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LiteCoin is Causing Shortages of AMD Radeon GPUs
- RankingMember 13y agoThat's no joke. I was trying like crazy to get in on one of the deals over "Cyber Week", and the deals that would pop up would literally be sold out within 2 minutes of appearing. I read a few threads in FatWallet and Slickdeals in which people said things to the effect of "Damn Litecoin miners! Some of us want to play games with these!" Shortly thereafter I came to the realization that, if this many people are jumping into the Litecoin pool, mining Litecoins is going to get a lot harder very quickly, so I stopped bothering to look.
- gatehouse 13y agoYeah, if you are "in the herd" and want to speculate, I think it makes a lot more sense to just buy the coins.
- acangiano 13y agoSmart cryptominers don't mine Litecoins. They mine the most profitable coin at the moment, then sell it and convert it to LTC (assuming they believe in LTC).
- woah 13y agoHopefully nobody figures out how to ASIC Litecoin. If it stays on general purpose hardware for a few years, we will have a huge network of processing power ready to be harnessed. If someone makes Litecoin ASICs, we will have a huge network of space heaters.
- wmf 13y agoHere you go: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355268.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355268.0 It's not clear that it's any cheaper than GPUs, though.
- salient 13y agoGPU mining is still not as decentralized, as basically only high-end PC gamers (with their own default cards) and the people specifically buying GPUs for mining will have a shot at it. CPU-only mining would be a lot more decentralized, if such a thing is even possible.
- lukifer 13y agoProtoShares (and a few other coins, I believe) focus as much on being memory-hard as CPU-hard. While CPU/GPU can be "cheated" by designing ASICs, there's no such thing as application-specific memory, making it a better candidate for an honest signal. [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
- erikpukinskis 13y agoWon't that just lead to people making machines with giant racks of RAM, causing the exact same difficulty race as we're seeing with the giant racks of ASCIs in Bitcoin? And even if that's not the optimization (I'm not an expert on ProtoShares or memory-constrained algorithms), I am highly skeptical of anyone claiming a computation problem is optimally solved by a laptop, and cannot be optimized with custom engineering.
- woah 13y agoGiant racks of RAM could be useful. Once someone's rig is no longer profitable for mining, they could turn around and open a MongoDB hosting service.
- lukifer 13y agoIt's about cost versus yield. Custom-designed ASIC chipsets are orders of magnitude more efficient at their intended task compared to general-purpose CPUs; whereas it's impossible to buy or make "special" RAM, and cheap RAM is something everybody wants for everything anyway.
- acangiano 13y agoCPU-mining however is also more profitable for malicious parties (e.g., botnets).
- Detrus 13y agoCan there be a coin for which ASICS will be general purpose enough?
- smtddr 13y agoTruth! I have a co-worker who had to jump on getting 2 of them from Newegg. They're nearly impossible to buy now unless you catch a 40% markup on ebay or something. I'm very sorry for all the gamers out there. This isn't fair to them. :( . I just purchased my LTC with good ol' USD. Besides Bitcoin, we both are betting that Litecoin will "go up to da moon!". Specifically, I expect LTC to reach $900 by end of 2014. I have no data whatsoever to back that up with other than the Litecoin-related announcements I sometimes see on various forums of small businesses accepting LTC along with BTC. I'm already holding some[1] and will probably buy a few more if I see another price drop. 1. http://ltc.block-explorer.com/address/LYmsP841obKKt9jkapj8iK4ohQyEXrk6AG http://ltc.block-explorer.com/address/LYmsP841obKKt9jkapj8iK...
- Kopion 13y agoDo you know of any good write-ups on buying LTC? I know there are plenty out there for BTC, but they don't always translate well to LTC
- kookiekrak 13y agobuy bitcoins from coinbase, transfer to btc-e, trade for litecoins, transfer to wallet and hold. or bitcoins -> cryptsy -> ltc -> wallet. i've traded on both sites and its worked out relatively well
- smtddr 13y agoYup, that's exactly how I did it. coinbase.com->BTC-E.com->OfflineWallet. And I'll add extra emphasis on making sure you transfer to an offline wallet(one that only you have the private-key for). I used https://liteaddress.org/ https://liteaddress.org/ to generate a unique pub/priv pair and as soon as the trade on BTC-E.com from BTC->LTC completed, I sent them to my newly created address. So if BTC-e.com gets hacked(it has happended before), nobody can steal my coins since the private-key is only on my machine. There's also https://www.bitaddress.org/ https://www.bitaddress.org/ for bitcoins. Also note that both these pages work completely offline. You can git clone the repos. Copy the files to a trusted-offline computer and generate the pub/priv there for extra confidence that the private-key never left your PC. ExtraNote: Do _NOT_ lose the private key. If you start to obtain lots of value in your coins, make backups of your wallet.dat or even better make sure you have the private-key on a piece of physical paper and properly secured in your home, in case of wallet.dat corruption/misplacement/deleted/etc. Don't end up like this: http://i.imgur.com/oJWtJjl.png http://i.imgur.com/oJWtJjl.png ExtraNote2: Ignore the chatbox(commonly called "trollbox") on btc-e.com. It's nonsense advice that'll lose your money, but it's funny to read. ;)
- nerfhammer 13y agocould an alt-coin be based on socially useful computation, e.g. folding@home?
- TillE 13y agoAs long as the work is hard to compute but quick to verify, sure. But you're probably going to run into the problem of having one central entity providing work units.
- hayksaakian 13y agoWell for the example: calculating primes does not require a central authority If the problem was purely mathematical in nature, that's where you don't really need authority.
- nwh 13y agoThat's not right. It must be hard to produce, easy to verify, and be deterministically linked to the previous POW. That last feature is critical.
- tedunangst 13y agoHash the folded protein with the previous POW. Problem solved, no? (I think the important thing is that you have to prove you didn't start the current pow until the previous work unit is done, right? Fortunately, there are lots of proteins to be folded. You can use the previous pow to select the parameters for the next pow. The hashes are uniformly distributed, so that will eventually range over the set of proteins.)
- nwh 13y agoNot at all. What's stopping me from hashing the result with something else? The base of the work must be in changeable. That's the whole point of POW in this case. If you want to rewrite history you need to do the POW again, in your system that doesn't need to happen.
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- nisa 13y agoFascinating. Slighty related: I've stumbled over Primecoin¹ while researching Litcoin mining. Primecoin uses prime chains as proof of work. Existing GPU implementations are slower than modern processors and I'm not sure about the feasability of FPGAs and ASICS. It's an interesting idea. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin
- Aldo_MX 13y agoApparently it didn't gain much traction here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6011094 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6011094
- kaonashi 13y agoThus demonstrating the sheer idiocy of crypto-currencies -- they burn real resources on what is essentially bookkeeping.
- smtddr 13y agoKeep in mind that the mining won't last forever. Bitcoin mining has already become all but unreachable[1] for normal household resources. Litecoin's blockchain is still new enough that it hasn't reached that point yet. Just like BTC, LTC was first just CPU, now it's GPU, then ASIC will show up then finally it'll just be pools for 0.00003 LTC a week or you'll need a freakin' Pixar+Dreamworks+ILM SuperPowered-RenderFarm or something that no ordinary person can reasonably afford access to. 1. http://www.ibtimes.com/secret-bitcoin-mine-chinese-facility-uses-boiling-liquid-cool-massive-computers-generate-bitcoins http://www.ibtimes.com/secret-bitcoin-mine-chinese-facility-...
- galactus 13y agoDoesnt the bitcoin network need mining to work? As far as I understand it, mining needs to be done forever, even if its impossible to collect new coins.
- smtddr 13y agoI don't think it does. Bitcoin can be split to the eighth decimal place, IIRC. If bitcoins become hard to get, the price should go up, then needing one whole btc to buy something should get less common. Or maybe you're right and years from now it'll all collapse and some other improved crypto-coin will have to take its place. I guess we'll find out, because there is a hard-limit on how many btcs can be obtained(21 million to be exact) by mining, so when that runs out...
- empraptor 13y agoFrom what I understand, the work that the miners do currently needs to continue for transactions to be added to the P2P ledger. This is why whoever wants to process a transaction will need to pay a fee that goes to the miner once Bitcoins stop getting generated to reward mining in 2016 or something. Otherwise, people who are in it for the profit will stop doing the "mining".
- polskibus 13y agoThat's the same in EU - amazon.co.uk shows 1-3 months delivery for R9 280X and in Poland the arrival date of new batch was already moved twice in the last 3 weeks. 3 weeks ago I placed an order fo R9 280X, the LTC difficulty is now 2x of what it was then. I think I will soon be cancelling the order as LTC price falls and the break even point is ca. 2 months instead of 1 month.
- Ihmahr 13y agoMeanwhile, I still can't mine ltc on my mac. EDIT: Both Asteroid and MacMiner don't work for me.
- lukifer 13y agoIt takes a little effort to compile yourself, but you absolutely can. https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer
- nwh 13y agoUnless you really want to have a dead GPU, that's a good thing.
- whyenot 13y agoSure you can. http://www.asteroidapp.com http://www.asteroidapp.com (cgminer and cpuminer are also in MacPorts)
- daddykotex 13y agoWhy is AMD Radeon GPUs more efficient to mine LiteCoins than Nvidia GPUs?
- kostyk 13y agoYa, good question.
- retroafroman 13y agoSee this discussion and linked article from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889027 It has to do with the different architecture allowing more 32-bit operations per second.
- hrkristian 13y agoIIRC, AMD GPUs support and are optimized for newer versions of OpenCL, while Nvidias Cuda solution is much (much) less effective for mining. At the very least a Google search with that in mind will get you the info you need.
- DennisP 13y agoOne reason is that AMD has a single-instruction bit rotate, which is used a lot in the hash function. Nvidia needs three instructions. Another is that AMD uses a large number of simple cores, and Nvidia has a smaller number of more complicated cores. The simple cores are all the hash function needs, so AMD can run more operations at once.
- smtddr 13y agoBecause this: https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison Apparently AMDs have been declared the winner in terms of work accomplished/resources-consumed ratio.
- haakon 13y agoIf Litecoin is anything like Bitcoin, here is a good explanation: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU#Why_are_AMD_GPUs_faster_than_Nvidia_GPUs.3F https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU...
- corin_ 13y agoCan confirm, working in hardware marketing in Europe, many retailers and AIB manufacturers are talking about Litecoin causing stock issues (and/or sales peaks, depending on which side they're looking at it from). Have even seen a major systems manufacturer I work with change up the GPUs in their SKUs based on availability issues.
- bede 13y agoFrom selling my 7950s earlier in the week on eBay UK, the going rate appears to be around 35% more than normal (Amazon) retail price. It's quite amusing, although I do feel for those caught in the CrossFire™ (sorry), who simply want a card to play video games.
- MatthewB 13y agoTook me about a week to find 2 of them on newegg. If you check newegg daily, you can probably find a couple here and there. You can possibly even find a name brand one.
- bsamuels 13y agoThis AMD GPU shortage isn't quite so terrible. I have a pair of AMD 5850s that I've been offered $250 each for. Never imagined those kinds of returns on 4 years old graphics hardware. I wonder if the demand for altcoin mining cards will end up becoming so great that Nvidia will modify their architecture to better facilitate it.
- EdJiang 13y agoAlternatively, you could try mining yourself if you're curious and want to learn about cryptocurrencies. I wrote a guide on how to get started with mining in <10 minutes (mostly for friends with gaming PCs), for some of my friends who were interested. http://edjiang.com/post/69758178501/mining-altcoins-for-fun-and-profit http://edjiang.com/post/69758178501/mining-altcoins-for-fun-...
- bluedino 13y agoCould AMD be using a significant amount of capacity for the new Mac Pro GPU's?
- udev 13y agoMac Pros probably don't sell in the numbers that the Apple laptops, iPads, or iPhones sell. But it is entirely possible that Apple feels the shortage of AMD GPUs right now, which could be one of the causes for the Mac Pro not being available.
- pat2man 13y agoThis is a cool side effect of GPU mining, this is all commodity hardware. In a year or less miners will need to upgrade their GPUs and will be selling their old GPUs. Gamers can then buy them up for cheap. With ASIC Bitcoin miners the hardware is useless once it becomes inefficient to mine on it.
- dllthomas 13y agoIt's going to be an interesting hiccup in bitcoin when we eventually have to migrate off of SHA256 and suddenly existing ASICs become irrelevant.
- ac29 13y agoClearly, this is in no way related to the busiest shopping period of the year. I'm sure there is some increased demand from cryptocoin mining, but really its pretty myopic if you think even half of the Nov/Dec demand for GPUs is going that way.
- aet 13y agoI see R9 290x on Amazon Prime...