[HN Gopher] GPU mining no longer profitable after Ethereum merge ___________________________________________________________________ GPU mining no longer profitable after Ethereum merge Author : geekinchief Score : 265 points Date : 2022-09-16 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com) | geekinchief wrote: | It 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 wrote: | A lot of heavily used cards, which were run at 100% load 24/7 | for who knows how long. What a deal. | staringback wrote: | Untrue, forcing more usage on a card while mining will | immensely increase power usage whilst hardly improving | hashrate. Mining GPUs are undervolted and arguably will be in | better condition than a hardcore gamer's card. | belval wrote: | Most "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 wrote: | I'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. | causi wrote: | Also the fan bearings, but again an easy fix. | latchkey wrote: | We don't have fans on the cards. | j0hnyl wrote: | Sounds like you run a large operation. Would you be | comfortable sharing what country you're in? | belval wrote: | I know there is a lot of negativity around mining | nowadays, but I'd love to hear more about the challenges | of running a large-scale operation. | latchkey wrote: | The largest challenge was tuning the cards for best | efficiency. | | Next up is just tracking inventory, making changes to the | system, etc... this is over 8k individual computers in | multiple data centers. | | We also added a different class of hardware which was | blade based... which increased the individual computers | significantly. Ended up with a very cool iPXE boot | solution for that. | | I also built some pretty cool software to manage it all. | It runs on the concept that each machine is an individual | worker that knows how to self-heal itself. Even just | distributing the software to so many machines reliably, | is a challenge. | | It has been a fun few years. | Workaccount2 wrote: | It's more temperature variation that kills cards. In a | conventional mining setup thermals are monitored and | accounted for. A card running at 70C 24/7 will last a long | time. Longer than a card that is constantly bouncing around | in temperature. | KennyBlanken wrote: | Miners overclock and overvolt the memory because there's a | substantial performance advantage to doing so with little | efficiency loss. This rapidly ages the memory. | | Also, 70c is well into the temperature range that will | significantly age capacitors. | Workaccount2 wrote: | I would hope performance GPUs are using 105C caps. At a | 30% derating they should last almost 10x as long as at | 105C. | latchkey wrote: | Also untrue. My cards have been running for _years_ in | shipping containers that are outdoors and go through full 4 | seasons (winter snows to summer heats). | | Edit: power supplies on the other hand... are a mess. | Mostly hand soldered in China... they fail randomly due to | the environment they run in. Sometimes, they "die", let | rest for a day or two and then fire back up and run just | fine. | TakeBlaster16 wrote: | Temperature changes outside don't translate to | temperature changes on the die. If the cards are running | 24/7 there will be no thermal shock to speak of since | they are always generating heat. | latchkey wrote: | Various machines reboot randomly _all the time_. Given | the amount of direct outdoor airflow that we push through | the machines (we don 't have fans on the GPUs), as soon | as the GPUs stop running, they cool down very very | quickly. That is the 'shock' you're looking for. | | Why do they reboot? We run on the edge of peak OC tuning | performance by default and I've built an automated tuner | which downclocks individual cards. This way, they get | more stable over time, while maintaining their best | possible performance. | | Occasionally, we would reset the tunings and then let | them auto tune back... this accounted for the seasonal | variances because hotter cards are more prone to | crashing. | mlyle wrote: | > That is the 'shock' you're looking for. | | It may still be a lot less 'shock' than normal use, where | players have a 15 minute round, then low use for a couple | minutes, etc, for hours.. and then turn the card off. | | Thermal cycling is known to be bad for electronics-- this | is well studied and documented. Sustained high | temperatures are also bad, but it's only really bad when | the temperatures are really high. | latchkey wrote: | I'm pretty sure my cards have gone through all extreme | different load situations that you could possibly make up | in your head. | | Certainly, thermal cycling can be an issue for | electronics in general, but my experience with these | specific cards says that it isn't an issue at all. At | least certainly not as much as something that should | dictate purchasing 'miner' cards or not. | jiggawatts wrote: | Since you would know about every possible failure mode... | | Do you know what causes NVIDIA cards to have their output | turn off (black screen) and the fan to go 100%? | | Been happening to my 2000-series recently but I don't | know what to try to fix: cooling, PSU, or capacitors... | latchkey wrote: | My primary experience is with AMD cards. | | My guess is a vbios or driver bug. You could also be | running into a tuning issue. GPUs are amazingly complex | beasts. | TakeBlaster16 wrote: | How often does the average machine reboot? If it's less | often than 24 hours you're still putting the card under | less thermal stress than someone who games for a half | hour every evening. I'd buy your used GPU over a gamer's | used GPU | latchkey wrote: | Sometimes it can reboot 50+ times in a row. Each box has | 12 gpus, so if I reset the tuning for the box, it can | take a while to find the optimal settings because the | voltage/clock tuning steps are very granular. | | Again, this isn't an actual issue and I have the data to | prove it. | TakeBlaster16 wrote: | Fair enough, I'll defer to your experience. Although if | you're power cycling that much, I take it back, maybe I | won't buy your cards :) | latchkey wrote: | No, you want my cards because I've proven that | reboots/thermal changes don't make any difference. =) | | You wouldn't want my cards, because they don't have fans. | Most people don't have adequate cooling for something | like that. | ben-schaaf wrote: | I'd be mostly worried about the fans. IIRC the thing that | really kills microchips is heat-cycles, so a continuous load | seems pretty good. | nomel wrote: | Is this actually a problem, besides needing to replace a | cheap fan? If the fans go out, they just maintain thermal | limit. These aren't like old cards, where they would melt. | vorpalhex wrote: | Don't run your hospital on them. Probably fine for gaming or | a little render farm. | whycombinetor wrote: | That's assuming the cost of electricity doesn't go up and the | value of POW coins doesn't go down. | neilv wrote: | I just got a nice GPU upgrade off eBay, and it looked like it | came from a farm/cluster. | sp332 wrote: | GPU prices _are_ tanking. They seem to be falling by the hour. | pawelduda wrote: | Hey, do you have any resource which tracks these, and | historical prices in real time? | usednet wrote: | Just look at posts on r/BuildAPCSales | [deleted] | wtallis wrote: | Long-term price trends: | 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 wrote: | Finally we beat inflation | doubled112 wrote: | If only I could eat a PCB. | dragontamer wrote: | Oh, you can. | | https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22944-pica | ajross wrote: | I know this is a drive-by joke, but in fact speculative | bubbles (crypto among them) were among the big drivers of | last year's inflation hump. Production was still suppressed | by the pandemic, lots of expenditures (travel, etc...) were | likewise suppressed, yet bank account balances were still | around and wanting to be spent. | | Broadly: what do you do when you can't go to Cancun like you | planned? You bet on Doge and GME, apparently. (Or you declare | yourself a "VC" and start handing out checks to 20-something | quarantined hackers.) Then you just end up with _more_ money | you can 't spend. | bagels wrote: | Why didn't people sell before the merge? Did they think it | wouldn't happen? | joecot wrote: | Given that crypto miners weren't willing to think ahead to | the consequences of countries needing to fire coal power | plants back up to meet their demand, or the problems with | continuing to crypto mine during multiple worldwide energy | crises, I am not surprised if they didn't think ahead to what | would happen if the Ethereum merge happened exactly as | planned. | miragecraft wrote: | Because they want to mine until the last second, supposedly | there will be a lot less ETH being generated after the merge | so each one will be worth more. | datalopers wrote: | > supposedly there will be a lot less ETH being generated | after the merge so each one will be worth more | | This has been hands-down the most ignorant view of the ETH- | merge proponents. The floor of the currency is tied to the | cost to mine. There's minimal cost to mine now. The price | will fall. It's not a supply vs demand problem. | DennisP wrote: | > The floor of the currency is tied to the cost to mine. | | This is not true because of difficulty adjustment. If the | price drops enough so miners are losing money, some of | them quit, the difficulty adjusts downward, and the | economics improve for the remaining miners. | epolanski wrote: | "worth" depends on price. | fortysixdegrees wrote: | Where can you see this? | | I've been looking on eBay but can't see any change. I'd like to | buy a lot of GPUs but don't know where to look | mmastrac wrote: | eBay is tough because the prices you see are the prices the | sellers want. I don't think it's in eBay's interest to show | you the real price. | albedoa wrote: | In the Advanced Search, you can include completed listings | and sold listings. This is a much better indicator of | market prices for consumer goods. | mmastrac wrote: | I didn't know this! Thanks | thrtythreeforty wrote: | If not on eBay, where, then? The list of "sold" cards on | eBay appear to me to be a pretty good starting point, but | if there's something I don't know, like "everyone on eBay | is a scalper" (which is not implausible) then where should | I be looking? | cercatrova wrote: | /r/hardwareswap | andrewla wrote: | There 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 wrote: | The 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. | pengaru wrote: | Does this mean the Monero/XMR network is about to explode in | size? | stiltzkin wrote: | Monero works with CPU mining. | pengaru wrote: | You'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. | humanwhosits wrote: | The miners will just start hyping the next most popular needs-gpu | coin | latchkey wrote: | None of that can support the amount of GPU compute. The price | would have to be the same as ETH and nothing is even close. | syntaxing wrote: | A 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 wrote: | 12gb 3060 if you can find one. That extra memory over 8gb will | try help for that kind of thing. | hedora wrote: | If 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. | ftufek wrote: | RTX 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. | malikNF wrote: | https://lambdalabs.com/gpu-benchmarks | illuminerdy wrote: | Great. 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 wrote: | It'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 wrote: | What kind of motherboard can accommodate such a set up? There | are not enough PCIe slots on many high end boards. | ftufek wrote: | It'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 wrote: | We 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 wrote: | Threadrippers 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. | pixelHD wrote: | Oh that sounds interesting! I'd love to read about it, please | post/write! | ftufek wrote: | Sure, will do, though it might take some time to finish | writing the blog post, you can get a preview of our | previous setup with 4x GPUs here: | https://twitter.com/ftufek/status/1569367127878139905. For | those that are curious, that's running a Threadripper | 3970x. | | It's not exactly a "clean" one, like a proper 2u/4u chassis | and server grade GPUs but it does the job for 70-90% | cheaper. | Cixelyn wrote: | would love to see the riser setup that you're using for such | a monster! | | we mostly gave up and just got barebones machines since the | cabling situation becomes pretty tricky, and the barebones | total cost is low relative to the GPUs anyways. | ftufek wrote: | I posted a link just below to twitter with an image of the | riser setup. That setup worked well for 4x, but for the 7x | we're moving the cards upside down and setting them up like | tree branches if you will. So the trunk/floor is the | motherboard and you get close to edges, the cards are | angled and use longer riser cables. | | The issue we had with barebones was cost and cooling, we | use 30$ racks from Target and hang the GPUs with metal zip | ties and a box fan from below, so they get lots of air and | we don't break the bank and can easily roll them around. | post_break wrote: | Without SLI no you can't. | nharada wrote: | Where'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 wrote: | What'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. | nharada wrote: | I might not mind for the right price, but I'd like to at | least know. Right now it seems that either (a) nobody is yet | selling used mining cards or (b) everyone selling used mining | cards is lying about it and trying to sell them at the same | prices as barely used cards. | smoldesu wrote: | > 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 wrote: | Linus tech tips had an episode on it, and largely found that | the performance degradation was insignificant: | 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 wrote: | Used mining cards are definitely worse, the VRMs are usually | destroyed and they're typically missing a couple VRAM memory | modules as well | GaryNumanVevo wrote: | to people downvoting this for some reason, it's real: | https://wccftech.com/beware-several-used-nvidia-geforce- | rtx-... | lostmsu wrote: | I would not trust anything coming from wccftech. That | particular article is probably just an advertisement for | some shitty software that promises to fix your broken | GPU. | frakt0x90 wrote: | The 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. | latchkey wrote: | It'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. | moomin wrote: | I don't think you can mine BTC with GPUs? Might be unaffected. | ThrowawayTestr wrote: | You sure it's GPU mining? Their website only mentions ASIC | mining. | [deleted] | banana_giraffe wrote: | Core 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/1839341/000119312522... | fluidcruft wrote: | I don't think GPU mining of bitcoin has been profitable for | quite some time. ASICs obliterated GPUs in $/hash. | nrdgrrrl wrote: | [deleted] | ikornaselur wrote: | I don't understand this well enough, but, why can't miners just | mine other coins? Was all GPU mining Etherium based? | | I know that bitcoin mining requires ASICS and GPUS can't compete | with that, but I just assumed miners are just mining one of many | possible coins, with Etherium being one of them. | HideousKojima wrote: | I would assume the problem is that a lot of alt-coins are built | on top of the Ethereum blockchain, and that most of those that | aren't are nowhere near as profitable to mine. | Aaronstotle wrote: | No other coins provide the profitability margins that ETH did, | so miners can switch to other POW coins, however the will be | paying more in electricity than whatever crypto they are | mining. | zeven7 wrote: | If 80% of the revenue was from Ethereum, and now that part | disappeared, 100% of the miners are left fighting over the 20% | that's left. | ftufek wrote: | Looking forward to all the creative AI startups using these cheap | cards to build cool products. We've been waiting a long for the | merge to finally happen. | | I can't believe that you can buy a card that'll do 15+ Tflops for | like 500$. | generj wrote: | Thank goodness. Hopefully they aren't able to grift another coin | up enough to be worth mining. | yieldcrv wrote: | If 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 wrote: | That'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 wrote: | Didn't this already happen several times in the history of | cryptocurrency? Then GPUs because scarce again when the | price of them goes up. | yieldcrv wrote: | yes 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. | velmu wrote: | Yes. Nothing unique. | LazyMans wrote: | Yeah, looks like it's all trash now. | https://whattomine.com/gpus | MuffinFlavored wrote: | I see peak Profit 24h at $0.29 | | What was it before ETH PoW -> PoS merge? | | And is 0.1 $/kWh average/normal? | | Let me pull up my latest electric bill (which I almost have | never looked at/have on autopay): | | New Charges | | Rate: RS-1 RESIDENTIAL SERVICE Base charge: $8.99 | | Non-fuel: (First 1000 kWh at $0.073710) (Over 1000 kWh at | $0.083710) $76.74 | | Fuel: (First 1000 kWh at $0.034870) (Over 1000 kWh at | $0.044870) $36.49 | | Electric service amount 122.22 | | 20.99 in taxes / surcharges | | Total $143.21 | | $143.21 for 1036 kWh in a 30 day timespan | | 0.138 $/kWh with taxes and fees I guess for me, I'm sure if I | was doing crazy ASIC stuff at my house they'd charge me | more/the rate would become less favorable | | Looks like mining BTC would net be $0.85 a day profit with | some kind of ASIC. $310/yr. Yikes. | ComputerGuru wrote: | It doesn't matter if its trash so long as its fungible trash | at a profitable price. i.e. the situation is OK for now but | as soon as the market adjusts to the glut of GPU miners | suddenly minting no-name coins no one really wants (and the | novelty wears off) those prices are going to drop like a | rock. | | Most of these coins only have value as scams that you could | prop up then cash out by exchanging for BTC or ETH; so long | as the "new coin of the day" hype train exists there will be | a way to make money off of GPU mining. I guess there will | always be suckers in this unregulated market. | downrightmike wrote: | Head to the Winchester, grab a pint and wait for those GPU prices | to come down | amelius wrote: | Especially now the energy prices go up. | Macha wrote: | To some extent this has already happened, as the recent crash | in the GPU market from its highs a few months back, but | obviously we did see some miners hold on to the bitter end, but | it's not clear how much difference that inventory will make. | serg_chernata wrote: | Love 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 wrote: | If 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. | asciimike wrote: | 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. | capableweb wrote: | > 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, and seems there | is more offers than usual, currently ~180 instances | available for rent. | KennyBlanken wrote: | > 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... | | 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. | sofixa wrote: | > AMD are the ones who are really fucked; their cards suck, | and nobody bought them out of choice but desperation. | | Do they really suck? From some benchmarks i saw there are | cards comparable to 3060-3070s (the 6800 IIRC) which is | solid midrange competition. | MatthiasPortzel wrote: | This 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. | BaseballPhysics wrote: | So regarding your first point, the merge has been coming for | years now. I suspect the folks who kept mining and didn't dump | their cards earlier were basically making the bet that the | merge would fail or get delayed once again. | | If they had been right, it would've meant more mining rewards | going to fewer miners. So it's an understandable bet. They just | bet wrong. | LazyMans wrote: | Yes, also, if they acquired these cards at or below MSRP. Now | they can dump these GPUs and only take a loss of 10-20% on | the hardware. Much less than the profits made while mining. | [deleted] | sp332 wrote: | Ethereum 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 wrote: | The marginal gain from a few days/weeks of mining might not | outweigh the drop in value of the hardware. | depingus wrote: | But 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. | colinmhayes wrote: | gamers might not be paying attention to the merge | situation. | ajhurliman wrote: | There'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. | coffee_beqn wrote: | I mined for a few weeks out of curiosity and I figured it | would work as a heater downstairs since it was winter. I | would think that the best move was to sell your GPU about a | month before it all ends since the actual mining doesn't make | enough money to offset the resale value plummet. | djhworld wrote: | I'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. | Animats wrote: | NVidia stock down 42% in last year. | devman0 wrote: | Lots of tech is down, the NASDAQ is down 25% YoY. NVDA is | certainly down a lot, but so is INTC for instance. | m4jor wrote: | You can still get paid to crack hashes :) | donmcronald wrote: | I 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 wrote: | What's the step after asics for bitcoin mining? | ElevenLathe wrote: | quantum miners? | [deleted] | retrac wrote: | ASIC 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. | Gordonjcp wrote: | FIIIIINALLY I can buy a decent GPU to edit video with, which is | far more important than making pretend number money. | shadowgovt wrote: | Among 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. | godelski wrote: | > Fiat currency has issues, but at least a government has the | authority to conjure money out of nothing and hand it to the | poor. | | This is why I'd rather see development of privacy coins, like | zcash, and less concerned with the decentralization issue (I've | yet to see a project actually address centralization or even | acknowledge the issue you're bringing up: momentum). We're | moving away from a cashless society and while that has a lot of | great benefits it also has a lot of detriments. So why not have | digital cash then? ZKPs for transactions. | | If you want to promote democracy you should also want to | decrease the ability for authoritarians to arise, which in our | modern era means how much data they can get their hands on and | abuse. There's common cop-outs like how will taxes work etc, | but society ran pretty smoothly on cash before. Companies still | have to report incomes and salaries. We can still do | consumption taxes. So we have our income and consumption easily | solved. I'm even fine with a small transaction fee, which I | know others aren't, but we already pay this in the world of | credit cards (2-4%). I think we could really bring down the | Visa/Mastercard tax (maybe something like 0.1%/0.5%?) and it | would all be a win for everyone. | | It is clear to me that cryptocurrencies aren't going to get us | this world, so let's start thinking about other means. | thayne wrote: | > Fiat currency has issues, but at least a government has the | authority to conjure money out of nothing and hand it to the | poor. | | Maybe, but it is much more common to summon money out of | nothing and give it to the rich. At least in the US this | happens in the form of buying securities from entities that | hold them, which from what I understand is kind of similar to | proof of stake (you stake some of your currency by buying a | security for a chance to get more when you sell it). | __blockcipher__ wrote: | Just to give context to others, it sounds like you're talking | about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing | the-anarchist wrote: | You, Sir, have clearly never been poor and required that | handout money you're claiming to exist. | pessimizer wrote: | Either this entire subthread is a confused reaction to | someone who expressed a belief that quick transfer payments | for the poor are good, and the fact that they couldn't be | done in a bitcoin economy is an argument against bitcoin, or | I'm the confused one. | bee_rider wrote: | Countries with social safetynets do exist, even if we don't | live in one. | nightski wrote: | Social safety nets are one thing. But in those countries | don't fool yourself capital still breeds capital. Also the | U.S. _does_ have social safety nets. In fact the largest | source of government spending is on them. I 'm not saying | we don't need more, but we can't dismiss what does exist. | derac wrote: | The OP didn't claim any currency is immune to that. | Actually, noone did. | shadowgovt wrote: | I'm thinking more along the lines of the giant stimulus the | United States cut to almost everyone during the COVID-19 | pandemic. Everyone who paid taxes just got a check in the | mail. | engineer_22 wrote: | The handout went to the wealthy in the form of Payroll | Protection Loans that never were required to be disbursed | to employees or repaid. And Wall Street got a huge multi- | trillion-dollar boost. | | The stimulus checks were a door prize. | brightball wrote: | PPP loans were required to be paid out or paid back. | | Issuing those loans prevented nationwide layoffs and | insurance termination for millions of people. | pessimizer wrote: | https://www.pandemicoversight.gov/data-interactive- | tools/dat... | | _Update: 10.2 million PPP loans were forgiven. Here 's | why._ | | > If borrowers use at least 60% of the loan to cover | payroll within 8 or 24 weeks after receiving the loan, | they can submit an application to have the loan forgiven. | | ----- | | edit: if anybody can clear this up for me, I'd appreciate | it, but what could it possibly mean for "at least 60% of | the loan to cover payroll?" | | Does that mean that the company has to spend its way into | insolvency first, then after becoming insolvent pay out | 60% of the loan to employees, or does it simply mean that | an employer's payroll has to sum to at least 60% of the | loan within 24 weeks, no matter how much cash the | employer has? | | It seems like the difference between 1) handing out gifts | to employers of up to 40% of their 24-week payroll, or 2) | handing out gifts to employers that are up to 166% of | their 24-week payroll. But I'm not a math scientist. | | Either way, making direct cash payments to employers in | proportion to their payrolls is as stark an example of | welfare for the rich as you could cite. That's like | paying money to people in proportion to their total | stockholdings, as long as they promise to spend at least | 60% of those payments to buy more stock. Even worse in | the execution, where tons of the smallest employers and | the self-employed were left out in favor of companies | with high-powered accounting firms or lawyers on staff. | nightski wrote: | There were limits on what you could spend the other 40% | on (defined categories of expenses). You could spend 100% | on payroll if you wanted, but it had a minimum of 60%. | The other 40% had to be used for specific things such as | building maintenance, etc... No owner could take a | distribution of these funds (directly at least, although | if this loan allowed them to be profitable they could of | taken those profits). | | Businesses that wanted to be legit put this money into a | specific account (in their accounting system) and tracked | all expenses against that specific account for | auditability. | | The only loans that had less strict rules were for sole | proprietors/self employed businesses. But the size of the | loan was capped pretty low relatively. | | Of course this program was highly flawed. But it was | thrown together quickly in response to the pandemic. | Personally I wish our government would already have plans | in place ahead of time so everything wasn't done so | hastily and last minute causing massive fraud. | pessimizer wrote: | What I'm trying to figure out is if they had to spend | their own money before spending the loan. Otherwise it's | strange to say that the money went to either payroll or | "specific things such as building maintenance." The money | went to the employer, and in return they wouldn't lay off | so many employees that their 24-week payroll would fall | below 60% of the amount of the loan (and a possible | requirement that they'd have to spend the difference | between the amount of the loan and the 24-week payroll on | capital improvements?) | | Did they at least have to prove that it would be | financially beneficial for them to do layoffs? | | > Of course this program was highly flawed. But it was | thrown together quickly in response to the pandemic. | | Eh, this isn't a deep dive, these are basic questions | about the concept. Not that a deep dive wouldn't be | warranted with tens or hundreds of billions at stake. | brightball wrote: | The flip side of this is that if the loans weren't given | and everybody is closed for lockdown, companies are | either firing everybody or going out of business. | | If that had happened, all of those people would have been | applying for unemployment, COBRA, Obamacare plans, | Medicaid, etc as well. It was more a question of which | Federal accounts to drain. By giving businesses a clear | path to making sure they could keep paying people | regardless of whether money was coming in from customers, | that was avoided. In order to get business owners to take | it though, you had to basically give it to them. | | It was highly variable which businesses could find a way | to keep operating in the conditions of lock down and | COVID protocols. Remote work was easy. Running a bar was | not. | | Even then you also had exorbitantly high unemployment | payments for a long period of time. It wasn't as if the | PPP loans were the only money being injected. | pessimizer wrote: | I'm asking specifics, you're giving me ideology. Unless | you have some evidence that people had to prove that they | would it would be more profitable to layoff/close unless | they got the loan, which is what I've asked. | | > If that had happened, all of those people would have | been applying for unemployment, COBRA, Obamacare plans, | Medicaid, etc as well. | | If we don't prefer direct aid over middlemen, why don't | we route all social programs through middlemen? I'd like | to volunteer, as long as I'm allowed a 40% cut off the | top. | | I have no objection to the government sending money to | people who were made unemployed by covid. I have little | objection to the government propping up marginal | businesses that serve a valuable purpose in better times, | but would otherwise fail during covid without aid, | although I feel it was largely a landlord subsidy. | | I'm asking a process question. | nightski wrote: | As for certifying whether your business needed it or not | you had to make a statement saying it was necessary for | you to continue the business on the loan app. But it was | an honor system. It will be up to the government to | search out & prosecute fraudsters. | pessimizer wrote: | I didn't ask any questions about fraud. | | edit: thanks for the edit. | [deleted] | stonemetal12 wrote: | https://www.sba.gov/funding- | programs/loans/covid-19-relief-o... | | To get your loan forgiven, you had to take a loan and | show documentation of having spent loan amount of dollars | on qualified expenses. There is no "must prove you were | saved by the loan" requirement. | pessimizer wrote: | That's what I figured. | belltaco wrote: | >Everyone who paid taxes just got a check in the mail | | There was an income limit of $75,000, thats not close to | everyone. | sam0x17 wrote: | It really wasn't giant. It was less than the average cost | of one month of rent in most locations | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | BS, especially since the 3-time IRS checks were just one | small part of the stimulus. The enhanced unemployment | lasted for months, and the increased amount alone was | more than many people's regular paychecks. | shadowgovt wrote: | Precisely. I'm trying to imagine how one would have | implemented something similar atop the cryptocurrencies | I'm familiar with and coming up empty. | | Stabilizing an economy when a national quarantine had | shut down production and trade is one of those challenges | that's much easier to solve in a centralized fashion. | calculatte wrote: | And that's one of the reasons supply chain issues | continue today as well as the record inflation. | sam0x17 wrote: | For middle-class workers who didn't lose their job it's | as I said, just a little bit less than one month's rent. | Definitely not enough to compensate for increased cost of | living and inflation across the board, especially now. | salawat wrote: | Correct. When you are poor, a one time check does | nothing. Your issue is lack of cash flow. | | You want to talk really uplifting those in poverty, we | need to talk stipend. | nomel wrote: | I would assume the problem they have, and that we should all | have, is the source of the money, which is leaving the | printer running through the night. | belltaco wrote: | MS has a patent application on PoL (proof of life) so that | crypto can be distributed to every human being that wants it. | | https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-patent-describes-tracki... | dezmou wrote: | "By tracking brainwaves when someone watches an advert, | Microsoft hopes to use the data generated as a "proof-of- | work." " Look like an episode of black mirror | DennisP wrote: | The government authority doesn't go away just because | cryptocurrency exists. Unless cryptocurrency somehow replaces | fiat entirely, which seems unlikely. And even if that happened, | governments could do the same by way of taxes. | hitpointdrew wrote: | > Unless cryptocurrency somehow replaces fiat entirely, which | seems unlikely. | | No the central banks of the world are all working on fiat | crypto, so we'll get the worst of both worlds. | dsr_ wrote: | "fiat crypto", or if you prefer, digital currency, will | neither be proof-of-work nor proof-of-stake. Neither | mechanism is needed when there is a single trusted | authority. | hitpointdrew wrote: | lovich wrote: | Relative to random individuals it seems like a democratic | form of government at least, has several advantages | | Did society fall apart when current fiat currency with | the government as the central trusted authority was | adopted? | [deleted] | codehalo wrote: | A "single authority", not a "single trusted authority". | px43 wrote: | PoS pays the people who run the infrastructure. Someone has to | run it, and it's trivial for anyone to participate. If you have | 5 dollars you can stake it in the PoS network and earn rewards. | The barrier for entry in the legacy financial system is way way | higher. Have you ever applied for a banking license? | BbzzbB wrote: | False equivalence, why is your equivalent to staking | (investing crypto) applying for a banking license rather than | opening a brokerage account (investing dollars)? With the | advent of fractional shares anyone can buy $5 of stocks too, | but it requires zero technical know-how. | nightski wrote: | When you stake, you are still processing transactions and | creating blocks/forming consensus similar to what mining | did. This isn't really comparable to investing in a | security. | | Just because you can join a staking pool which often takes | a cut and makes it easy doesn't invalidate what is actually | going on. | BbzzbB wrote: | Sending $5 to a third party pool so they stake it in your | stead under the promise it remains your $5 does not make | you a bank. It's more like sending $5 to Robinhood so | they buy $BAC in your stead under the (legally backed up) | promise it remains your $5. IMO. | nightski wrote: | That's not really staking. It's just lending your eth to | a staker which is completely different. | belltaco wrote: | >PoS pays the people who run the infrastructure | | Both Ethereum's and Bitcoin's regular nodes don't make any | money. | jsemrau wrote: | You are conflating several topics. (Background: through | Ternary we run the Red Bike validator nodes on Cardano). | | 1. If you want to run a validator node, i.e. run the | architecture you need to have 32 ETH to be eligible to | provide this service. And it does not mean immediately that | you will earn something. https://ethereum.org/en/staking/ | | 2. If I stake the equivalent of 5 USD I will likely get a 5% | return on it per year making it much less interesting from an | investment perspective given volatility and opportunity cost. | | 3. Staked funds are locked and can't be used anywhere else or | for anything else. At least GPUs can be used for mining AND | general purpose computing. | | 4. It is much easier to go to any random money exchanger and | go USD/EUR or USD/JPY | | 5. Getting a retail bank account can be done in a matter of | minutes online. | sterlind wrote: | you have to have 32 ETH, which is around $50K USD, but agreed | other than that. | sudhirj wrote: | Pooling should be possible, same as mining earlier. Collect | ETH from a bunch of people and split the gains by ratio. | px43 wrote: | You need 32 ETH to run your own staking node, but there are | many options for liquid staking, which can be done with any | denomination of ETH. | shadowgovt wrote: | [edit: misunderstood the initial statement; disregard the | part that was previously here] | | > The barrier for entry in the legacy financial system is way | way higher. Have you ever applied for a banking license? | | One doesn't have to have a banking license to use the local | fiat currency of one's nation (basically, one is born into | it). And one must do almost nothing to get a check from the | government if they decide to stimulate the economy by handing | out money to those who showed they had very little on their | last tax return. | px43 wrote: | You don't need to be a staker to use Ethereum either. You | can also stake with a few clicks on a website if you're | using a web3 capable browser. You don't need to buy | anything fancy or even open up a terminal if you don't want | to. | | If you're into UBI type stuff, yeah, there are multiple UBI | projects on Ethereum https://www.proofofhumanity.id | | There are a ton of other projects that allow people to | share storage space, compute, art, information, etc to earn | cryptocurrencies. People contribute what they can to the | network, and are compensated for their efforts. Projects | like gitcoin are raising millions of dollars for people who | volunteer to provide public goods, from performing security | audits on large open source projects, to cleaning plastic | out of rivers (https://gitcoin.co/grants/). Seems to me | like the Ethereum ecosystem is far more altruistic than | many current governments. | candiddevmike wrote: | How will PoS not deflate the currency to zero? Why would you | spend eth at all when you can make more money holding it via | guaranteed returns? | Drakim wrote: | Couldn't somebody ask the same about getting interest rate | on their savings? Why spend money when you can use the | money to grow more money? | [deleted] | dmarcos wrote: | Yep. Parking your ETH in a staking pool much better than in a | traditional bank saving accounts. There's a proliferation of | services that make it easier and easier and can put any | amount. | spywaregorilla wrote: | My bank account didn't drop 63% YTD though | calculatte wrote: | 1 ETH = 1 ETH still. | blep_ wrote: | The numbers are irrelevant over time. Can you buy the | same things for 1 ETH now as you could then? | kodyo wrote: | Dollars have similar problems, for more depraved reasons. | calculatte wrote: | That all depends on the time points you are comparing to. | 1 ETH now is $1400. 3 years ago it was $180. | | Can you buy the same things for 1 USD as you could then? | (no) | blep_ wrote: | No, but it's close. USD's swings are a hell of a lot less | wild, even in high-inflation years. | NotYourLawyer wrote: | Or 100% when it got hacked. | kelseyfrog wrote: | My loss, I guess | glennvtx wrote: | Nor did it go up thousands of percent over the past | decade | kmeisthax wrote: | This isn't unfortunate, this is deliberate. Bitcoin was birthed | dripping in the amniotic fluid of right-libertarian ideology. | Capital-breeds-capital isn't so much a side effect as much as | it is the deliberate goal of capitalism: use money to make more | money. And the core of right-libertarian ideology is to more or | less let the capitalists do what they want. | | This isn't exclusive to capitalism; there are other ideologies | that work this way. However, they are ever more intolerably | authoritarian than capitalism. Capitalists at least offer the | promise of growing the economic universe alongside themselves - | you can get 10x richer by taking 50% _less profit_ in some | businesses. But fascists, criminals, and dictators also play | this game - not to create wealth and grow the size of the pie, | but to shrink it so their share gets bigger. And without a | government to enforce rules, capitalists will be out-moded, | out-gunned, and out-played by thieves of various stripes every | time. | | Making this worse is the fact that Bitcoin mining is inherently | and deliberately zero-sum. It _has_ to be, because it pays in | inflation (block subsidy) and confiscation (transaction fees). | So capitalists can offer no wealth creation here. | | In other words, Bitcoin is how authoritarians trolled right- | libertarians into building and buying into a system that | creates the thing they hate. | [deleted] | chef0 wrote: | A deflationary system awards each market participant with an | equitable increase of purchasing power relative to the increase | in demand for earning more units through value creation. I'd | imagine that would shift some social responsibility from being | more centralized to being more decentralized. The Gini Index | over time has only been trending up toward 100, signaling a | growing environment of inequality. Having said that I do | believe that we tend to oscillate between central and | decentralized governance of social responsibility and | technology innovation around how we transfer value (money) | enables a shift away from one end of the spectrum. | lottin wrote: | > A deflationary system awards each market participant with | an equitable increase of purchasing power relative to the | increase in demand for earning more units through value | creation. | | What do you mean? Holding a currency involves zero value | creation. | jalino23 wrote: | nothing stops crypto PoS with governance to hand money to the | poor as well. | klodolph wrote: | With fiat, there are at least some incentives. Not perfect | incentives, but incentives just the same. Not sure what would | incentivize crypto here. | bee_rider wrote: | If 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. | skybrian wrote: | Depending on what you mean by money, there are unsolved | problems. You need some kind of layer that maps real people | to accounts, or people can just create lots of accounts for | unlimited money. | | There was some crypto startup that wanted to do this and was | going to different cities and doing retina scans. I wonder | what happened to them? | | I suppose you could outsource it by donating to GiveDirectly, | but that would require conversion to real money and then (by | GiveDirectly) to mobile phone payments. In that case, the | cryptocurrency isn't solving much of the problem. | bee_rider wrote: | Seems like an interesting idea to spur adoption of the | currency. | iLoveOncall wrote: | "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. | dlivingston wrote: | > [crypto is] not immune to the general capital-breeds-capital | effect. | | Is there a currency - even theoretical - where 'capital-breeds- | capital' is _not_ a side-effect? | shadowgovt wrote: | Fiat currencies can defend against that phenomenon via wealth | redistribution: simply creating more currency and handing it | to the poor. | fwip wrote: | Most currencies don't have it baked it into the core workings | of the currency. | | In crypto, possessing money generates money, without | investing it or putting the money "to work." This would be | like if the dollar bills in your wallet periodically grew | another dollar. | oumua_don17 wrote: | I 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. | ant6n wrote: | Seriously. If they'd launched a year ago they could've perhaps | prevented their stock tanking and future being totally in | doubt. | latchkey wrote: | https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/04/intel-doubles-d... | armchairhacker wrote: | If 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)? | cstejerean wrote: | I picked up a 3090 Ti for this purpose given the price drop. | The 24 GB of VRAM is hard to beat. | ftufek wrote: | Not much difference between 3090 or 3090 ti though, while the | price is usually 30% higher. | wincy wrote: | The prices are identical now from what I've seen. | cstejerean wrote: | Mostly because the 3090 Ti was discounted to $1,000, at | which point it's about the same as the non-Ti version. | barrkel wrote: | The 3090 Ti also pumps out a lot more heat. | learndeeply wrote: | This 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). | hedora wrote: | I'd consider renting these, especially if you are just | getting started: | | 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 wrote: | Lots 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. | hedora wrote: | How do you carbon offset? | | We have a bunch of diseased pine trees. Assuming we don't | have enough time to cut them down and burn them in the | next 12 months, and that I am unscrupulous, I could sell | you carbon credits through one of the bigger exchanges. | You would never know, and it would be completely above | board. | | John Oliver had a particularly depressing segment on this | recently. | | (Totally off topic, but I'd love to biochar them instead. | Using them for lumber and shipping them offsite are non- | starters. Any ideas, anyone?) | asciimike wrote: | See above post, but the TL;DR: is "we capture methane | that would otherwise be flared." | | Agreed that a lot of carbon offsets look like, "we were | going to cut this section of the rainforest down, but if | you pay us, we won't do that for X period of time." This | is _actually_ reducing existing emissions. | douto wrote: | How can this be carbon-reducing? That sounds like a | dubious marketing claim. | asciimike wrote: | TL;DR: we run data centers on-site at oil wells and take | natural gas that would otherwise be flared (it can't be | economically transported as natural gas in a pipeline or | turned into electricity and transported) and combust it | completely. Methane is a significantly more potent | greenhouse gas than CO2, so it ends up being a net | reduction in emissions vs what's currently happening. | | https://www.crusoeenergy.com/digital-flare-mitigation has | some more information. | pbronez wrote: | Cool idea. Tried to join your waitlist but the form | throws errors. Could be my security measures, but I'm on | mobile safari, toggled off all content blockers and still | had an error. | asciimike wrote: | Odd, I just tested on Safari mobile and it went through | without issues. Mind sending me an email at mike at | crusoecloud dot com and we can get you set up? | UncleOxidant wrote: | Won't 3090 prices go down a good bit after the 4xxx series | cards start coming out in a couple of months? | kajecounterhack wrote: | My guess is "not as much as most folks seem to think" | | Comparable 24gb vram 4xxx cards are also 1 slot bigger and | many watts hungrier. If you want to be able to use a 800w | PSU + 3 slots, and just need 24gb vram for say, running | inference on a big diffusion model, then 3090 is still | going to be your only option for a while. | | They're pretty well priced right now, at $1k. If you need | one, not much reason to wait, your time is probably worth | more than saving a couple hundred bucks. | KaoruAoiShiho wrote: | Is there no consumer option bigger than 24gb next gen? | tootyskooty wrote: | The 4090ti is rumoured to be 48GB [1], but who knows when | that will release or how much it will cost. If you really | need extra VRAM and don't mind longer inference, older | used Tesla cards are an option. A used Tesla V100 32GB | can be sometimes found on Ebay for 1500. | | [1] https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce- | rtx-4090-ti.c3... | KaoruAoiShiho wrote: | Thank you great tip on V100. | InvaderFizz wrote: | It appears as though the 4090 will be 24GB, but that card | may also be almost $2k. | | Used 3090s on eBay are $800 all day long. That price may | drop a bit in the next week or so, but not much, as that | 24GB of VRAM is the main draw for that over a 3080Ti. | pbronez wrote: | Lambda Labs crunched the numbers in Feb 2022 [0]. They | concluded: | | """ So, which GPUs to choose if you need an upgrade in early | 2022 for Deep Learning? We feel there are two yes/no questions | that help you choose between A100, A6000, and 3090. These three | together probably cover most of the use cases in training Deep | Learning models: | | Do you need multi-node distributed training? If the answer is | yes, go for A100 80GB/40GB SXM4 because they are the only GPUs | that support Infiniband. Without Infiniband, your distributed | training simply would not scale. If the answer is no, see the | next question. | | How big is your model? That helps you to choose between A100 | PCIe (80GB), A6000 (48GB), and 3090 (24GB). A couple of 3090s | are adequate for mainstream academic research. Choose A6000 if | you work with a large image/language model and need multi-GPU | training to scale efficiently. An A6000 system should cover | most of the use cases in the context of a single node. Only | choose A100 PCIe 80GB when working on extremely large models | """ | | [0] https://lambdalabs.com/blog/best-gpu-2022-sofar/ | papercrane wrote: | You should get a Nvidia card with as much VRAM as possible. A | 12 GB RTX 3060 is probably the most cost efficient at the | moment. | | I don't think AMD is really viable for ML. Nvidia has the mind | share in that segment, so nearly all tools will work with | Nvidia, while very few support AMD. | hedora wrote: | Not disagreeing, but my < $300 8GB AMD runs stable diffusion | just fine. | capableweb wrote: | Guessing "just fine" is relative, but care to put a prompt | + the settings you use, and how many it/s you get? I'm | getting max ~8it/s on a 2080ti and I think even that feels | slow sometimes so looking to upgrade my GPU now, curious to | see what "just fine" means for you here. | hedora wrote: | 100 seconds per batch of five (1.7it/s); default settings | (512x512, etc) | | Performance seems to be prompt-independent; I'm using a | docker container that seems to have disappeared, this | modified version for amd cards with less than 10gb: | | https://github.com/basujindal/stable-diffusion | | and this workaround: | | https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1756#iss | uec... | | Anyway, don't "upgrade" to my budget AMD card. :-) | capableweb wrote: | > 100 seconds per batch of five (1.7it/s); default | settings (512x512, etc) | | What settings precisely? Scale, steps and sampler being | the most important ones (together with size, but you | already shared that :) ) | Uehreka wrote: | Stable Diffusion is the kind of phenomenon where people are | actually contributing other backends (like the one for the | M1 GPU). That's not super common though, a lot of the time | if you want to get a network running you need an Nvidia | card so you can use CUDA (it's not even about hardware | performance, just that CUDA and CUDNN and so on are written | by Nvidia for their GPUs). | paulgb wrote: | I have a dumb question: when someone implements a backend | like mps for stable diffusion, what are they actually | implementing? Shims for Nvidia proprietary stuff that | doesn't exist outside of CUDA? | orbital-decay wrote: | Keep in mind that bigger models are coming. And to use all | features of even the current SD version, you need a lot of | VRAM - 12GB for textual inversion (making it learn your own | style), 30GB+ for Dreambooth (sort of micro-finetuning that | doesn't need a GPU farm and a huge tagged dataset), a lot | for img2img on a high-res picture. It also massively | benefits from the large amount of compute cores. | | Right now, the bigger and faster, the better. And there's | really no limit of the computing power you can throw at | various tasks to make them run better. It almost looks like | 90s again. | 34679 wrote: | There 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. | Smithalicious wrote: | Prediction: this is not gonna lead to even close to the levels of | cpu price drops that people expect, especially not for new GPUs. | iLoveOncall wrote: | GPUs are already readily available at MSRP, I don't see what | drop would be expected in the non-used market. | LazyMans wrote: | For the last two years, the highest end cards which were good | for mining were certainly not available at MSRP in the US. | nomel wrote: | > GPUs are already readily available at MSRP | | I don't think maintaining original MSRP, a month before next | gen release, is all that great. | rightbyte wrote: | I'll take that any day over what I paid for my 3060 at the | time. | nightski wrote: | They are far below. The 3090 original MSRP was $1500 and | you can find them brand new for under $1000 now. | holoduke wrote: | Prices are already down to acceptable levels. | LazyMans wrote: | For the RX 6800xt, prices already dropped by over 50% on ebay | in the last month. | TrainedMonkey wrote: | I 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 | stuntkite wrote: | There 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. | shrimpx wrote: | Aren't they immediately going to start mining other PoW coins | with those GPUs? | giarc wrote: | I saw that argument on twitter when talking about the energy | reduction for ETH mining. Someone commented that it won't | change because they will just focus their GPUs on some other | coin. | apeace wrote: | TFA is pointing out that other GPU-based POW chains have | become unprofitable. Partly because of the massive influx | of GPUs increasing the difficulty of those chains, and | partly because those coins are just not worth as much as | ETH. If that's true, then lots of miners are going to be | shutting down their GPUs and selling them. | latchkey wrote: | Power companies are incentivized to sell power. | | They will just find other buyers. | elil17 wrote: | Perhaps you are right about power companies wanting to | sell more power (although it seems like that is not the | case for the marginal kWh given all that power companies | do to incentive energy efficiency for their customers). | | But even so, at least that power would go to something | useful (keeping buildings comfortable, purifying water, | who knows what) rather than being burned in the crypto- | pit. | latchkey wrote: | I'm getting downvoted on my original comment, sigh HN. | | > Perhaps you are right about power companies wanting to | sell more power (although it seems like that is not the | case for the marginal kWh given all that power companies | do to incentive energy efficiency for their customers). | | It is literally called a power _company_. They offer | special rates for large customers. That alone creates a | marketplace. | | > But even so, at least that power would go to something | useful (keeping buildings comfortable, purifying water, | who knows what) rather than being burned in the crypto- | pit. | | Did you have a choice in where that power went to begin | with? No. | | "No one has the moral authority to tell you what is a | good or bad use of energy (ex: watching the Kardashians)" | -- https://twitter.com/danheld/status/1479135584685854729 | ?lang=... | simondotau wrote: | The parent to your post never asserted "moral authority" | around how power is used, only that they think this shift | is a good thing in their view. | latchkey wrote: | > _at least that power would go to something useful_ | | I consider that a moral opinion. | simondotau wrote: | Ultimately it wasn't the grandparent that asserted that | proof-of-work Etherium mining wasn't useful, it was the | Etherium blockchain community themselves -- which is why | they have stopped doing it. | | It's not a "moral opinion" to accept someone else's | assessment of the utility of their own actions. | | Is it a "moral opinion" to state a preference that crude | oil is more useful when refined and injected into an ICE | vehicle than if it's burned on site in an oil well fire? | chowells wrote: | That tweet thread is 100% wrong. I absolutely do have the | moral authority to tell everyone that burning billions of | joules per day in a bank of resistive elements and then | dumping the heat directly into the atmosphere is morally | wrong. It's not even a tough question. It is clearly a | malicious (hypothetical) act being done only to hurt | others. | | So if there's an unambiguous case of morally abhorrent | energy use, everything else is up for debate. That tweet | thread goes off the rails early, as it's clear the author | is financially incentivized to not understand the | position he is arguing against. So it's no surprise the | argument is nonsense. | latchkey wrote: | It opens a can of worms. If you start telling people how | they should or should not use any form of energy, then | you have to deg [?]? deg at yourself first. | | https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/bitcoin- | energy-c... | | https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ | simondotau wrote: | > then you have to deg [?]? deg at yourself first | | Yes, and? | latchkey wrote: | It is absurd as: your website makes money from Google | Adsense and therefore is a waste of power because google | is profiting off people advertising crap to others. | simondotau wrote: | The only way for them to find other buyers is to lower | prices, which benefits everyone. | LazyMans wrote: | Not really. https://whattomine.com/gpus | Volundr wrote: | Ouch, looks like for most cards even if energy was free a | miner would be looking at ~1000 days to break even. | Hopefully this really does more or less end GPU mining. | cesaref wrote: | Those numbers are based on $0.1/kwh electricity costs. | Here in the UK the cost is around $0.4/kwh, so I don't | believe any of those cards would generate any sort of | profit. Basically the electricity cost is the main | driver, and you'd need to check what your local cost is | to evaluate this. | | Of course if you are running from home generated power | (e.g solar) then the equation changes, but so does the | capital cost. | [deleted] | dybber wrote: | More/bigger miners ==> higher competition ==> miners will | require higher transaction fee's to finance their operation? | Or do I misunderstand it? | [deleted] | karaterobot wrote: | The article gives an answer to this. | | > "The only coins showing profit have no market cap or | liquidity. The profit is not real." | | That is, the remaining PoW derived coins are not as | profitable for miners, presumably not enough to cover their | margins. | Retric wrote: | Presumably those other coins are close to an equilibrium | point where more people mining them would be unprofitable. | Aka if the total block rewards from other coins are 1 million | dollars per month, there is no way spending 2 million per | month on electricity is a good idea. | fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: | Mining is only profitable when the block reward and | transaction fees are worth more than the costs of mining | (electricity, capital costs). ETH was the only coin big | enough to support all those GPU mining rigs. With ETH gone, | there are too many miners and not enough valuable stuff to | mine. | adriand wrote: | I'm sure this is a stupid question, but I'm going to go for | it anyway: isn't Bitcoin also proof-of-work? Why isn't that | where ETH miners are going? | ur-whale wrote: | > Why isn't that where ETH miners are going? | | Mining BTC on a GPU isn't profitable. | | You need a dedicated ASIC chip that is far more efficient | at the task than a GPU if you want to hope turning a | profit mining Bitcoin. | | Something like this: | | https://www.bitmain.com/ | duskwuff wrote: | Bitcoin mining all switched over to custom ASICs long | ago, and is barely profitable even on that hardware. The | GPUs that were used for Ethereum mining can't compete. | wongarsu wrote: | For some more background: bitcoin's POW is basically just | sha256, which was trivial to port first to GPUs and then | to custom hardware. That makes mining a bigger up-front | investment and thus more centralized, which is why almost | all later coins chose POWs that aren't easy to speed up | with ASICs | cedricd wrote: | I'm fairly sure that Bitcoin mining just isn't as | profitable to mine with a GPU -- it's more cost-effective | to use an ASIC designed for that purpose. | acchow wrote: | > I'm really excited about this because there are SO MANY gpus | that are now going to be cheaper than sand | | Over the course of a GPU's lifetime (in your hypothetical use- | case), how much of the cost is the GPU itself and how much | electricity? | hinkley wrote: | I'd like to see some PoW scheme for public good projects like | SETI or Folding@Home or even CGI for a fan fiction, where | there's perhaps something more than just bragging rights for | contributing. I'm not sure what that would look like exactly. | stuntkite wrote: | Since the new GPU offerings from nvidia have secure multi- | tenancy, I think you're going to start seeing things like | that. Especially when you look at what's happening with | compute being more universally adapted via Vulkan. I haven't | seen the framework for such a thing yet but you make a good | point. I think I've got half a model in my head that could be | retooled for something like that in a flexible fashion. It | could work both ways too. Either you are giving away GPU | cycles for research or you are paying for people to be paid | for their cycles, or you post up your own job to be computed | for pay or donation of cycles or money. As an example, wanna | render predictions for erosion on a property you wanna buy? | Put up the job and people that wanna contribute can and you | get the result. Any user could set their hierarchy of things | they contribute to. Like patreon sort of. So bucks or compute | cycles can be chunked out to them by order of need and | weighted priority. | | Humm. Someone beat me to this idea so I don't have to do it. | djbusby wrote: | GPUslice.com | Grimburger wrote: | > 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 wrote: | By 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. | yaddaor wrote: | Please provide a citation to a well researched study for | that claim. | Dma54rhs wrote: | PC gaming alone has bigger carbon footprint than crypto | mining so objectively yes they are both anti environmental | activities. | switchers wrote: | Running cards at full pelt 24/7 vs at most a few hours a | day? Doubtful. | ben_w wrote: | Lot of gamers, and the displays add a few more watts each | to the total. | | Fermi estimate: 10 million latest Xboxes, used for 1 hour | per day. | | Power estimates seem to vary from 120 W to 315 W, let's | say 200 W including display. That's 2 GWh/day. Probably | similar for Playstation, or at least close enough for a | Fermi estimate. I'm going to guess similar for PC gaming | also. | | Smartphones are what, about 1 W? But a few billion of | them? 1 hour per day makes that another GWh/day? | | So probably about 7 GWh/day for Xbox + Playstation + PC + | mobile, 2.5 TWh/year. | | Bitcoin is estimated to use 131 TWh/year according to | Wikipedia. | | Yeah, you're right, it's not even close. | Dma54rhs wrote: | There have been see scientific prayers on power us usage | snd PC gaming (only) and it comes similar to crypto | usage. There are not many things that take tons of energy | - heating, cooling, crypto, gaming etc. | iforgotpassword wrote: | I'd be surprised if it's actually more than crypto; while | there are way more gamers than crypto miners, they don't | game 24/7, don't have a dozen GPUs per rig etc. | | Anyways my main point was that a lot of things people do | for fun are more or less directly bad for the | environment, like for example creating dozens of silly | images with stable diffusion. But it's still better than | crypto mining imo, as doing "fun things" usually benefits | you/your mental health. | sacrosancty wrote: | If you say something's bad, you imply something else is good. | So can you identify some contrasting technologies which | didn't start out as a "garbage fire of greenhouse gasses and | e-waste" or the appropriate equivalent? Are you wanting a | world contains only those born perfect technologies? | visarga wrote: | > producing hundreds of thousands stable diffusion pics of | the same scene | | Why are you twisting reality? People don't generate hundreds | of thousands of stable diffusion pics of the same scene. | Instead they generate dozens to hundreds of images carefully | tweaking the prompt and the starter image. | behnamoh wrote: | I don't know why you're being downvoted. At least the last | part is totally true; advance in ML is unfortunately just | bigger models, more data, and more compute. | | But doing ML won't necessarily boost GPU sales because most | deep learning work is shifted to the cloud. | CharlesW wrote: | > _There is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute | that isn 't crypto._ | | For sure, but there were many crypto operations with data | centers that had hundreds or thousands of GPUs. For example, a | report from JPR estimates that crypto miners bought 25% of all | GPUs produced in 1H'2021.1 | | 1 https://www.jonpeddie.com/blog/crypto-minings-half-a- | billion... | latchkey wrote: | Or over 100k... | UberFly wrote: | 25% seems like a very low estimate. All sections of the | supply chain were being looted. Barely anything made it to | stores. | CharlesW wrote: | It seemed low to me too, but it was the most credible | reference I could find. Surely it's an estimate, and I'd | guess a conservative one. | eachro wrote: | What other things can you do with GPUs outside of machine | learning, generalized scientific computing and gaming? | qeternity wrote: | Can't tell if sarcasm... | wheresmycraisin wrote: | What are the interesting things? | thaneross wrote: | One I'm interested in is graph databases powered with linear | algebra (see GraphBLAS and RedisGraph). Putting the graph | structure in a sparse matrix in GPU memory and doing matrix- | multiplication to perform queries means you can effectively | traverse the entire graph quickly by using the massive | parallel nature of the graphics card. | ars wrote: | I predict the opposite will happen. GPU demand will drop, which | means GPU manufacturers will have less money to spend on R&D. | | GPU prices may go down in the short term, but long term GPU | speeds will stagnate. | | I wish there was a way to put a 1 year timer on this comment to | see who's right me or stuntkite. | AdmiralAsshat wrote: | There's more than enough demand for GPUs with gaming, video | rendering, and machine learning that R&D will continue | without crypto mining. | stuntkite wrote: | You seem to think GPUs are only currently used for gaming and | speculation on ape gifs. | Fabricio20 wrote: | We are already at a stagnating point in GPU speeds, with the | most recent generations from NVIDIA simply being pump more | juice (watts) instead of big design changes and efficiency | optimizations. | | I don't believe R&D funds will dry as well, since they will | simply be relocated to AI and datacenter workloads which have | been on the rise more recently. | ls612 wrote: | The rumored 4090 is going to pull 450W and score ~19000 on | 3DMark time spy extreme. The 3080 pulls 350W and scores | 9000 if we are being optimistic. If these numbers are | ballpark correct we are talking about 60% more performance | per watt in two years. Your story may eventually come true | but it is not yet true. | stuntkite wrote: | Maybe kind of in like clock... but the parallel throughput | and the ability to securely slice and provision GPU | workloads is what was delivered this go around. As well as | optical NV-Link and all the crazy new stuff coupled with | their CPUs. Go look at crowdsupply and look at the previous | gen cores being strapped to massive software defined radio | arrays. | | This isn't just about pushing framerate. It's about vector | processing being massively more efficient than CPU for | almost everything and the tooling to start floating | consumer needs that aren't just making pretty bleep bloops | go boom boom for fun times is very, very mature. | im3w1l wrote: | I think you are both right. Lower prices _and_ lower r &d. If | you buy gpu because you care about the objective performance | then it's bad. If you buy gpu to keep up with Joneses, then | it's good. | SketchySeaBeast wrote: | I don't think 1 year is long enough to tell - release cycles | seem to be ~3 years so you'd need that long to compare the | 3xxx->4xxx->5xxx series. | colordrops wrote: | Would 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 wrote: | https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/modulus/text/features/p... | ftufek wrote: | You 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 wrote: | If 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 wrote: | This will be helpful for straining electrical supplies as well. | j-bos wrote: | What 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 wrote: | Alternative: "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 wrote: | I 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 wrote: | Satoshi is actually a time traveling Roko's Basilisk creating | itself. | | https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk | DennisP wrote: | If 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. | UI_at_80x24 wrote: | Awesome. 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. | JoeAltmaier wrote: | Maybe 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 wrote: | Why do you want to upload, at best, a _copy_ of your | consciousness? | officeplant wrote: | To leave the flesh husk behind. | TremendousJudge wrote: | The flesh husk is you. You can't provably leave it behind | without dying. | cdelsolar wrote: | as soon as you copy yourself you're both, and | indistinguishable to anyone else but your flesh husk. | TremendousJudge wrote: | Yeah but I don't think _you 'll_ feel that you're both. | You'll still feel like yourself, and the other will feel | like another. You won't feel as though you have left | anything behind, only the other will feel like that. | dymk wrote: | There's an entire subgenre of science fiction exploring just | that question! | | You may enjoy authors Greg Egan or Dennis E. Taylor. | trollied wrote: | I recently discovered the Bobiverse series. Very | entertaining:) | donio wrote: | To me they tend to answer the question of why you wouldn't | want to do it. | JoeAltmaier wrote: | Yeah but the bots _would_ so there 's that. | JoeAltmaier wrote: | Immortality | jdpedrie wrote: | But you're dead. Digital copy of you != you. | anonymoushn wrote: | How are you certain that you can survive a night's sleep? | johndough wrote: | The digital copy can be kept alive long enough until we | figure out how to download it back into a body again, at | which point this is basically the ship of Theseus | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus | | Also some people might disagree with "digital copy of you | != you". Personally, I do not care since it is close | enough to immortality imho. | philipkglass wrote: | It 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 wrote: | But 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. | mlyle wrote: | > Immortal-you will eventually develop different | motivations. | | Yah, well, mortal-me also eventually develops different | motivations. There's still continuity and connectedness. | | It's just fork(2). | batch12 wrote: | To be fair, it's not you that becomes immortal, just your | copy. From your perspective, you still die. | JoeAltmaier wrote: | But not today! | | And consider: if I can upload, perhaps I can download. | Perhaps my digital copy can live life 'faster'? In that | case I live 1000 lives digitally and download that. | | Now I'm essentially immortal, in my physical body, | because I've lived for millennia! | | At the very, very least its no worse than living this one | life and dying anyway. | batch12 wrote: | It isn't you living those lives though. What is the | difference between this and downloading someone else's | memories? | mlyle wrote: | What about the whole Ship-of-Theseus thing? | | What if you add something to you that's knit into and | augmenting your brain by 10%, and then as a little more of | your brain withers, you add another chunk. Ultimately it | reaches a point where your existing brain is doing none of | the work and it's all machines, but there was arguably never | a precipice crossed where it wasn't "you". | debacle wrote: | Such a strange thing, that a comment like this on a Friday | afternoon would completely blow my mind. | mlyle wrote: | Thank you :D | JoeAltmaier wrote: | Stories have been written! On this very subject. Back in | the day. | karaterobot wrote: | I 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. | yuan43 wrote: | > 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. | Sohcahtoa82 wrote: | GPUs haven't been profitable for Bitcoin mining in _years_. | | Anyone mining on a GPU was likely mining Ethereum. | dyingkneepad wrote: | I always wonder how many people have their boss's machines in | their boss's offices mining bitcoin 24/7... | rhacker wrote: | Can a mass produced GPU profitably mine bitcoin if the | electricity was "free" somehow? | latchkey wrote: | If 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. | Kerrick wrote: | What 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)"? :) | latchkey wrote: | That's what I said, but wasn't clear enough to you. | | The hardware capex for mining BTC with GPUs would | outweigh any 'free' power you have access to. You can't | just focus on one aspect of this business in order to | calculate your ROI. | Sohcahtoa82 wrote: | The GPU would need to be stolen, too. You'd never reach ROI | on a GPU. | ComputerGuru wrote: | It 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). | [deleted] | ugjka wrote: | If electricity was free it would also be "free" for ASIC | farms | MBCook wrote: | Yes, but you'd still mine much faster with an ASIC. | 01100011 wrote: | > definitely don't buy any graphics card for more than $500 | | Ef that, I'm buying a 20GB 4080 when they come out for doing | stable diffusion research and gaming. I'm still rocking a 1060. | I doubt a 4080 is going to drop below $500, recession or not. | derac wrote: | The 4080 tis might have 48 gb _salivating emoji_ | olliej wrote: | I assumed bitcoin also had GPU mining as well, is it now all just | ASICs? | ur-whale wrote: | > 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... | | https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/the-history-of-cryptocurr... | | https://thenextweb.com/news/a-brief-history-of-bitcoin-minin... | sc68cal wrote: | Good. | hedora wrote: | Queue the machine-generated SEO content / fake-news Internet | apocalypse in 3, 2, 1... | drexlspivey wrote: | Is 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 wrote: | You 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 | [deleted] | trenning wrote: | Now 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 wrote: | Just to be clear, have you ever purchased any physical device | to be used for entertainment? | lifeisstillgood wrote: | This 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?) | cphoover wrote: | good ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-16 23:00 UTC)