Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any victory at all it is a pyrrhic one when you look at the externalities.
If you can call a digital gold rush a victory, anyway. The physical one in the US was pretty bad for a lot of people.
I'm gonna steal that one, thanks. :D
The upkeep cost for Bitcoin is, and by necessity must be, proportional to the value represented by Bitcoin.
In other words, if you just mine a physical gold block, you don't really have an asset without the state's (or your own) continual upkeep that keeps it protected from attacks.
This completely misses the point, which was one of magnitude:
>> The upkeep cost for Bitcoin is, and by necessity must be, PROPORTIOANAL TO THE VALUE REPRESENTED by Bitcoin.
Also, that upkeep cost is 100.00% to protect the value of existing bitcoin.
C.f., gold:
> If you want to own some gold you need to protect it (usually with the state apparatus of violence, which has massive externalities).
I don't need continuous mining of bitcoin to protect my non-bitcoin stuff.
However, I do need the "state apparatus of violence" to protect my non-gold stuff, including things like my house and my body, and oh yeah, my fucking mining rig!
If all gold disappeared tomorrow, would anything about the "state apparatus of violence" change? No, of course not. That is absurd.
Although as a Brit myself it's amusing to consider myself some kind of atavistic archetype of humanity
This describes Bitcoin too.
I think it's facially absurd to claim that the existing financial system (including military, police, etc) costs anywhere near what bitcoin does, but even if it does, it's irrelevant because bitcoin doesn't provide the same things. Bitcoin is a virtual bar of gold or piece of currency, not a financial system.
"Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis"
"“Even sophisticated investors have been completely incapable of doing any kind of management of private keys,” said Diogo Monica, the co-founder of a start-up called Anchorage, which helps companies handle cryptocurrency security. Mr. Monica started the company in 2017 after helping a hedge fund regain access to one of its Bitcoin wallets."
"“This whole idea of being your own bank — let me put it this way, ‘Do you make your own shoes?’” he said. “The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do.”
Like remembering where the money is!"
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-12/don-t-...
But let's be honest, Fort Knox doesn't require 0.5% of the world's energy consumption (and increasing) just to continue existing.
False equivalencies don't help this argument. Yes, we know everything requires energy. No, that doesn't make it all the same.
This is a tangent, but it's more fun than the usual Bitcoin fetishizing and bashing.
There is building evidence that neutron star collisions, not supernovae, are the primary source of the universe's gold [1].
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/did-neutron-stars-or-supernov...
Unless you've got some dyson spheres lying around that you're not telling me about, I'm going to politely request that bitcoin advocates not expend more energy than we have in the entire world just so that they can diversify their investment portfolios.
Actually though, I wonder if there's an analogy that could be drawn between the real origin of gold (supernova) and bitcoin (mining a block). Both are created as dense byproducts of a large compression event (bitcoin: transactions; supernova: the rest of the star). ?
I was curious about this. What would "significant" be? What is it based on - the number of outstanding blocks? Is this vulnerability mentioned anywhere in the protocol spec?
Mutual funds, the most legible way to get an estimate of the holding cost of securities (since they are required to transact at net asset value) routinely charge between 0.2-1% fees, depending on size and asset class.
Clearinghouses, transfer agents, and cash management firms don't work for free, which is the problem that cryptocurrencies explicitly solve; neither do compliance, KYC, fraud, etc., which most cryptocurrency protocols elide altogether.
Oh wait.. You don't want that functionality, and you're still using up the energy footprint in the event you are correct. One of these delivers significantly less versatility than the other for the same energy investment.
The energy usage of ethereum comes from the proof-of-work DAG, not the solidity execution. You can easily see this by running a (non mining) ethereum node, any decent CPU will churn through the transactions in blocks in a matter of milliseconds (~200 ms per block), not the 13 seconds it takes to generate that block
No? Then it's a calculation. Or an abstract and useless one in your terms.
I don’t have an opinion on this but if you’re making a point, you should be the one providing evidence, not telling others to look it up.
This is different than people blithely spouting “it’s not my job to educate you” when asked to give some support for their controversial, unsubstantiated claim.
Yes, it's work to back up your claims with direct links to a source. But maybe that's a reasonable minimum bar to hurdle to stand behind ones statements.
There’s real uses for Merkel trees in finance - Cryptographically secure history is valuable. I’ve yet to see any problems that blockchains solve that merkel trees do not[1]. Finance and interchange works just fine with just Git - Interchange done via simple published balancesheets with countersignatures by both parties, then merged into “head” on the regular by any form of rollup. It doesn’t have the (well overstated) pseudonymity advantages of bitcoin, and that’s a feature in a well regulated financial market.
[1] With one ridiculous exception: In Iain Bank’s “Excession”, a mothballed war-fleet is resurrected by a traitor who presents enough cryptographic signatures of coconspirators to burn the keys of the real C+C chain. Blockchain would make this much harder - But not necessarily enough harder, even if they had to effectively recreate the military history of an entire total-peace (through superior firepower) civilization.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush#Longer-te...
Bitcoin is not humanity using energy. It is humanity flushing energy down the drain.
"But look at the sun man! That's the real waste"
Are you high?
A more useful perspective is "humanity uses more and more energy for computation". The many devices which enable us to post these comments burn energy. The astronomically high video-traffic these days burns energy. Modelling early universe, protein folding, advanced chemistry... every damn thing we compute has the cost of burning energy.
As an aside, let's not forget how much electricity gets used simply for heating. There's no shortage already of "smart heaters" with a nice side effect of mining you some coins while they keep your house warm. Anything environmentally wrong with that?
See, it's not the endgoal of cryptocurrencies to burn energy; it's simply a cost. Now, thanks to bitcoin, we can have economies of scale drive optimization of that cost: improving the core compute-per-joule ratio of our technology. With all the collateral improvements across the globe with regards to environmental impact.
Could you say that porn distribution industry "kind of by design" lead to people watching more and more porn? Regardless of the answer, thanks to that we can have fast internets now. Similarly with bitcoin: thanks to it, we'll pack more & more bitflips into every joule, up to the thermodynamic limit.
It's a myth from the pro-cryptocurrency crowd.
With recent price spikes, mining is profitable even if you have to pay relative high prices for electricity. You don't need to have cheap energy.
Also, it's another myth that we have an abundance of hydroelectric power that would otherwise go to waste if not for Bitcoin. With modern power transmission it's trivial to send power through the grid to other locations, and nobody is building power plants in the middle of nowhere without a way to send that electricity somewhere else.
Finally, Bitcoin's power consumption is additive. Energy that goes into Bitcoin mining is energy that isn't being used to power cities and other infrastructure, which must still get its power from somewhere.
Don't believe the whitewashing campaigns to downplay Bitcoin's energy usage. It's very bad.
(It's only an upper bound because energy isn't perfectly fungible.)
Renewable energy is also better than fossil energy in terms of environmental damage, but it's not free from damage. A dam is a massive localised environmental impact, and a huge amount of concrete. A solar farm requires (holes-in-ground) mining and significant industrial processing to build. The lower bound on environmental harm is the cost of building renewable energy sources that are used for something so unproductive.
Or is there energy being "stolen" from other uses?
As I wrote: is there any reliable data?
If a billionaire hoarded manufacturing plants and kept them shut down, people would probably be mad, since resources were being wasted, even if it was a net positive on greenhouse gas output.
It is almost exclusively reflected back out into space, and wasted. We have nearly no incentive to capture it, so the energy is being wasted at a mind boggling scale. I've been mining cryptocurrencies with solar power for about 6 years or so.
The great thing about crypto mining is that it creates a price floor for energy usage. This gives people real incentive to build the tools we need to harness the energy on our planet.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-potential-of-sol...
I am obviously not an expert but I looked at the magnitude of the energy itself vs the greenhouse effect and it's about 10-100x less potent than the greenhouse effect. But that means that even if we had 100% clean carbon-free energy, we can't continue increasing our energy utilization forever. And we still have a huge portion of the world that is below a first-world living standard and will eventually want automobiles and air conditioning and vacations using jet travel too.
IF we do not level off the energy consumption of the "first world" standard of living sometime within the next 50-100 years then we are on a course to cook ourselves to death even with 100% clean energy.
Whether or not that limit is actually reachable and something we should actually worry about I don't know. i.e: is there enough physical space for that many people on earth where each person uses X amount of renewable energy where the sum of X is greater than the amount of energy the earth can actually capture without being negatively affected.
Solar? It heats the atmosphere, because it captures solar heat which would bounce back.
Wind? Obviously it slows winds down, and who knows how it affects the existing ecosystem. We know how important the gulf stream is, you wouldn’t want to slow that down..
Etc..
As was pointed out upstream, capital and resources are required to get a solar panel, and if its output is directed to something frivolous like crypto mining, those inputs are being wasted. The fact that there remains unused energy from the sun is completely orthogonal to the waste that is happening.
To be clear, I'm less passing a judgement about the efficiency of crypto than I am pointing out that crafting objectively absurd arguments about why it is not actually wasteful helps nobody.
A) the environmental impact of manufacturing a solar panel is 0 and carbon neutral itself (it's not),
B) there's an excess of solar panels available too (not really),
C) the bitcoin miners aren't often running on coal power during the nighttime hours (they often are), and
D) there's nowhere better for mankind to deploy the capital used in deploying miners and renewable power production than for cryptocurrency mining (dubious).
The infinitesimal portion we do manage to convert with the currently available technology shouldn't be pissed away in the wind so lightly.
>Markets facilitate trade and enable the distribution and resource allocation in a society.
as long as a majority of bitcoin mining happens from non-renewable resources, the network as a whole is damaging.
That's not true at all.
You can enter a power cost into this calculator: https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-rtx...
It comes out positive using energy prices from virtually anywhere.
The idea that mining is powered purely by renewables that would somehow otherwise go to waste (that is, not take fossil fuel plants offline) is pure FUD.
Happy?
For reference, Visa does thousands to tens-of-thousands of transactions per second. The cost to run one of these transactions is negligible because it can be handled so quickly. Contrast with BTC, which struggles to hit 10 transactions per second on a good day. I used to work in a facility that monitored debit transactions. Our SLAs were ridiculous. Certain customers had requirements that if a single transaction took more than 100 ms, we were to open a ticket and contact their help desk immediately. This is the type of rigor it takes to maintain a financial payment network that consumers will have confidence in using.
This is not something that can be solved with current crypto approaches. There are information theory constraints regarding how long it would take to reach consensus across a distributed system and in such a way that transactions are serializable.
That makes 3.6667 transactions per second. BTC needs a hard fork in order to increase this dramatically.
So you were actually quite generous with 10 transactions per second...
[0] "Blockchain Charts" https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions-per-block
Which was proposed, and shot down by core Bitcoiners.
They aggressively do not want to increase the transaction limit.
Miners want transactions to be expensive, because that's where they'll get their money when the mining reward falls again.
It's mind boggling that people will complain about banks conspiring to charge them hypothetical fees, then rush to use a cryptocurrency that has double-digit transaction fees when nobody is really using it for anything other than speculation. The reality is that Bitcoiners don't actually want people using Bitcoin as a currency, they just want you to buy and hold. No selling, no spending, just buying. That's the only thing that drives the price up, and that's the only thing they want you to do.
For example, Lightning is built ontop of BTC:
Once all of these cryptocurrencies and exchanges become fast, the price doesn't actually matter. If I can buy the crypto, transfer it, and exchange back out of the crypto to my target currency in seconds, it doesn't matter if SOL is at $0.01 or $100 per coin. If I'm only in it for a few seconds, I just buy and then immediately sell however many coins are needed to move my value from Point A to Point B.
The reason Bitcoiners don't want larger block sizes is that they don't actually want spending. They want Bitcoin to be an asset that only goes up in price. Spending and selling drive the price down, so those need to have high hurdles to discourage that behavior.
I might be answering the wrong q, but the separate currency represents the cost of a transaction in the network. I.e. the amount you're willing to pay to send a transaction in the network and the amount a staker is willing to receive in exchange for validating your transaction
How else would you represent that cost in a crypto network? Some kind of currency needs to represent the transaction cost.
Unlike enthusiasts they don't see it as a necessary step and haven't been following the long and arduous journey of developments and breakthroughs to get here.
I can't tell you from personal experience if it would be the same if my amounts were a million plus, but they are not insignificant amounts either. I'm quite sure that attempting to deposit similar amounts of physical cash at a bank would be at least somewhat challenging.
Bitcoin needs to be able to handle at least a few hundred transactions per second as a first goal.
* Accept transactions that are in the mempool * Use the lightning network
Accepting mempool transactions obviously has lesser guarantees and unfortunately lightning hasn't seen great adoption even from centralised exchanges.
Also obviously there is a human-imposed "timeout" too. Like, if you buy something with Bitpay they expect your transaction to be included in one of the next 3 blocks. If it's not, they will "timeout" the transaction and it bounces. If it is eventually mined for inclusion, they will voluntarily return it to you minus whatever fees they choose to charge (average transaction fee is $24 right now, so you will lose $24 sending it to them, then $24 for them sending it back to you, and $24 to send it again).
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
(of course they don't have to send it back to you, there is no network-enforced mechanism for this, they could bounce the transaction and then if it gets included an hour later they could not pay you back, the money is under their control once you've signed the transaction. They could even maintain a separate mempool of these "dead" transactions and use a friendly mining pool to process those transactions preferentially...)
The entire Bitcoin narrative has become buy and never sell (HODL). The more friction around transacting with your coins (other than buying) the better it is for the asset value.
>The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size.
By the same logic, trucks are useless and inefficient because my moped burns 1/100th of the fuel per km.
> This is not something that can be solved with current crypto approaches. There are information theory constraints regarding how long it would take to reach consensus across a distributed system and in such a way that transactions are serializable.
This is demonstrably false. Newer-generation coins offer better tps, and even bitcoin itself can manage due to things like segwit and lightning.
Ok, I’ll bite.
No, it doesn’t, but what is that actually useful for?
The best answer I can come up with is illegal activities and libertarian fantasies.
Even if one generously frames “illegal activities” in the context of financial freedom from a tyrannical regime, even that has limits.
Any regime with a banking system can implement a KYC-type of policy that will can make interacting financially with anything related to BTC difficult or impossible. Need a modern example? Look no further than online wallets (e.g., Neteller) and online poker sites after the UIGEA.
I will add that if any government views a digital coin as a threat to their fiat currency system, it will be trivially easy for them to make that currency an extremely inefficient store of value. The measures will be draconian towards coin holders, but most people (rightly or wrongly) won’t care.
This fear is greatly exaggerated by people who have bought into the false idea that Bitcoin is the only way to escape inflation.
The definition of inflation is that asset prices go up. You can escape inflation by simply buying assets, or basically anything other than cash.
If someone truly believed massive inflation was coming, they would want to take out USD-denominated mortgages and buy houses. Inflation would increase the value of the houses and reduce the value of your loan repayments.
It's silly that so many people are afraid of the government devaluing their cash that they've decided the best way to escape it is to pile into an asset with an extremely lopsided distribution in favor of early adopters. The average person stands to gain more from recent stimulus than they stand to lose from inflation in their cash accounts. Doubly so if they invest their cash in stocks or assets, which doesn't even require Bitcoin.
The definition of inflation is typically that consumer prices go up due to there being "more money". The only kind of asset that people consume is housing, and even then they don't really - housing as an asset (purchase price) can be disconnected from its consumption price (rent). Besides that, you can't eat stocks so you don't get poorer when the price goes up.
Assets can actually increase in price because of deflation. For instance, technology getting cheaper has made all the stockbrokers drop their transaction fees and add fractional shares, so now everyone can bid up the same stocks.
Ownership. It's the difference between "I own 20 quatloos because the Bank of Endor says so" vs. "I own 20 quatloos". It supports actual ownership instead of representative or proxy ownership.
In the same way that you can have $20 in the bank or $20 in your wallet. When it's in your wallet, it's actually yours and you own it. When it's in your bank account, then you don't actually own it, you must trust that your bank will do the right thing and give it back to you when you ask for it. That level of trust has been wavering for decades.
Remember that Bitcoin was started as a rebellion against the "second bailout for banks".
OK... so what exactly is "ownership"?
A buddy of mine mined ~160 BTC (currently about USD $8.1m) back when it was fairly worthless. He left it on a hard drive on one of his many machines. BTC became worth something. He look for said machine and HD. Couldn't find it. That BTC is effectively gone forever. So... who owns it?
There are a not small amount of stories like the one above for various levels of non-trivial amounts of money (tens of billions). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/business/tens-of-billions...
Situations like this point to a desire for many/most people to want some sort of custodianship so that they don't accidentally lose something that might be worth millions one day... or even hundreds or thousands one day. At that point, one is looking at banks and banking systems, so we're back at square one.
If one is looking at an alternative to banks, we sometimes/often get stuff like Mt. Gox and Bitfinex -- a situation in which a group of people who want to be independent of the banking system learn the lessons of the value of the banking system the hard way.
So I guess where I am at is that I appreciate a desire to rebel against banks -- they wield way too much power. That said, I don't think that it's particularly prudent (or maybe even possible) to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this matter. The banks definitely do some fairly nefarious stuff, but they also do a metric shitload of very pedestrian-but-useful stuff extremely well on a daily basis. Until a coin can replace that pedestrian-but-useful system with equal grace, I doubt that a coin will be able to replace our current system. Furthermore, somehow if it does, it will be because the current system integrates coins into the current system rather than coins usurping the current system.
So again... what is distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority actually useful for?
Really? Ignoring the philosophic debate, ownership in terms of BTC deals with the capacity to modify the ledger using an agreed-upon protocol -- but you already know this, and I don't know why you're asking that question. What do _you_ think ownership means in terms of BTC? Do you think you can implement a public system for ownership of digital assets without a distributed consensus system? Or Verifiable transactions? Maybe you can, and if you do I'd love to see it. Good Luck.
>So... who owns it?
The person who has the key.
My point is that most people seem to prefer having a central trusted authority, specifically for custodianship.
That’s why most people put money that is significant to them somewhere in the banking system rather than a shoebox or a tin can somewhere. They want that money to be be traceable, accessible, and recoverable.
There are exceptions, of course, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule, IMO.
Yes. You sign one receipt at the store with a security camera pointing at you, and are handed a second, matching receipt by the vendor.
This defies your assertion that scaling cannot ever be achieved with current crypto approaches.
Not really a change in semantics here. It's still the point that crypto promised a LOT of really cool things for fintech that realistically won't materialize for a long time.
With the recent defi boom and the increased trust and popularity in oracles serving off chain data I'd say that you can find a cryptocurrency project for most promises.
Not being popular or adopted is another issue.
Here's a list of Ethereum nodes that are staking 32 ETH, attesting blocks, getting rewards and slashes: https://beaconcha.in/validators
Roughly $5.6b in value staked, with no particular expectation date for being able to withdraw. That's 2.55% of the total available ETH.
I'm the top 25 market cap there's:
BNB (powering the Binance Smart Chain) DOT (Polkadot) ADA (Cardano) ATOM (Cosmos) EOS TRX (Tron) NEM
Later: data sharding, where you're doing the same thing but each Ethereum node only has to store a portion of that data. That will multiply rollup capacity by 23X.
Details from Vitalik here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html
The Internet doesn't have built in mechanisms for regulation or fraud and nor should it. Cryptocurrencies obviously don't solve the problem, but can be used to create a stricter set of guarentees than the current sustem.
https://register.fca.org.uk/s/firm?id=0010X00004U9vVAQAZ
> fraud
Just to name two examples. Cryptocurrency like cash won't stop you from falling to fraud or illegal activity but communities and regulations could enforce a safe subset of projects with stronger guarentees than the current system.
And don't come back with "you shouldn't want to avoid KYC and regulation" as that's a different topic. Others find those properties useful even if you don't.
I'm not a fan of using so much energy, just as I'm not a fan of guns. What does that have to do with discussing how they work and why people use them?
My knowledge of this technology isn’t very deep. From my understanding, mining is essential to facilitate transactions, which in turn makes cryptocurrency a currency. Mining needs computing power, which needs energy. More energy translates to more rewards, which incentivises parties to keep mining and keep the network running. Even if you make the underlying calculations more energy efficient, miners are still incentivised to spend more energy to capture more of the reward(?).
If you actually believe what you're saying, then short it[1]. If you really think that the practical value is non-existent, then put your money where your mouth is, and take out a short.
This isn't some academic theory where the best you can do is throw tomatoes at it, and ridicule it from a distance. This is an economic theory, where if you are correct, and everyone else is wrong, you can profit significantly from it.
Maybe once you're faced with actually taking a stand on a belief like this, you'll come to understand why cryptocurrencies are beginning to dominate the global economy. It's also totally possible that you're right, but I think it's far more likely that you just like to ridicule things you don't understand because you get some sense of power from shitting on people who you consider to be beneath you.
And thinking that bitcoin is a terrible idea is not the same as thinking you can predict its market value. When something is as volatile as bitcoin, shorting it is almost as bad as going long; eventually its value will likely drop but being early is the same as being wrong.
PoW is also the most efficient way to do what Bitcoin is doing. Attempts to displace PoW have all failed, because the required trade-offs are always too high, and detract from the value of the network.
If you can figure out a fair way to seed value on a network that doesn't require burning energy, then please let the people know, and your new magic cryptocurrency will dominate the crypto-ecosystem overnight. No one would love that more than me. I could talk for hours about the various ideas people have had in the past, and why they failed, but I don't think this is the right place for that rant.
It's also important to recognize that there isn't a single watt of PoW power that's wasted. The power utilized reflects exactly amount of value that Bitcoin is providing to the world. Satoshi also made the mining rewards get cut in half every 4 years, so the value to power usage ratio gets better and better over time.
I could also go on about how mining facilities overwhelmingly are using excess power produced almost entirely from clean power sources. If the goal is reducing carbon emissions, there are so many serious offenders that are massively more wasteful.
Don't you mean reverse?
As I've said elsewhere: doing one transaction on bitcoin uses approximately the amount of electrical power that an average US household uses in 2 weeks.
About 700 KwH, far as I can tell. (Based on 76.87 terawatt hours annually in 2020, as an estimate for bitcoin). A house uses ~1000/month, ballpark.
If I could short bitcoin over a 20, 30, 40 year timeframe I absolutely would, unfortunately that's not possible. There might be utility in some cryptocurrencies for some applications, but bitcoin as it currently exists is worse than useless, it's actively harmful.
Maybe I'm willfully ignorant, but I just don't see any practical use outside of massive speculation game. Mind give us some examples? :)
It really doesn't matter if you don't recognize how big of a deal that is, but to A LOT of people, it's a complete game changer. If you don't need a service like that, well that's fine, but obviously a lot of people do, which is why the network is where it is today. Massive amounts of value is being moved through the network daily, and the fees that people are paying to utilize the network are not at all trivial. It's worth it to them though, or they wouldn't be using it.
First they came for the miners, and I did not speak out.
I hope they don't, given that there is limited upside and a lot of push back from dev community.
I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060 would be trivial for mining operations to get around.
Development of domestic chip manufacturing might even start to become a national security concern, leading to even more money flowing in on top of the money coming from crypto miners.
Also, my concern is not for data centers running creepy ML models that invade users' privacy, but for the average home user who wants to get started with ML and at the same time get decent frame rates when they play a game.
Getting started with ML doesn't require a GPU at all. Realistically, any video card or even a modern CPU is more than sufficient to get started with ML learning.
It's a myth that $1000 gaming video cards are necessary or even helpful for learning basic ML.
My argument is they should and could have scaled up the production rather than just shuffling around which group they hurt or help at the expense of which other (be it miners, ML folks or gamers). This isn't the 'right thing', it just helps the group you prefer on this round.
A sudden implosion of demand combined with a flooding of the used GPU marked. Better not plan on bringing out any new GPU architectures when your warehouses are still full of the previous generation.
Just becuase your use case is more noble doesn't change the fundimental issue of supply and demand. Nividia also already has artificial restrictions on their GTX and RTX lines to produce a product for your use case: the Tesla series.
ML is a bit different in that the applications are probably here to stay, and the applications are "legit". But, the ML market will not have the same brand loyalty that the consumer gaming market will. Consumers like brands and they stick with them. Companies spending money on ML are going to flock to the cheapest TCO, and a lot of this will also be abstracted through cloud offerings.
In short, they don't want to piss off what they believe to be their cash cow for years to come.
Some gamers are switching to AMD now that Nvidia cards are sold everywhere.
Meanwhile, companies are tied to CUDA, and AMD still doesn't have a similar API offering. There's some progress, but they're not there yet.
I've actually been wondering about this -- are there any major ones that meaningfully provide other kinds of value for all of the computational resources they're using?
My understanding of blockchain as a concept is pretty surface-level, so maybe I'm just missing something obvious here. But at least at first glance, it kind of baffles me that so many of them are using seemingly arbitrary hash algorithms to calculate proof of work, when they could instead be tied to distributed projects -- folding@home, for instance -- and measuring actual work.
[0]: https://www.newsbtc.com/news/ethereum/ethereum-on-pace-to-se...
There's a few others that take different approaches like Golem Network Token, Nym, Oxen, etc.
I'm speechless
It's to the point where I'm thinking about selling my "backup" 1060 3GB card, but if my GPU died then I would be in real trouble because lol at getting ahold of GPUs right now.
like, shockingly to some, there exists a market for GPUs for doing things other than mining. And not all coins require 8GB cards either.
Anyway, seems easier for them to obtain crypto than getting a commodities account and buying gold, since presumably one would have to deal with KYC/AML in that case, and one can continue to use crypto as a currency within the country (though I doubt Bitcoin, since the transaction fees probably amount to more than a typical Venezuelan earns in a month).
I'd understand if you wanted all economic activity to have to figure in the negative externalities before a profit could be realized by stake/shareholders, but your comment implies to me that crypto should have some kind of special tax because you're upset you cant buy a gpu.
This is exactly the kind of antagonism that is detrimental to everybody. Read op comment again:
> Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation
I am not "upset I can't buy a GPU", mining uses a lot of power[1] and its environmental impact is not being taken into consideration. So yeah, if mining is damaging the planet and if we can assess the damage quantitatively and link it to mining without a doubt, it should have to be taxed accordingly.
Replace 'mining' with 'anything' and I fully understand as I'd said.
If I'm running 3,000 watts worth of GPUs at home to heat my house, and you're running 3,000 watts worth of space heaters at your house, I'm certainly not damaging the environment anymore than you are.
We should both pay the FULL cost of the toll the generation of the required electricity cost to run our equipment. Why I should pay taxes above and beyond what I already do because my heater makes money is where you totally loose me.
However, it is important to note that mining does do something useful: it secures the network from attack. To my knowledge, there is no known alternative solution to the distributed trust-free consensus problem.
Not yet, but don't presume current economical status quo is working flawlessly. The current monetary system is kind of a joke, it no longer is backed by gold, in fact it's not backed by anything. So if you think about it for more than a minute why should it be that currency in the US should have any value? Creating an alternate store of value that is not just printed or made up and can be proven to exist at the very least provides something not too dissimilar to a database backup in case of a complete meltdown of fiat currency. It, however, does need to be allowed to get sufficiently big for a future restore to work. That is worth a bit of electricity. Yes, a bit, as a percentage of the GDP.
I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line.
Edit: the "Syrian refugee crossing into Europe" trope might pop up as a counter-argument for crypto. I am Syrian and still have relatives there. Refugees' assets are a drop in the ocean of speculators' mining and HODLing.