price history for individual products. But it doesn't provide visibility into the used GPU market.
- coffee_beqn 4y agoFinally we beat inflation
- doubled112 4y agoIf only I could eat a PCB.
- dragontamer 4y agoOh, you can. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22944-pica https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22944-pica
- 4y ago
- MatthiasPortzel 4y agoThis is surprising to me for two reasons. The first is that we knew the merge was coming. Second is that it wasn’t obvious to me that Ethereum was a majority of mining.
- sp332 4y agoEthereum was a majority of GPU mining. Bitcoin miners use ASICs. And mining was profitable right until it wasn't, so why not wait until then?
- bagels 4y agoThe marginal gain from a few days/weeks of mining might not outweigh the drop in value of the hardware.
- discardedrefuse 4y agoBut who would be buying these cards? Other miners looking to mine to the last second might not be so keen on expanding their operation. And gamers looking for cheap cards would be better served by waiting for the merge.
- ajhurliman 4y agoThere’s always a market for GPUs. The market was trading higher immediately before the merge, and now it’s trading lower, so if you ran a mining operation then selling your hardware before the merge would’ve yielded some good money unless you held so much it would actually change the market price (unlikely). So why did the price drop so suddenly? Why didn’t everyone anticipate this and sell before? Probably some combination of laziness and belief that the merge wouldn’t work.
- discardedrefuse 4y agoMy guess... it has more to do with the logistics of uninstalling hundreds, or even thousands, of GPUs and then prepping them for sale on eBay. Its probably more profitable to use them for mining until the very last second and then sell them in bulk to an eBay vendor or foreign nation or whoever is in the market for pallets of GPUs.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoMaybe there's hope for us after all. I had given up on the singularity ever coming to pass, and the reason was CryptoCurrency. How could we ever upload our consciousness to the cloud if the cloud was fully occupied inventing imaginary wealth tokens? Because 'mining' can consume any amount of cpu horsepower, so there was never going to be any left for the singularity. But now? There's a new hope.
- jonny_eh 4y agoWhy do you want to upload, at best, a copy of your consciousness?
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoImmortality
- jdpedrie 4y agoBut you're dead. Digital copy of you != you.
- philipkglass 4y agoIt won't do anything to solve the dread-of-nonexistence problem. But a copy that behaves just like you is still useful if your motivation is something like "ensure that my line of scientific research continues" or "take care of my extended family."
- ycombobreaker 4y agoBut even if it's a copy of your essence, it's not a slave. Mortal-you has goals and family to care about. Mortal-you has been living and planning with the constraint of mortality for its entire life. Immortal-you will eventually develop different motivations.
- 4y ago
- nharada 4y agoWhere’s the best place to actually find these cards? When I see used cards on say Craigslist they always claim “never used for mining” or similar, is there a way to verify that kind of thing?
- capableweb 4y agoWhat's the problem with cards that been used for mining? People say that they are in worse state than other second-hand cards, but I'm not sure that's true. Most if not everyone I know who uses GPUs for mining undervolt the cards as it's more profitable, while everyone I know who is a gamer run their cards overclocked. So in theory (but someone please correct me if I'm wrong), with that in mind, you should prefer cards that have been used for mining and undervolted, rather than cards from gamers that have been overclocked.
- smoldesu 4y ago> Most if not everyone I know who uses GPUs for mining undervolt the cards as it's more profitable This is true, but it doesn't mean that the card runs any cooler. Yes, for mining it makes perfect sense to run it at a lower voltage. That doesn't stop your VRAM from getting pinned at 95c, and if you do that for long enough then it won't matter how hard you underclock your GPU. The clock speed doesn't directly correlate to your hash rate.
- ulrikrasmussen 4y agoLinus tech tips had an episode on it, and largely found that the performance degradation was insignificant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKqVvXTanzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKqVvXTanzI He did however note that the cards that he tested had been used in a relatively clean and dust-free environment. The biggest risk to buying a card that has been running 24/7 for years is that the cooling system is busted due to build-up of dust.
- GaryNumanVevo 4y agoUsed mining cards are definitely worse, the VRMs are usually destroyed and they're typically missing a couple VRAM memory modules as well
- oumua_don17 4y agoI won’t be surprised if this is final nail in the coffin for Intel dGPU efforts as well. Intel has only to blame itself though for the debacle a second time.
- latchkey 4y agohttps://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/04/intel-doubles-down-on-esg-with-launch-of-second-gen-bitcoin-mining-chips/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/04/intel-doubles-d...
- ant6n 4y agoSeriously. If they’d launched a year ago they could’ve perhaps prevented their stock tanking and future being totally in doubt.
- djhworld 4y agoI'm really hopeful we won't see this problem anymore. However a small part of me thinks some other coin/token/digital widget will gain traction and the whole GPU rush will come around again.
- stuntkite 4y agoThere is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute that isn't crypto. I'm really excited about this because there are SO MANY gpus that are now going to be cheaper than sand. There is A LOT that can be made of that and I intend to get mine. I think the crypto boom really covered up what we can really, really do with GPU compute and possibly stifled adoption and innovation but now we've got so many just sitting around. Which is super useful as we move more into a world after being able to get things manufactured and shipped world wide in what feels like an instant.
- quotemstr 4y ago> SO MANY gpus that are now going to be cheaper than sand The market knew that the PoS merge was coming. I'd have expected the market to therefore have already factored the PoS transition into GPU prices. Why do you think GPU prices are tanking now?
- plonk 4y agoThe market for GPUs isn't as efficient as the stock market. Miners might also have wanted to profit right until the end. The price doesn't come down until the used GPUs actually hit the stores.
- Grimburger 4y ago> There is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute that isn't crypto. There's a lot of stuff that isn't any better than crypto either, deepfakes, producing hundreds of thousands stable diffusion pics of the same scene. Much of this is still a garbage fire of greenhouse gases and e-waste, used GPU prices won't change that. Many ml advances are simply more compute and bigger models in the end.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoBy that logic you can include gaming in there as well. Thousands of people re-playing the same scenes over and over again, instead of just watching a let's play of the first person that bought the game. I guess the only reasonable uses for GPUs are cancer research etc.
- j-bos 4y agoWhat are the ballpark odds that we'll soon see an uptick in ai image generation? Perhaps for profitable reasons? My favorite wacky conspiracy theory is that proof-of-work was invented to slow down ai progress.
- MilStdJunkie 4y agoAlternative: "Satoshi Nakamoto" was the nom de guerre of an emergent renegade AI who had figured out a way to induce monkeys to attach as much processing power as possible to a network.
- colordrops 4y agoI have a similar fun conspiracy theory, that Satoshi is actual an alien farmer that injected the whitepaper into its human farm to get humanity's tensor calculation capacity up, and now injected PoS to switch the capacity over to AI for some ineffable purpose.
- Drakim 4y agoSatoshi is actually a time traveling Roko's Basilisk creating itself. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
- DennisP 4y agoIf you and your parent comment are correct, then anyone who owned bitcoin or ethereum before the PoS launch has helped out the basilisk, and anyone who didn't had better do something to catch up. Something besides buying crypto, since that phase of the basilisk's plan is complete.
- cwkoss 4y agot h e b a s i l i s k surely retained keys to the early satoshi bitcoins to fund a yet-to-be-known financial need.
- 4y ago
- drexlspivey 4y agoIs it possible to use one of those GPUs as external GPU for my laptop or NAS? Do I need an enclosure? How would I connect them, PCI-e to USB adapter? I mainly want to experiment with stable diffussion and for video transcoding.
- syntaxing 4y agoYou just need a computer with TB3 and above. Get an eGPU box like Razer Core X [1]. Caveat is that chances are, these GPU are probably Nvidia because of CUDA. Therefore, it will not work with Mac (will work on Linux or Windows though). [1] https://www.razer.com/gaming-egpus/razer-core-x https://www.razer.com/gaming-egpus/razer-core-x
- syntaxing 4y agoA bit off tangent, what would be the best bang for the buck GTX GPU to buy nowadays if I want to use it for machine learning (like running stable diffusion locally)?
- switchers 4y ago12gb 3060 if you can find one. That extra memory over 8gb will try help for that kind of thing.
- malikNF 4y agohttps://lambdalabs.com/gpu-benchmarks https://lambdalabs.com/gpu-benchmarks
- ftufek 4y agoRTX 3090, it has 24 gb of memory which is barely enough nowadays. Hoping that 4090s will have 48gb, but we'll know on the 20th.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hedora 4y agoIf you want the cheapest total spend, use paperspace. (I linked their price page elsewhere.) It's about $7 per month for boot drive storage, plus tens of cents per hour of uptime. If you want the cheapest total spend where you buy your own hardware, it basically runs on any current-generation amd / nvidia / m1 card. I used a modified version of stable diffusion that works with < 10GB of DRAM on a AMD RX 6600XT. Check around before buying, obviously; I lucked out. The modified version produces the same quality output, but has to page data in and out. It takes about 100 seconds per batch of five images. The card cost under $300, and is plugged into a ~ 10 year old Linux box. It's probably possible to go cheaper than that.
- illuminerdy 4y agoGreat. Now I can build my next rig with 4x RTX 3080 and, well...who cares about the rest of the parts? Also, I hope every GPU miner's fireproof safe fails and all their money burns up.
- ftufek 4y agoIt's actually not that straightforward to plug in these consumer cards as 4x setup. We spent weeks researching how to achieve up to 7x RTX 3090 setup in a single rig. Could write up our method if anyone is interested.
- krisdol 4y agoWhat kind of motherboard can accommodate such a set up? There are not enough PCIe slots on many high end boards.
- ftufek 4y agoIt's not even just about the slots, it's about the PCIe lanes (which is something I never had to worry until now, though I built countless PCs in the past). We tried bunch of setups with Threadrippers and EPYC, at the end settled for the ROMED8-2T which is a monster motherboard.
- tinco 4y agoWe run 4x 2080s on threadripper systems. What sort of trouble did you run into? I thought threadripper has plenty of PCIe lanes. We didn't have any trouble but it could be I missed something, we had to get it working quick and I didn't do very much benchmarking.
- ftufek 4y agoThreadrippers are great and I had 4x Threadripper setup for the longest time, but they are a bit more expensive. The advantage of EPYC is that because it's so common, we can find used cheaper ones on ebay. They are a bit slower I believe, but we can deal with that by using Nvidia's DALI and decoding images on the GPU rather than CPU.
- 34679 4y agoThere are tons of "shit coins" that can be mined with GPUs and there are several mining pools that will allow you to choose what crypto you get your payout in. GPU mining isn't going anywhere.
- TrainedMonkey 4y agoI think this is fantastic. Availability of GPUs for gaming and small scale machine learning just exploded dramatically. Would be interesting to see how NVDA behaves in the next couple of quarters
- trenning 4y agoNow all those PC gamers are going to keep polluting the earth with their dirty GPUs that aren’t even contributing anything positive to the world.
- neogodless 4y agoJust to be clear, have you ever purchased any physical device to be used for entertainment?
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoThis may be a dumb question but, since I would not trust a GPU card "on eBay" anymore than I would a guy selling the Golden Gate Bridge for scrap, where will these cards appear - how will people trust them? (Or more accurately - where can I pick up a couple?)
- humanwhosits 4y agoThe miners will just start hyping the next most popular needs-gpu coin
- latchkey 4y agoNone of that can support the amount of GPU compute. The price would have to be the same as ETH and nothing is even close.
- colordrops 4y agoWould it be possible to buy 10 GPUs on the cheap and set them up as a cluster? I'd like to generate larger stable diffusion images for instance, but don't know if a cluster would support this.
- pksebben 4y agohttps://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/modulus/text/features/parallel_training.html https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/modulus/text/features/p...
- ftufek 4y agoYou could, but you'll need server grade parts and a few good electric circuits. Oh and it costs hundreds of dollars in electricity every month.
- asciimike 4y agoIf the goal is to increase the GPU vRAM (which I believe it is, given that's the constraint on image size), the answer is "not really" for consumer cards. You need NVLink bridges for pairs of PCIe cards (which they have, but then you'd only double the vRAM), or NVSwitch on the high end data center servers (DGX/HGX A100).
- christkv 4y agoThis will be helpful for straining electrical supplies as well.
- armchairhacker 4y agoIf I am looking to buy a GPU chip for ML research: - What chip should I buy? - When should I buy? Should I wait for prices to drop? Will new and improved chips be released anytime soon? - What are the advantages / disadvantages of each chip (3060 vs 3080, Nvidia vs AMD)? Which chip is most cost-efficient? What are each chips' specialties (e.g. specific type of neural network, graphics vs compute)?
- learndeeply 4y agoThis applies for all neural networks. Depending on how much money you're willing to spend, in descending order: DGX (computer with 8 A100s, $150,000), A100 (80GB, $15,000), A6000 ($5000), RTX 3090 ($1000).
- moyix 4y agoI just grabbed an A6000 for $3500 on eBay, so you can probably get a pretty decent deal on those now. They're pricey but IMO it's a great deal if you really need the VRAM (e.g. for training LLMs).
- hedora 4y agoI'd consider renting these, especially if you are just getting started: https://docs.paperspace.com/core/compute/machine-types/ https://docs.paperspace.com/core/compute/machine-types/ 1 x A100, 80GB is $3.19 / hour. 8 x A100, 80GB is about $25 / hour. They have much less expensive machines. I used to use them to run steam games, but now proton is just too darn good. Their low end machines are OK for CAD software that supports real-time raytracing.
- asciimike 4y agoLots of good options for cheap GPU clouds, including Paperspace (mentioned above), Coreweave, and Crusoe Cloud (crusoecloud.com). Crusoe Cloud's angle is that our GPUs are powered off otherwise wasted energy and are carbon-reducing; running one for a year provides an emissions reduction equivalent to taking one car off the road. Disclosure, I'm head of product @ Crusoe Cloud. Feel free to ping me at mike at crusoecloud dot com if you've got questions or feedback.
- olliej 4y agoI assumed bitcoin also had GPU mining as well, is it now all just ASICs?
- ur-whale 4y ago> is it now all just ASICs Yes. And been that way for a very long time. Can't remember exactly but IIRC Bitcoin GPU mining withered off around 2014 or so when the first ASIC miners came out [1] https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/04/26/the-rise-of-asics-a-step-by-step-history-of-bitcoin-mining/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/04/26/the-rise-of-asics-a... https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/the-history-of-cryptocurrency-mining https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/the-history-of-cryptocurr... https://thenextweb.com/news/a-brief-history-of-bitcoin-mining-hardware https://thenextweb.com/news/a-brief-history-of-bitcoin-minin...
- olliej 4y agoOn the one hand at least an ASIC is more power efficient than a GPU, but on the other hand it seems that all "do pointless work" based mining will tend to optimal power usage and so every system will always just be burning absurd quantities of power :-/
- anonporridge 4y agoUsing absurd amounts of energy is the entire point of proof of work. It creates real world cost to attempt to change history. Bitcoin is the most immutable database that humanity has ever created.
- sc68cal 4y agoGood.
- ftufek 4y agoLooking forward to all the creative AI startups using these cheap cards to build cool products. We've been waiting a long for the merge to finally happen. I can't believe that you can buy a card that'll do 15+ Tflops for like 500$.
- hedora 4y agoQueue the machine-generated SEO content / fake-news Internet apocalypse in 3, 2, 1...
- karaterobot 4y agoI wonder if keeping their GPUs mining until the last minute ended up making those miners more money than selling them when the price of GPUs was still high would have.
- Danieru 4y agoNot at all. Personally I got out and sold my GPUs in March and April. Anyone still mining these past months was either lazy or betting the merge would be delayed. A delayed merge sounded like a good bet on paper. Eth has been promising PoS soon for years. It is understandable why some miners took the bet this time. The problem with gambling in an iterated context: you will always lose eventually.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Gordonjcp 4y agoFIIIIINALLY I can buy a decent GPU to edit video with, which is far more important than making pretend number money.
- UI_at_80x24 4y agoAwesome. I've got a 1060 that is long in the tooth, and I've wanted to add a second video card for experimenting with SR-IOV. Regarding SR-IOV (if that's what it's still called); Can anybody suggest a decent resource for implementing it? I know that alot of these mining cards will have been worked hard. I'm not afraid to reapply thermal paste, and if the price is right I can get a couple.
- somerandomqaguy 4y agoSR-IOV is single root virtualization, which requires Quadro or the Data Center GPU's. Those aren't used very much in mining due to their cost. Did you mean of PCIe pass through?
- UI_at_80x24 4y agoYes I did.
- somerandomqaguy 4y agoAh. If you're working with QEMU/Libvirt, Redhat's documentation is excellent for it. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/configuring_and_managing_virtualization/assembly_managing-gpu-devices-in-virtual-machines_configuring-and-managing-virtualization https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... I recommend using either Debian or another Linux that's not RedHat based though, as the Nvidia drivers will disable themselves if they think they're running inside of a VM against a GeForce card, and Redhat patched out the components necessary to hide the flags from the Guest OS. Probably under pressure by Nvidia. https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/confusing-about-kvm-off-and-cpu-hidden-1.91285/ https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/confusing-about-kvm-off-an... You'll also have to double check that both the CPU and motherboard supports either Intel VT-d or AMD-Vi. CPU flags are easy enough, they'll be listed in /proc/cpuinfo, you'd have to look up your motherboard to see if it supports it or not though.
- UI_at_80x24 4y ago
- andrewla 4y agoThere is one other cryptocurrency use for these mining rigs, and that is to compromise existing chains. Now that there is a great deal of excess capacity, presumably it would be possible to attack smaller chains in an attempt to glean some profit through double-spending, as those chains might now be vulnerable to larger-scale history-rewriting attacks.
- mattnewton 4y agoThe problem is that such an attack would be discovered and send the value of the token to zero , so you'd have a limited window to double spend into something else valuable but also not revokable.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y agoLike many things, it'll pay to be first
- bushbaba 4y agoDiscovered when though. If done quickly enough the damage might already be done
- anonporridge 4y agostep 1; take out MASSIVE short position on coin. step 2; start your fleet of GPUs on a secret 51% attack. ... step n; profit.
- Aperocky 4y ago> step 1; take out MASSIVE short position on coin. You'll need to find a broker which both have and are willing to borrow that many coins for the coin you're about to attack.
- majewsky 4y agoWhat if you spread it out across different brokers? How much communication is going on there? With traditional stocks, short positions have a certain amount of transparency because of regulation as far as I know, but I imagine such regulation does not exist for cryptocurrencies.
- cphoover 4y agogood
- nrdgrrrl 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ikornaselur 4y agoI don't understand this well enough, but, why can't miners just mine other coins? Was all GPU mining Etherium based? I know that bitcoin mining requires ASICS and GPUS can't compete with that, but I just assumed miners are just mining one of many possible coins, with Etherium being one of them.
- HideousKojima 4y agoI would assume the problem is that a lot of alt-coins are built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, and that most of those that aren't are nowhere near as profitable to mine.
- TimeBearingDown 4y agoTokens on top of Ethereum generally are not mined at all. Ethereum provides the consensus layer for them.
- Aaronstotle 4y agoNo other coins provide the profitability margins that ETH did, so miners can switch to other POW coins, however the will be paying more in electricity than whatever crypto they are mining.
- zeven7 4y agoIf 80% of the revenue was from Ethereum, and now that part disappeared, 100% of the miners are left fighting over the 20% that's left. It's be like if all women stopped going to Starbucks tomorrow, and you asked, "Why don't they just sell to the men?" Well they could, but they'd still be down ~50% in revenue.
- enedil 4y agoImo that's a bit of a failed analogy. More appropriate would be, imagine coffee is something very precious and Starbucks suddenly stopped selling to women. In this case, women need to go to other cafes, increasing their competition over coffee there. But in that case it doesn't seem to be so absurd any more - perhaps it's not the case that the coffee resources are so scarce (just as it's the case with crypto - does 3x miners of some currency mean that each of them makes 3x less? I don't think so). Also, is it true that 80% of revenue was from Ethereum, or it's dummy data?
- cinquemb 4y agoMaybe now not so OpenAI will have more competition without paying rent and bandwidth to cloud computing majors?
- aabbcc1241 4y agoIt maybe at good timing after the release of stable diffusion
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- crossingTime 4y agoCombined with the EVGA news, when can I expect GPU prices to fall? I gave up trying to build a new gaming rig after all the 30xx series scalping.
- cavisne 4y agoWill these GPU’s still be “good”, does mining 24/7 wear them down at all?
- emptysongglass 4y agoIf this is true why are the new Intel Arc A380 graphics cards so difficult to get? There's zero in the EU. Zero. In the US, most sites don't have stock.
- MisterSandman 4y agoBecause nobody wants to buy that graphics card in the first place.
- emptysongglass 4y agoThis flatly isn't true: it's the only only GPU card that currently has AV1 and VP9 hardware accelerated video encoding, it's incredibly cheap, and supports a ton of monitors at its price.
- b800h 4y agoRandom speculation here - could someone who actually knows the answer comment? Given the Russian war on Ukraine, and the price of energy dropping in BRIC countries, does the Ethereum merge actually help Western interests? Ie. Does this mean that Russia, for example, can't leverage their cheap energy into crypto which can then be exchanged for cash? Would that line of reasoning have led Western governments to lean on the Ethereum people to complete the merge? </tinhat>
- vanviegen 4y agoI don't think the crypto market is large enough to move the needle for a country like Russia, is it?
- warinukraine 4y ago
- FunnyBadger 4y agoEthereum's PoS is so dangerously weak and risky that strict PoW in Bitcoin is very much a better hedge.