You presume the total energy consumption would be the same whereas it'd be more likely that GPUs that are used for mining will be used 24/7 whereas gaming is likely to be performed by a human being who cannot or would not utilize the GPU nearly as many hours of the day.
Yup. And even if they could utilize them 24/7, gamers generally* won't have 10+ cards going at once.
*:I'm sure someone has some weird 360 degree flight simulator edge case.
Crypto operations in modern times are not subtle. Margins are razor thin, so it's all about scale and efficiency
I’d argue the target total fertility rate per woman should be somewhere below one. To hell with economic growth that relies on an ever increasing human population.
Even if strange when it comes to animals, humanity progresses following rules similar to classic evolution, aka by randomly mixing stuff until something works. We've gotten (only) pretty good at selecting and amplifying what works extremely well, but we still need a steady stream of randomly arranged characteristics to enter the pool. Imagine if the next Newton isn't born (or is born 200 years later) because a couple decided to not have children to "save the planet". Perhaps this figure would've been a key piece in a breakthrough discovery about energy, climate, terraforming, public policy....
I seriously fail to understand anti-natalists.
I think it very much depends on how one experiences life. The two ends of that scale are largely incomprehensible to each other.
Your point about "the next Newton" is unrelated, and IMO misses the mark. It's not coincidence that Newton, Hooke, Boyle etc appeared in the same place at the same time, and it's not because there'd been a crippling shortage of randomly arranged characteristics before that. The right characteristics aren't enough, you also need the leisure to develop them (which implies material surplus) and a society that makes sufficient use of scientific discoveries to value and propagate them. Nobody would have heard of Isaac Newton if he'd been born a subsistence farmer. I'm sure lots of potential Isaac Newtons were, and in many ways that's a tragedy.
Absolutely. Just to set the record straight, I am not anti-birth and I think I agree with GP more than I disagree. We must do everything we can to reduce the carbon footprint per person. I am just logically following what my parent post said.
I didn't even know the word anti-natalist. I want all children who are born to be healthy and reach their full potential as productive adults. One child is a blessing. Two is also fine (I have a sibling).
At least in a developed country, if someone has eight or more (not born at the same time) children, they are terrorizing the environment in my eyes. I don't see how you can justify that with access to decent healthcare and the infant mortality rate is under ten.
I mean if you live in a place where infant mortality rate is over a hundred (a quick web search shows that IMR in Afghanistan is over 110 which means a hundred and ten die before the age of one of every thousand infants born), I can't imagine the pain and suffering the parents must be going through.
We clearly can do better. The open question is how.
You'll have to pardon my bluntness, I've seen many self proclaimed environmentalists straight up advocate and encourage women to never have children for the sake of the planet.
OK, I think you're talking here about VHEMT [1] and the like, which is only very tangentially related to traditional [2] antinatalism. The latter is more a reduction-of-suffering philosophy, in much the same way that vegans/vegetarians/etc believe that it's better for an animal never to live at all than to endure the conditions of modern meat farming.
Obviously neither movement stands much chance of success since neither stands any chance of convincing an entire population. If they have any effect at all, the former will tend to eliminate genes associated with environmentalism, while the latter will tend to eliminate genes associated with unhappiness (which doesn't sound so bad).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov...
[2] It's not new, goes back to Ancient Greece at least
Depending on the card some would have been run underclocked and even undervolted. I personally know friends who purchased mining cards that are still up and running.
For miners they're not being sold becuase they're not useful but because they don't have the cash on hand to continue the scale of operation when mining is no longer profitable. It's not that difficult to run the numbers yourself to verify this.
I never had that specific opinion, but I have another point of view.
Games bring inherent value to the table. That is, if you didn't play games you would be reading a book, going outside to play, browsing the web... Games fill a purpose and bring value. Whether or not I believe our current consumption of videogames is acceptable is irrelevant.
I don't see tangible value in crypto. Crypto is worth what other people are willing to pay for it. If you wanted to invest in an asset that does not depend on the currency you could buy gold.
(I had a paragraph here making a point about international transaction costs. I removed it because I started to find it offtopic. Long story short: I find the societal cost of crypto way too high).
Try convincing any crypto "enthusiast" of that, though. Literally none of them have ever been able to explain to me why cryptocurrencies should have value, but that doesn't stop them from proclaiming it the best thing since sliced bread.
I'd also agree that price bubbles happen and future speculation becomes a dominating factor in their price action, but this doesn't mean they don't have inherent value.
This is what crypto-enthusiasts must be blind to. We could be using bottlecaps to do the same bloody thing. Nobody wants to though. Why? Because nobody else takes the value assertion of a bottle cap seriously. As long as people keep buying into the hype, and the enthusiasm is kept up through selective refusal to accept the realities and externalities of the process, then the gravy train continues.
As with most things in finance, it's all trust at the bottom of it. If there is any doubt, no one will be around to be left with the bag.
That's pretty much true for anything that has financial value, though. Setting aside the chemical properties of gold (conductivity, resistance to corrosion, etc.) that make it more valuable than some other metals, pretty much every financial construct in human culture is only valuable because we decided it was valuable. That's not to say everything is inherently valueless, but crypto is not too dissimilar to, say, digital coins for a game; you just can't usually swap it back in the latter case so it has little/no tangible value. Similarly, the value of stocks, foreign currency, even money itself fluctuates daily. As long as you can swap it back to "real" money, I see it as having tangible value.
That being said, I personally choose not to get involved in any cryptocurrency because I would rather invest in more "established" forms of value, like stocks and bonds and whatnot.
Correct. Maybe a better statement would be "I don't see that the inherent value of crypto is bigger than that of the dollar or gold". This gets even more complicated when you take into account the cost of the transactions that I have discussed with another user.
Newer projects like Uniswap, AAVE and MakerDAO (for DAI) are uniquely new and novel concepts that can't be accomplished trustlessly without blockchain technology.
Bitcoin has a lot of intangibles (name recognition, trust, hashpower) and for many is a more intersting asset (in what it represents) compared to gold.
I would like to clarify something. I didn't say I disagreed with the value of cryptocurrencies (that is, its value in dollars). I said I find their societal cost way too high. In other terms, (Inherent Value of crypto < Societal Costs of crypto).
> would you at least agree that their inhenrant value isn't 0?
I agree with that. Although my previous answer stated "I don't see tangible value in crypto" I suppressed the paragraph that said that crypto may have some inherent value when it comes down to international transactions (or transactions in general). If international transactions in crypto are cheaper than with banks, clearly those who want to make these transactions do see some inherent value in the currency. That is, its value would emerge from its transaction properties.
I did suppress the paragraph because I just don't know enough about the fees of such transactions. I think it is reasonable to expect Banks and Financial entities to offer transaction fees lower than Crypto for all use cases. If that happened, then I just don't see any value in crypto whatsoever.
I have said it a few times on HN: I see more potential into a "Crypto Dollar" than in crypto in general.
> I have said it a few times on HN: I see more potential into a "Crypto Dollar" than in crypto in general.
This, and the potential of smart contracts that use the "Crypto Dollar" are where I see the most potential.
Here are some of the associated costs of crypto:
- Environmental effects for the energy consumption that is not clean and the corresponding breakeven for clean energy.
- Subsidized costs of energy are a direct cost into governments budget.
- By increasing electricity consumption miners are increasing the demand and therefore the cost. This drives up inequality.
I haven't found a better term than "Societal Costs" that summarizes all these costs.
> This, and the potential of smart contracts that use the "Crypto Dollar" are where I see the most potential.
Absolutely!
Does the efficiency with which a game utilizes system resources alter its value?
Sort of the inverse of crypto.
Crypto is an investment the same way $GME or playing the roulette is an investment. Better term would be speculating or gambling. Nothing wrong with either, but let's call it what it is.
Buying assets "as a hobby" that depreciate or generate no income, is just that, buying for a hobby, not investing.
Where did I talk about penny stocks? I was talking about volatile meme stocks like $GME being like playing the roulette.
I don't doubt that is the case, but that kind of reinforces my point. The societal cost of crypto is too high. If we have to justify the electrical consumption of crypto because people enjoy it more when they see its name on their screen, we are clearly doing something wrong.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_properties_of_diamond
First some variables:
RTX3090 idle power usage = 21 Watts
RTX3090 mining power usage = 270 Watts
RTX3090 gaming power usage = 350 Watts
270W \* 24H = 6.48 kWH per day
(low, 1 hour per day) 350W \* 1H + 21W \* 23H = 0.37 kWH per day
(med, 4 hours per day) 350W \* 4H + 21W \* 20H = 1.82 kWH per day
(hig, 8 hours per day) 350W \* 8H + 21W \* 16H = 3.14 kWH per day
(ext, 18 hours per day) 350W \* 18H + 21W \* 6H = 6.43 kWH per day
Note: From what general figures I've seen online the energy works out roughly the same for the rest of the recent RTX series cards (some such as the 3060Ti work out a few % more favourable for mining as they are more energy efficient overall)
Gamers also use monitors(~40W) for many hours a day, and run the whole machine with 1 card while many miners minimize all other costs but the GPUs. Also gamers typically damage their cards a bit faster and change them for newer ones faster on average (miners keep mining with very old cards still).
Also, gamers and professional users will likely still buy graphics cards in 5-10 years (and more so), while I'm pretty sure miners will have either given up or switched to more custom solutions like ASICs by then (which has already happened with Bitcoin). So NVIDIA also risks losing a long-term market to please a potential short-lived market, hence I think they do the right thing by trying to disentangle these two market segments for good.
> Nvidia does state that these GPUs "don't meet the specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don't impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers." Frankly, that doesn't mean much. What does Nvidia do with a GPU that normally can't be sold as an RTX 3090? They bin it as a 3080, and GA102 chips that can't meet the 3080 requirements can end up in a future 3070 (or maybe a 3070 Ti). The same goes for the rest of the line. Make no mistake: These are GPUs that could have gone into a graphics card. Maybe not a reference 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, or 3090, but we've seen TU104 chips in RTX 2060 cards, so anything is possible.
Nivida isn't risking anything.
They boost their sales now by selling mining cards knowing they won't enter the seccond hand market to compete with their new products.
They gain good PR with their mining locked 3060 cards. Gamers praise them without internalising that a number of mining cards would have been binned lower and sold, but instead an artificial restriction allows Nivida to allocate behind the scenes.
You can say Nvidia is making a smart business decision (questionable) but to say this isn't anything other than a pr disaster imo is incorrect. The people who were the target of their press releases saw right through it.
Now that some time has passed and Linus (from LTT) has released his video I'd say the sentiment is still mixed. I'm still seeing many tweets praising nividia for finally taking a step for gamers.
Here's an austrilian tech Youtuber who should know better: https://youtu.be/jnoNryem-G8
Ah, you’re a miner? You’re worried about their ability to make money?
> gamers realize they’re being screwed
How, exactly?
When it was no longer profitable miners sold their GPUs on the uses market, here is evidence of that: https://youtu.be/plrsxEGYO-A
> gamers realize they’re being screwed
Linus Tech Tips' video and the /r/hardware discussion puts this best: https://youtu.be/plrsxEGYO-A
It also combines and supports advantages in science by making this more affordable for the rest.
You can still critizie it and there have been huge energy savings for idle GPUs which was not the case 10? years ago.
Nonetheless, one thing doesn't make the other thing better or worse. Doing bitcoin is supporting a system which requires mining to make transactions. It also doesn't free me but potentially people who benefit from this directly. Like money washing, moving their millions from left to right or other things. And while doing that, taking my graphicscard, i wanted to play with, to sit somehwere, running 24/7 for what?
What real problem solves bitcoin for me and most other people on the world?
Both are using energy, I don't know what the 'other' even r refers to.
>It also combines and supports advantages in science by making this more affordable for the rest.
.. Both of those apply for crypto. Better GPUs are developed because of usage, gaming usage doesn't necessarily give you more than crypto usage and cryptocurrencies are putting a lot of money into cryptography.
I have not had this amount of return on investment when doing something with bitcoin.
It was more like 'huh? how much is the transaction fee now?', ah why is this market seized? Oh i found a little bit of bitcoin here, i totally forgot.
And while i play 85h over a span of 4 weeks or so, your mining rig already consumed 590h more energy than i did.
I said 'to a certain degree, i think this is okay' and i also think that for bitcoin, this is not the case.
Trustless exchanges and lending (including tokens pegged to real world assets like the dollar or stocks).
NFTs as digital proof of ownership.
Not an upside, but probably that the mining is mostly done by 1 person (or org) who use a lot of energy. A gaming rig probably won't be running 24x7 as max utilization.
I'd also say that gaming at least occupies the human who is playing. Mining would be running in the background: the human would still be consuming energy doing something else. So one doesn't replace the other. Therefore using the inefficiency of one to justify the inefficiency of the other is not a valid argument.
One last observation: you're assuming that all these video cards would still have been produced. Maybe production of hardware has gone up to serve the mining demand.
The basic fabric of society is much less reliant on the ability of citizens to play digital games, so losing that ability wouldn't matter much.
Running with the Nascar/Formula One analogy, those things aren't such a huge deal because they're niche applications of vehicle technology. It would be far more disastrous for society at large, on the other hand, if we decided to make all commuter vehicles get 2 MPG and require high octane fuel and new tires every two hours.
Similarly, cryptocurrency is (relatively) harmless right now because it is a niche speculative commodity. It would be a global disaster if it ever became widely used as actual currency. Cryptocurrencies are like castles, gaudy but interesting spectacles when only a few lords build them, but the world would quickly run out of rocks if we made them the universal unit of housing.
The number of games that actually cause a modern GPU to hit its maximum TDP is also much lower than you'd think. If vsync is turned on, even a 3060 will trivially hit 60fps on older/simpler games, and modern ones unless the settings are turned way up. Games like Doom Eternal and Counter Strike Go are incredibly well optimized and can easily hit hundreds of frames per second on modern hardware. Likewise if it's a simple 2D game or more balanced title that leans on the CPU (unless you're using complex shader packs, popular games like Minecraft do a lot of their work on the CPU)
No. Really, no.
Mining hardware is just trash when new hardware is released, pretty much immediately.
OTOH, gaming hardware very often has a second life in the form of used hardware and lower-specced gaming computers. Don't be fooled by YouTube influencers, most of the real people won't be buying the latest and greatest hardware and drop their previous hardware. IIRC, valve stats showed that 1080-era cards are still very common and in use.
And by the way: pretty much no one is running games 24/7. Mining hardware OTOH are specifically meant to be kept going 24/7.
Except people are still mining with cards they bought 4-5 years ago. This is not True.
How come? You can still game with these.
I would assume miners keep these cards pegged at 100% 24/7. By comparison very few games actually push graphics cards to 100% utilization, especially when you're talking about top of the line cards like the nVidia 3000 series, and on top of that very few people play games for more than a couple hours per day. A card in the hands of a gamer probably consumes only a small fraction of the power that same card would in the hands of miners.
Besides, it's also the transacting that uses a lot of energy, not just the mining.
I mean, is there any inherent upside to burning tons of energy for games vs burning it for a cryptocurrency? How much electricity do all the gaming PCs and gaming consoles in the world consume vs Argentina? To me, it feels a lot like Nascar or Formula one burning tons of fuel.
I don't think that it is somehow bad to play games, but I wonder why the one (crypto) is always criticized into oblivion for the energy consumption, while the other isn't.