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> “All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of st

• DeepYogurt 4y ago
  It's entirely possible for nvidia to be sour and also correct. Crypto currencies have done nothing for society but to introduce scam and money laundering vectors.
  • psychphysic 4y ago
    Online dark net markets would not be possible without cryptos. They are a pretty big win for those who believe in personal liberty.
    • KyeRussell 4y ago
      Fortunately I don’t think anyone is concerned with what libertarians consider a “big win”.
      • mmiliauskas 4y ago
        Except for libertarians? Personally, as a libertarian this is all I need -- a win for myself.
        • bregma 4y ago
          Not all libertarians. Any libertarian is of course free to decide for themself if it's a win or not. Some may, and some may not.
    • justsomehnguy 4y ago
      Bullshit, they existed both before the crypto and before the Internet itself. It's just a bit more convenient, but otherwise it's just the same as it was: give money to one man, take money/goods from other man and how exactly they settle their accounts is none of your business.
    • Melingo 4y ago
      In sense of buying drugs? Yeah sure still not society relevant. And look what happens in Germany, it's much better to push for legalization. People need to stand up for rights
    • edflsafoiewq 4y ago
      Yes, crypto's main use is crime. Its supporters have various arguments for why crime is actually good.
      • rvz 4y ago
        > Yes, crypto's main use is crime. It is quite a very poor use with such "crime" happening all on a public and transparent blockchain, making it very easy to trace all of that (even if they use a tumbler / mixer) with the funds certainly seized and frozen as soon as it hits the exchange. In fact criminals and scammers still use banks and Zelle to facilitate their criminal enterprise - [0] [1] in the trillions of dollars. [0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-files-financial-scandal-criminal-networks https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-fil... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/business/payments-fraud-zelle-banks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/business/payments-fraud-z...
        • tzs 4y ago
          So why do so many ransomware gangs want payment in Bitcoin?
          • rvz 4y ago
            Perhaps they want to get themselves traced on a public ledger and to join the long list of gangs caught and arrested by the authorities each week? Once again, Bitcoin is worse for scammers, criminals and ransomware than using Zelle and the banks for fraud. You should be asking why the banks continue to move trillions of dollars of illicit funds for criminals for years without them doing anything. Same with Zelle.
        • saurik 4y ago
          And Square. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jack-dorsey-block-loses-20-164948270.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jack-dorsey-block-loses-20-16...
      • psychphysic 4y ago
        I suppose you'd have told Ms Parks to shut up and get off the bus if avoiding crime is all that's good for society?
    • tzs 4y ago
      "A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it" --Jean de La Fontaine. With sufficient tracking of non-cryptocurrencies and physical goods governments could largely kill dark net markets by making it too hard to buy anything physical with your cryptocurrency. Imagine KYC but applied to every transaction instead of just large ones. Making dark markets too easy isn't a win for personal liberty. Its a step on the road to a dystopia with little personal liberty or privacy because every time something seriously bad happens a few due to dark markets that would not have been possible in the legal markets the general public will demand something be done about it, which will result in government being granted more power.
      • M95D 4y ago
        No need for dark markets. We will get there anyway. Government doesn't need people to demand it.
  • 1066 4y ago
    Right, but _they_ are also are also firmly planted within the fiat monetary system. Ultimately their will be a socially defined singular cryptographic definition of economic value at some point in the future.
  • tric 4y ago
    His claim... "it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society" ...is incorrect. The total crypto market cap collapsed because of interest rate hikes. Nvidia's stock dropped 68%. Is that because it didn't bring anything useful for society? No. It was trading at a premium because of low rates.
    • TrainedMonkey 4y ago
      > The total crypto market cap collapsed because of interest rate hikes. Let's take a deeper cut, why does something collapse when interest rates rise?
      • nightski 4y ago
        Because capital is necessary for growth and the more expensive capital becomes the less growth is anticipated.
        • kiviuq 4y ago
          We've seen a lot of growth over the past decades, so it should be easy to retire at 30, but we're being told to work longer, be more productive, and die sooner. So where is that all growth? something doesn't add up.
          • everfree 4y ago
            > So where is that all growth? Is that a rhetorical question? It flows to the 1%. Current levels of wealth inequality are unprecedented in American history. We work hard to support the lavish lifestyles of the rich. If we could combine today's technology with 1970s levels of wealth equality, we could probably retire in 1970s level comfort by the time we reach age 40.
      • enjoy-your-stay 4y ago
        Money flows out of equities and into bonds which yield a higher more dependable return when interest rates are high enough. The equities market was already running at artificially inflated values for some sectors (like technology), which means there isn't much growth potential (if everything is deemed to be already overpriced), and so the outflows were quite significant from those sectors, accentuating the inverse relationship between equities and interest rates.
  • everfree 4y ago
    We could go back and forth for days on whether cryptocurrencies have done anything for society, but it's already been discussed ad infinitum both here on HN and elsewhere. I only wanted to point out that this article is inane.
  • emsy 4y ago
    There are people that still have their accounts frozen because they donated to the truckers in Canada. That’s insane. Other countries had or will have similar cases in the future. We absolutely should have a way to exchange money without the governments involvement. The government already has the monopoly on physical force. That ought to be enough. So yes, there is a use case. But you’re correct in that it hasn’t really been used that way so far.
    • twawaaay 4y ago
      Oh yeah, and those same people later cry foul when they get robbed of their money because it was not protected in any way. Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections. Fools. There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left. Those protections are not perfect, true, but still orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all. And as to monopoly on physical force, there is a reason for it, too. Take a look at African countries for what happens when people are allowed to take things into their own hands. Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens when there is no government that can project physical force. Our civilisation is far from perfect but it is a civilisation. It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety. So think about it the next time you start imagining how good it would be without all this pesky civilisation around you. Because it is much better and productive to try to iteratively fix what we already have than decide to erase everything and start a complete rewrite.
      • mike741 4y ago
        > Oh yeah, and those same people later cry foul when they get robbed of their money because it was not protected in any way. Can you give an example? Do you actually know any of these people? > Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections Not me, So not everybody. > There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left. The reason is that their protocols are inherently unsafe. Similarly, there is a reason Bitcoin was made to be unregulated -- to protect the little guys from having their share devalued by trillion dollar bail-outs for the super rich. > orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all Better for who? Maybe better for you, but certainly not everyone. > Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens The video game?? > It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety. Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system.
  • patrick451 4y ago
    Money laundering is a social good, necessitated by corrupt governments who steal innocent people's cash [1], [2]. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fbi-seized-40-000-couple-151500433.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fbi-seized-40-000-couple-1515... [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/civil_forfeiture https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/civil_forfeiture
  • bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
    Do we have different definitions of nothing?
  • PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    I will have to disagree. They enable people to buy medicine that is otherwise too expensive to get from official channels.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    They would still be incorrect about the cause, in your example.
  • b33j0r 4y ago
    One of the things I hadn’t considered in the beginning is that it is also a large conversion of resources and power into computation and heat. Fundamentally, that’s a kind of transfer of wealth in and of itself. My favorite examples were people with subsidized electric bills who kinda scored on that arbitrage until everyone wised up.
  • grapesurgeon 4y ago
    [dead]
  • xk_id 4y ago
    As part of the society being referenced, I find it very upsetting that you think yourselves in a position to judge this on my behalf.
• furyofantares 4y ago
  You're kinda right but it's also kinda right that after a decade+ crypto found like 1.5 useful applications and generative AI is finding some mind blowing product launch or demo something like once every 8 hours.
  • hermitcrab 4y ago
    What were the 1.5 useful application - buying illegal stuff and money laundering?
    • cs02rm0 4y ago
      Getting out of Russia.
      • hermitcrab 4y ago
        Good for you. But it seems that cryto is a zero sum game. Every dollar one person makes, another person loses.
        • rkho 4y ago
          I have some exciting news to share with you about our traditional financial markets.
        • unvx-n-banned 4y ago
          Bitcoin is trading at 28k. When the dollar is endlessly printed, all you need to do is not sell your bitcoin and eventually you'll come out ahead. Because the dollar supply is infinite, it is not zero-sum.
          • jboy55 4y ago
            If bitcoin was the only crypto, maybe, but there is an infinite number of possible crypto coins.
• rvz 4y ago
  > No, the crypto mining industry collapsed because the largest GPU-mined cryptocurrency (Ethereum) removed the ability for people to mine it with GPUs. Crypto obviously does not "need parallel processing" in the way that Nvidia GPUs provide it, because Ethereum removed that requirement entirely. Absolutely correct. At least cryptocurrencies like Ethereum found an alternative consensus method that is efficient and environmentally friendly, unlike what I am seeing in AI and deep neural networks for decades which that still has not changed with the way on how models continue to get larger and require more planet incinerating power and will currently require millions and in the future, billions of dollars to train. As long as they stay inefficient, Nvidia will continue smiling knowing that. The end result is a pseduo-intelligent black box that confidently hallucinates and can get confused by a single bad input - rendering it useless. Once it all goes wrong, then it gets re-trained / fine-tuned again, wasting more energy. Inference requiring tons of GPUs is also wasteful and inefficient. The moment we switch to better and efficient alternative in training deep neural networks at scale, that I would call a 'breakthrough' in AI rather than throwing more data, more GPUs at the problem.
  • humanistbot 4y ago
    > unlike what I am seeing in AI and deep neural networks for decades which that still has not changed with the way on how models continue to get larger and require more planet incinerating power and will currently require millions and in the future, billions. As long as they stay inefficient, Nvidia will continue smiling knowing that. What are you talking about? The inaccessibility of the models and the heavy gatekeeping by the big players is leading to more and more open source models that can run on an average gaming GPU or a Mac M1. It seems like every day on HN there is another post on another super-optimized version of something that was once only accessible to those with huge server farms or cloud budgets. You're seeing announcements like Stanford's Alpaca that specifically mention how it can run on low-budget commodity hardware or a few hundred dollars in the cloud. I'd say efficiency and optimization is one of the hottest areas in large language models right now, although the motivation is less for climate reasons and more for 'I want to do this on my own hardware and have no safety censors' reasons.
    • 4y ago
• TheDudeMan 4y ago
  "the crypto mining industry collapsed..." It did not collapse. Only GPU mining collapsed (shitcoins). ASIC-based mining is going strong (Bitcoin). Disk-based mining is going strong (Chia).
  • boulos 4y ago
    Hmm? Chia seems to be a clear failure. The price and market cap both collapsed. https://www.coinbase.com/price/chia-network https://www.coinbase.com/price/chia-network tells me the latest daily volume is less than $5M USD.
    • TheDudeMan 4y ago
      The mining is what I mentioned. 21 exabytes on line. https://xchscan.com/charts/netspace https://xchscan.com/charts/netspace
• altairprime 4y ago
  Wasn’t Nvidia trying to block cryptomining a year or two ago so they could sell to their core target markets in peace? It seems difficult to reconcile “we’re actively trying to stop cryptominers from buying our product” actions with “we’re against cryptomining only because they’re not buying our product” views.
  • menzoic 4y ago
    thats because they couldn't keep up due to the disruption of the supply chain. No corporation avoids money
    • paulmd 4y ago
      the GPU mining booms in 2014 and 2017 showed that nobody can keep up even without supply-chain disruptions. the demand for machines that turn a quarter into a dollar is effectively infinite. It is always rational to turn $0.99 into $1, only bounded by the risk that you can't do that in the future and the machine loses its value. But as there are more machines in the market, that $0.25 starts to approach the $0.99 return, because mining rewards are distributed across more GPUs so each has less expected return. (and this is ignoring some weird effects like some miners being willing to run at a loss due to stolen electricity/using it to move money past currency controls/etc) So in effect cryptomining has this super weird demand curve where the demand is infinite for the bottom and middle parts of the curve, then as you pass the break-even point it actually reverses, and suddenly you're left with miners selling a bunch of used GPUs that undercut all the inventory you geared up to produce at 2x your normal sellthrough. It's not just a normal supply curve because the demand is literally infinite, there's no "I have enough toilet paper to last a lifetime", the answer to how many money-printing-machines I want is always "all of them", as long as they're all profitable. And again, they're a durable good and when the demand becomes negative your customers will sell them all again and flood your market again. Literally the only way to cope with that is an instantaneous supply chain - you need to be able to produce enough GPUs to immediately saturate demand and push to the "nobody makes any profit anymore" stage of the curve. But that's not possible in silicon fabrication even in a perfectly ideal scenario - you are doing really well if (like NVIDIA) you can gear up to produce 2x your usual production. There just isn't enough VRAM production on the planet to produce 100x your normal quantity for 2 months, let alone the GPUs themselves. And then you'd have to ramp it all immediately back down too. And even then, once miners are done they flip all that production back into the secondhand market (often with higher defect rates, the current batch are suffering from GPU cores that explode due to moisture from when miners powerwashed them, as well as memory failing due to prolonged high-temperature operation, and miners are repainting markings on dies to obscure this). You can't build a supply chain to support that. It's not physically possible. Again, 2014 and 2017 showed this. And the inventory overhangs in 2015 and 2018 showed this too. The only answer is to get miners onto their own line of products so that it doesn't starve the rest of the market for 2 years and then snap back and flood the market with excess inventory (both unsold and secondhand). People really don't like the idea of being told what they can do with their cards but you can't balance a supply chain around crypto boom/bust cycles, it is not physically possible. Mining during your spare time is a consolation prize for GPUs being unaffordable, it just gets you back to where you started. And we are now seeing the downside of the inventory overhang resulting from mining - both AMD and NVIDIA are slow-walking the new generation to let existing inventory (mostly NVIDIA) burn through. And that happened in 2018 too. Ethereum is done for now, but I am in the camp that there will likely be more PoW coins that evolve in the 5+ year timeframe and put us back into the same situation. NVIDIA needs to put perfcounters on their cores that look at alignment and memory coalescing. If ~0% of your memory accesses are aligned and ~0% are coalesced that's highly likely to be a mining workload, since everybody else at least tries to align/coalesce to benefit from higher effective bandwidth, but this is inherently impossible in proof-of-work algorithms since the algorithm is supposed to be making inherently random, unpredictable access patterns. So you can detect kernels that are doing inherently unaligned work, and back that up with a whitelist from the driver of things that you know are good (validated via TPM that the driver hasn't been tampered), and slow down everything not on that list that seems like a mining workload. And I mean slow down significantly, not just slow down 50%. NVIDIA wasn't interested in stopping mining, they only slowed themselves down to the same level as AMD so they wouldn't be preferentially sucked off the shelves. And it turns out the secondhand dumps from miners aren't particularly cheap either, and didn't magically give us 3080s too cheap to meter. I said before that people often didn't do the math in the 2017 boom either, prices really only dropped about 30% from pre-boom prices (which were already significantly below launch MSRP - 480 4GB/8GB were $150/175 ish in early 2017, 1080 was down to low $400s, etc). It's tough to get a read on what a "true" pre-boom price is for Ampere/RDNA2 since they launched during the pandemic, supply issues, and really into the start of the mining boom ramp-up, there isn't a good reference. But I think that "roughly 30% below the 'true' baseline" figure has held pretty true. (and again, the miners did dump, that's why there's GPUs with the dies exploding because they powerwashed them! they're also even making their way back into the supply chain as new/refurbished at times, because a powerwashed and remarked GPU looks pretty dang clean!)
• permo-w 4y ago
  I was under the impression that the crypto industry—and by extension the mining of it—went into a skid when China (re)banned its use
  • everfree 4y ago
    China's 2021 ban didn't affect the crypto industry in any real way. Mining operations moved from China to the USA, a few irrelevant Chinese companies shuttered, and the industry continued business as usual. The most influential crypto companies were already incorporated in the west.
    • permo-w 4y ago
      are you trying to tell me that the world’s second largest economy banning cryptocurrency had no real impact on demand for cryptocurrency?
      • everfree 4y ago
        I wasn't referring to the demand for units of cryptocurrency on particular networks. I was referring to actual industry, i.e. the companies that are researching, improving, and selling the technology itself.
        • permo-w 4y ago
          the industry is a result of the demand
          • everfree 4y ago
            Well, China's ban didn't negatively affect global demand enough that any relevant companies closed up shop. Just reporting to you what happened. Most of these blockchain R&D companies (and their investors) are still in the bootstrapping phase anyways. They're looking ahead 3+ years before they expect their product to go parabolic, so the actions of one or two governments in the mean time is just noise.