Like literally every other piece of Bitcoin or crypto mining technology. It’s straight to the landfill every 6 months.
Bitcoin generates 100 GRAMS of ewaste for every transaction. Every 2 transactions consumes as much energy as driving a Tesla from SF to NY [edit for clarity: round trip] and as much ewaste as throwing your phone out the window along the way.
Don’t hate the player; hate the game. Nvidia is maximizing shareholder value as per their charter, creating differentiated product offerings for different segments. Quadro, RTX, CMP. It’s all segmentation, and better, likely binning. I wonder if CMP products are just failed RTX and Quadro parts they’re offloading. For every card Nvidia doesn’t sell, Ant will sell 2 ASIC miners.
Time to push back on proof of waste, and end the economic incentive.
[0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
[1] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=road%20distance%20san%...
Thank you for going through the numbers and adding the sources. I was on my phone and meant to circle back.
I have limited knowledge of Bitcoin so maybe not quite "explain like I'm five"... but close. :)
Once someone finds a winning block, they're rewarded with a number of Bitcoin. This subsidies the cost that goes into mining that block. However the reward halves after every 210k blocks, so as the reward goes down, miners will prefer to only include transactions with high fee. Eventually the true cost of mining will reflect in the transaction fee.
And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions. Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy used to process a transaction goes down tenfold.
Oh, it could be somewhat improved. Then it'd be "only" 65 kilowatt hours, compared to ~1 watt-hour for conventional payment networks.
(And, this assumes that the increase in bitcoin price doesn't cause more mining).
Sure, and? You get other benefits, those might not be relevant for you in which case keep using conventional payment networks. But if things like counterparty risk of your payment processor come into your calculations, even $10 dollars a transaction migth be a good deal.
It's called an externality. It doesn't matter if you'd pay $10 for it if the cost imposed is too great. There are a lot of things people would absolutely pay for that we don't allow, because of that. Dumb weird fantasies about decentralization or counterparty risk or whatever don't actually matter if the energy cost is that high. It's just not important enough. Sorry.
The cost imposed is proportional to the fee, since the fee has to pay for the electricity used to mine the transaction. And $10 of electricity is just... not a lot to worry about.
If you believe the electricity consumption in general has huge externalities, you have bigger problems than mining, and once you address those the mining cost/diffiuclty will adjust
No. Miners get rewards for mining blocks, which pay for 80%. Transaction fees don't pay for the electricity used in a transaction: not even close.
> If you believe the electricity consumption in general has huge externalities
Well, sure, I believe that electricity is artificially cheap. I also believe that spending $50+ of electricity per transaction done is absolutely nuts. And that amount is steadily increasing...
Indeed, from a decentralization perspective, mining is looking worse than proof of stake, etc.
That makes a lot more sense that many transactions are included within a block. So effective transaction fees are likely in the few cents USD range.
I've read that one issue with the latency of Bitcoin transactions is that many of the large miners from China have network issues. Would raising the block size to 10-100MB cause significant latency issues for transactions even if one could fit a lot more transactions into a single block?
There are two ways to understand your question so I'll just answer both of them:
Fitting more transactions in a block leads to faster confirmation, and potentially lower fee. When a transaction gets into a block, the network confirms that the transaction is valid and can't be reversed. Right now each block can only fit ~2k transactions, and since a block can only be generated every 10 minutes, the mempool (backlog of unconfirmed transaction) is rather huge. This site shows how big it is: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/. Miners are incentivized to only select transaction with high fee into the next block, which in turn incentivizes users to pay more fee to get their transaction to confirm faster. With bigger blocks, more transactions get confirmed quicker, which leads to lower fee.
Bigger blocks however mean miners with slow internet connection are at a disadvantage. When a miner finds a winning block, they broadcast the block to as many nodes in the network as possible. After a while, a majority of nodes accepts that winning block, and the miner is eligible for the mining reward. If A finds the winning block 10 seconds after B, but A is able to propagate their block quicker than B, then it's possible that A's block is accepted and not B'. In reality, it's possible that B might still win the race, but the rule is: faster propagation => more chance of being accepted.
The cost is socialized across the block reward. So long as there’s more new money coming in than block reward paying electric bills on the way out, the cost of a transaction is socialized efficiently.
Elon’s $1.5B investment only lasted a total of 4 weeks. It’s already gone. It’s in the hands of Chinese coal produces now.
Because the comments above yours are misleading. Transactions don't consume mining energy. Miners expend the same amount of energy regardless if they are validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block.
You’ll have to explain to me why when mining a block of transactions, it doesn’t make sense to break that down on a per transaction basis with division.
If the number of transactions in a block ever changes I’ll change my divisor. Until then the proof is on you isn’t it?
Because the division result is meaningless as it just reflects how full a block was, not the cost of a transaction. Again: miners expend the same amount of energy regardless if they are validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block. Exactly the same amount. And whatever math you might be doing doesn't account for batched transactions (1 tx, N outputs), lighting transactions, or off-chain transaction (think tx within a platform like an exchange).
For one that’s horrifyingly wasteful - you say it like it’s a good thing but it’s really not. And two, I’m describing the network as it exists today. That’s not dishonest; there’s no plan to increase the quantity of transactions per block. If it ever changes we can run the numbers again. But saying it’s a bad way to run the numbers is like saying there’s no cap on the number of bitcoins because the core team could just change the cap. Ok, and if they do, we’ll run the math again.
It is a great thing: it means Bitcoin can scale without increasing energy consumption. See, that's my problem with the way you phrased your post. You misrepresent the system. You imply transactions consume energy when they don't.
You pretend they don’t but they obviously do! You’re green washing one of the biggest environmental tragedies since CFCs.
It could in theory scale past where it’s at but the core team won’t let it making your argument no more useful than my unlimited coins argument. In what way exactly is it different? Yes if we pretend it’s efficient, it is. But only in our imaginations.
Even if they did increase block size fundamental inefficiencies mean even at maximum scaling it can’t hold a candle to visa or even a raspberry pi running MySQL.
In the long term, if transactions count doesn't rise fast, we will also see significant issues, either with transaction fees going to absurd amounts, effectively banning btc as a payment medium, or with the miner pool decreasing to counts where decentralization becomes inexistent.
This ignores the transaction fees. Even though they are only 10-20% of the total fees a miner collects, 10-20% of a round-trip from SF to NYC is still a lot of energy.
Also the defense of "the energy is spent securing the blockchain" is missing the point, the blockchain isn't a good unto itself it's only useful as a log of transactions and you only need new blocks when there's transactions and if there are no transactions Bitcoin is basically dead.
It bugs me that even quality newspapers frequently mistake power (watt (W)) for energy (joules (J) or watt-hour (Wh, often with the usual metric prefixes)).
Perhaps this is the cost of running a secure system.
Fuck that. I can hate the game, and the players who decide to play it.
There's zero chance of ending the economic incentives of cryptocurrency mining without (global) government intervention. Instead, the best effort the US government has provided is increasing SUPPORT for it.
Apple took a unique, aggressive, and still-controversial stance for privacy. This position has easily cost them a double-digit percent of their revenue; the amount of money they could generate from selling out their billion+ users, who are generally above-average income, in the same vein Google does, is unfathomable. I don't like Apple as a company, but I still feel its important to give them recognition for how industry-leading they were, and still are, in pushing for Privacy.
There are ethics which can transcend corporate interest, even when considering negative PR. There are some things companies just don't do. The excuse of "optimizing shareholder profit" and "hate the game" is bullshit; it moves the onus of responsibility off of companies who are fully capable of acting more ethically by blaming some Invisible Hand as if they had no choice in the matter.
That's bullshit. Jensen Huang had a choice. He made it. End of story. You want to shift some blame onto Ant and the miners themselves; that's all fair game for Round 2. But at this time, we're still on Round 1.
Its reasonable for Nvidia to stand by and do nothing. Graphics cards are, after all, general purpose computing hardware. Even after they've outlived a useful life in a mining farm, those miners may attempt to extract an ROI by reselling them in secondary markets. Not ideal, but certainly better than Nvidia's plan for the future.
Nvidia's plan is to, instead, support miners directly, while intentionally tiering consumer hardware, then positioning the entire move as somehow "Standing By Gamers". A dystopian science-fiction author legitimately could not write a more canonically evil storyline. I would change this position if Nvidia walks back, cancels the CMP line, and continues forward with driver limitations on the RTX 3060 with public plans to move to in-silicon ethereum mining protection on future cards; I think that's reasonable, given its fair to assume that the "ship has already sailed" on Ampere. Until then, fuck Nvidia; I'm not touching anything their hands are involved in.
It is disgraceful to watch people such as Elon Musk and most of the VCs put money ahead of the environment.
Fiat bans cannot really work well against just doing math. Taxation schemes/financial regs tamping down on bitcoin speculation, what you can spend it on? By design I don't think you can just pump money into bitcoin in order to "deflate" its value without similarly consuming a lot of energy?
How would you execute an exchange ban politically? Any politicians who did this would be responsible for instantly vaporizing tons of value owned by an increasingly non negligible fraction of the population that spans a broad spectrum of political affiliation.
An exchange ban also wouldn't stop bitcoin, because the network would still continue running and anyone cutoff and stuck with bitcoin can still use it as a medium of exchange, and it could kick off its development as a direct unit of account. An exchange ban might even make using bitcoin as currency even easier, because if it's not legally exchangeable for fiat, how do you tax cap gains on it?
Stopping bitcoin is a REALLY hard problem. It would require a massive coordinated crack down by every government on the planet. And then you're left with a prisoner's dilemma. What happens if China or Russia publicly go along with such a ban, but secretly keep supporting it and buy up coins for themselves, preparing for a day when it will be the global reserve currency that dethrones the dollar? It's a similar game theory problem to why we will likely never live in a world without nuclear weapons.
The reason this will probably never happen is because every government will think through this game theory, and realize the risk of being on the wrong side of a potentially ineffective ban and hamstringing your nation's citizens and companies from participating and developing on the new global financial system, is greater than the cost of just capitulating and adapting to live with it.
Anyone who owns Bitcoin is gambling. There was never a guarantee that value would go up, or that the government squash the idea entirely.
If we as a society decide that Bitcoin is too dangerous, current holders should accept Bitcoin for what it was: a bad investment.
There are at least a couple of bitcoiners currently in Congress, including the new Senator of Wyoming who is publicly all aboard the idea that bitcoin is an important, long term store of value that the US needs to jump on board with.
How many politicians do you think already hold some bitcoin quietly, just in case?
>> It is disgraceful to watch people such as Elon Musk and most of the VCs put money ahead of the environment.
> I am sorry you did not buy it when it was cheaper. No need to hate it now because you were stupid back then.
You're obviously defensively making some false assumptions. The big one is probably assuming that people are primarily motivated by greed and jealousy, and that other motivations are fake and meant to disguise that.
And for the record, I agree with the GP, and I've made quite a bit of money off of this bubble by selling some bitcoins I mined a decade ago.
Isn't that a trend that has mostly ended or is about to end now? It looks like that was mostly caused by nm process improvements for ASIC chips in the past. With 7/5nm ASIC chips it seems like it should now progress as fast/slowly as the nm process capabilities of chip manufacturers in general.
Not pro-BTC, but this seem very much like faulty interpolation based on a past trend.
3nm will hit in 2024, but until then there will always be advances in chip design. It’s not just about speed, it’s also about thermals, power consumption and manufacture price to work out the TCO of mining.
I'm not an expert on chip design, but I would have assumed that there isn't a lot of room for improvements of ASIC mining chips, given that they are probably a straightforward implementation of the hashing algo used in Bitcoin (and that a few thousand+ times), in contrast to CPU design which is more dependent on other computing/hardware trends.
Also remember an ASIC miner will generally use more than it costs in electricity each year, so a relatively small improvement in hashes / watt makes a big difference to overall profitability.
CPU design is more complex, but also has more people working in the space and has been going for longer. I just get sceptical if someone says this is as good as it is going to get because history shows usually those predictions end up being wrong. As a child I thought Super Mario 64 was as good as computer graphics were ever going to get...
That doesn't diminish the hashing power of the equipment you already bought though (and the topic was obsolete equipment).
> so a relatively small improvement in hashes / watt makes a big difference to overall profitability
Yeah, that's a fair point.
> I just get sceptical if someone says this is as good as it is going to get
And I'm skeptical if people blindly extrapolate past trends, assuming that they will continue to hold. I wasn't saying that it won't get better from here on out, just that the extreme growth that was mostly fueled by quickly going through the existing nm process steps can't be sustained, and that from now on it will follow the same slowish pace as all chip miniaturization.
It means even more equipment to go obsolete when improvements come through - and more equipment deployed does not equal more bitcoins generated, so it is an issue of more hardware that will ultimately end up in landfill / being scrapped.
> And I'm skeptical if people blindly extrapolate past trends
Well I'm also sceptical of people who blindly assume progress won't be made. To quote someone in 2014 predicting what would happen to ASIC design...
> As an emerging field of IC design, bitcoin mining ASICs have experienced rapid evolution over the past two years. However, they cannot keep evolving and developing at the current rate.
https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-can-longer-ignore-mo...
Well, still, try see how profitable your 3 year old ASIC miner is today...
I don't get this comparison because Nvidia isn't a Bitcoin mining technology company. Or at least they weren't until a week ago. When someone deems it not profitable to mine on a set of 50 GPUs they purchased, they can resell those to gamers. But these mining cards are just e-waste.
> Don’t hate the player; hate the game.
Games don't exist without players.
Of course they do. Just because a game isn't being played doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Or at least, the rules do.
In a world of 7 billion humans, all you need is 2 to be the first movers and start playing. If the game is rewarding to the players, then it will continue to attract more players and grow until the size of the network of players itself becomes a huge part of the value of playing.
Games are just a protocol. And if the protocol is useful and better than other protocols, or has some first/second mover advantage, then the network using the protocol will grow until it saturates the addressable nodes.
Except they can't. GPUs used for mining are trash - too much heat and stress continuously.
Think about the average load on a consumer card used normally - maybe a daily 4 hour gaming binge max?
Meanwhile a mining card is running near 100% capacity 24/7, probably without enough cooling.
A world with more access to energy and cheaper silicon chips is probably necessary to address the immense challenges civilization is facing.
It's rather strange to see so many luddites on HN advocating to ban technology they dislike.
First, they came for the miners. You'll be cancelled someday too.
In the Wild West you would need maybe several horses each in order to exchange a certain amount of gold. What does the carbon usage be here?
Bitcoin solves that problem in software, which is magnificent. For the same carbon footprint.
That won’t stop Nvidia having a near monopoly on high end GPU. They use this to jack up the price of machine learning cards as well.
The Titan RTX is ~$2,500, which is incredibly well-priced considering that a 100G dual NIC is going to cost you $1,250.
With a 3080 you can make over $12/day in BTC and the electricity costs required are less than $2 in a majority of the US [0].
[0] https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-rtx...
NiceHash rents your hash rate to buyers, you mine ethereum, while they pay your rewards in btc.
If you want ethereum directly, you can mine for a pool like ethermine or flexpool.
There's a profitability floor on hashes/KWh. When coin's price goes as sky-high as it has been, it pushed GPU mining back into the black. This is likely a temporary state of affairs; either the network difficulty will increase to where only ASICs can break through, or the price will decline.
The main cases I image are:
1. The miner doesn't want to deal with price fluctuations and wants to prevent arbitrage risk
2. It might be more profitable to outsource smallish coins that have to buy hashing power to stabilize their network (though that would probably also be covered by the profit switcher)
3. Money laundering <--- Which I assume is the biggest portion
Anyway, I now have six machines set up in my (previously... freezing cold garage), generating around £20 to £25 day total, after electricity costs. I’m on a metered power supply that is much cheaper at nighttime.
The benefits of NiceHash are:
- super simple set up. Literally an installer, it benchmarks the machine and gets to work in minutes. They have their own OS as well. That’s a rabbit hole for a few evenings this week to have some fun with.
- mobile app for monitoring all your rigs - temperatures, profitability, etc.
- pretty decent web front end for tracking progress, crypto prices, rig stats, etc.
- automatic switching between the most profitable algorithms in real-time. If the market are paying money for a specific currency/algo, it will swap to where the money can be made quickly and automatically without you needing to be involved.
- easy to disable specific algorithms that don’t work well. First day it kept jumping to KawPow, but for me this was really poor for profitability on my hardware, so it’s literally a click to disable that algorithm in their software.
I guess it just works, is largely set and forget, but offers lots of tweaking, monitoring for those with the desire to do that. Is it the most efficient or profitable? I’m starting to think not, but I’m still at the bottom of the curve for all of this, however, NiceHash has provided the perfect springboard into a new (to me) world.
BTW, I am fairly anti crypto in general. I’m kind of doing this as a learning experience while I have some free hours to burn each week on learning about something I feel I should know a lot more about while having a bit of fun in the process.
Setting up a miner yourself doesn't take much work but it won't have profit switching or extra cloud features that Nicehash or Minerstat have.
No, you can mine Bitcoin on your GPU or CPU. It will work.
Go mine Ethereum or Monero instead.
I was just correcting that. Bitcoin isn't unable to be run on GPUs or CPUs.
I think that's important to point out.
> No one mines bitcoin on GPU's anymore, since 8? years.
I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying its not the transactions that use power.
Milton Friedman's doctrine was a failed turning point in business thinking [0] and unfortunately pervasive in people's perspective today. Prominent shareholders often have different motives than that of delighting the customer. Motives that are very short term profit driven. Such a toxic way to purport value.
We could use a revival of these ideas (which were the foundation of the enlightenment) in our era of blasé cynicism.
Then, if I understood, your point goes back to “might makes right”, as in, we have the power, we might as well take the money, and to hell with long term prospects or society. It is unfortunate that these people have so much influence over the rest of us. It is also a demonstration that optimising private interests does not result in public good, that is, the invisible hand of the market is utter bollocks.
Back at PS2/PS3 they were used for computing, Sony actually released a kit and had paid staff helping people who wanted to build PS2 supercomputers -- a good friend from college worked on the project at Sony. They had amazing vector processing units in them.
* https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supe...
Article from 2003 on PS2 setups https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/05/28/ps2-supercomputer
Maybe nvidia should be held responsible for thier products. Anyone else up to support a law imposing disposal obligations on single-use products designed to kill secondary markets? When the boom slows, the miners can give these cards back to nvidia for environmentally friendly recycling.
This line of thinking scares me. It’s basically saying “they aren’t doing what I want so let’s use the government to make them do what I want!” How is this freedom? Forcing people to bend to your will though government is the opposite of freedom, and should be used very sparingly
Whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
The fact is that corporations are made up of many people, so at a basic level you’re still compelling people who want to do what _they_, to do what _you_ want, through government.
But it’s pretty clear that you and I are never going to agree on this. So probably not worth discussing too much further.
Regulation of a market by government doesn't mean abandoning free markets. Regulation is an essential part of sustaining a free market. Totally non-regulated markets quickly devolve into monopoly and other anti-consumer evils such as devices, like this, designed to kill secondary markets.
"Regulation" in the old sense of "making regular", perhaps. Establishing fair weights and measures, preventing fraud, etc. Ensuring that individuals are free to trade and that all transactions are in fact voluntary (including, most importantly, transactions with the government itself). But when your "regulation" consists of applying force to micromanage how people—shareholders in this case—employ their capital for the benefit of some other group, you've moved well outside the realm of the free market.
"Lobby the government" that's what bigger corps do to the point of buying some. So it is only fair game.
It's not really the same because playstations are sold at break-even or at a loss with the expectation that follow-up revenue would make up for it. On the other hand no such dynamic exists for nvidia. For them, sale to a miner is the same as a sale to gamer.
It's simply not possible.
There's Nvidia's longstanding allergy to open source, but that only affects the tiny fraction of gamers who use Linux.
There's this hash rate thing, but from a gamer's perspective that's pro-consumer.
I suppose you can count their price increases for recent GPU generations. But I don't know if that rises to the level of "anti-consumer". Especially when they've been delivering performance to match.
The best example I can think of is their policy of requiring servers to use their more-expensive 'professional' line of GPUs. This does hurt gamers, since it forces game streaming services using Nvidia cards to charge higher prices. That said, among the major streaming services, Stadia, xCloud, and PlayStation Now all use AMD GPUs, while GeForce Now can skirt the policy since it belongs to Nvidia itself. The remaining services are relatively obscure – though perhaps they'd be less obscure if Nvidia didn't have that policy.
Not ever having the functionality in the PS4 and later doesn't imply they didn't remove it in prior cases.
I would have had Sony and friends not create a closed ecosystem in the first place.
You're replying in a thread about (compared to consoles) general purpose computers, which developers depend on gamers actually playing their games on, being effectively DRMed.
I don't particularly care about shareholder obligations in this case. I'm glad this incentive structure exists, and it doesn't necessarily inform my ethos.
This is being received well by people who are practically triggered by the notion of cryptocurrency operations.
Trucks generally are often wasted (from a green perspective) because people like them not for their intended design utility.
Same for single passenger SUV usage etc...
(I drive an SUV - not trolling those that do)
The analogy is improved like this: Ford announces in advance that their upcoming truck requires a certain usage, and if you want whatever special commercial usage, you need to pay a premium. You might be grumpy about the upcharge, but this is a very different situation from them changing the terms of the deal after the sale.
Implicit somewhere is the economics and supply is that nvidia has made these ans knows people use them for work. What would be our collective thinking if they made the gpu not work for non games?
This would probably increase supply further for the gamers. Commercial users should and would pay more since they are literally profiting from their use.
Miners would buy the edition now meant for them.
John Deere has entered the chat.
We often have used GPU's for around the price range you're looking for. They won't be fantastic, but probably an upgrade for a 9 year old machine.
Edit: I should also add, a lot of the really small scale shops also don't list 100% of their inventory online, with the benefit that it doesn't get scalped up like everything else.
Modern computers have allowed these 'forever existing' technologies to scale to our population growth. Try building freeways without modern computers, or performing modern medical interventions without them.
Probably the most critical usage of GPUs is scientific simulations for biology/medicine, climate, space, etc.
Provide a better product for mining .. don't cripple what's out there.
This feels similar to when Nurofen tried to repackage generic drugs for different types of pain. I.e. ultimately a branding exercise.
--
Edit: spelling and s/paracetamol/generic drugs
Not even the same manufacturing process...
Regardless, most proof of work algorithms are already being optimized with ASICs (ala bitcoin)... Or, like Ethereum's ETHASH alg, they have a step requiring high throughput random access to large amounts of memory, ala scrypt or argon (5gb or so for ETHASH right now, and slowly increasing). That's what's kept ASICs from being profitable for Eth, and is probably limiting factor for FPGAs as well. Though maybe there are FPAGs with dedicated memory on par with a modern GPU?
OTOH, it could be cracked tomorrow and value of dedicated silicon will go off a cliff. So I don't blame the GPGPU crowd for that, before even considering the engineering challenges of silicon/FPGA for eth.
https://beaconcha.in/ is a nice explorer to see beacon chain running live.
(Ethereum & Bitcoin both add some other year-decade timeframe factors to the difficulty, but don't think it affects this basic principle, which acts on week-to-minute timeframes).
I view it as a race to the margins. Anyone who can do it cheaper, or benefit from economy of scale, will get a larger slice of the pie, but at smaller margins... creating a cycle of consolidation.
I think original assumption was that folks running PoW at home on their GPUs would be able to compete, but due to efficiencies of specialized hardware and regional differences in electricity costs, that's just not the case.
---
Others might disagree, but my personal opinion is that this isn't a sustainable way to maintain decentralization, since it seems to obviously trend towards a few large "just turning a profit" players.
There might be some ways to adjust mining incentives to make it work, but this fundmental issue is why I think Proof of Stake has a much more viable future, as it sidesteps this (and the environmental) issues.
In theory you could run the entire network on one CPU, though it would take a very long time for the difficulty to adjust downward by that much from its current level. However, the extra capacity isn't wasted—a network secured by the hashing power of a single CPU would be extremely vulnerable since a trivial expenditure would give an attacker >99% of the hashing power and the ability to create forks and double-spend almost at will. The point of spending so much on hashing is to ensure that no attacker could plausibly out-spend the rest of the network and thus acquire a majority of the hashing power.
Now, do we need all of the current hashing power to secure the network? I don't think so. That's a consequence of the initial block distribution system, with a fixed halving schedule for block rewards and a price which has risen much more quickly than anyone anticipated. The cost of reliably executing a double-spend via a 51% attack far exceeds the potential reward for pulling off the attack. At some point the market will be saturated, the price will cease to double every four years (or less), transaction fees will make up a majority of the block reward, and the resulting drop in the total market value of the block rewards will lead to a decrease in hash rate to a level which is sustainable and yet still sufficient to discourage any would-be attackers.
I sorta see this as Nvidia trying to create some market segmentation not for the miners, but so gamers can actually get their cards before Nvidia loses mindshare. (Not that I think that's likely)
1) covid-19. Factory closures, employee, and supply chain issues. 2) 30-40% growth in gaming due to covid-19 3) trump tariffs (for the USA). Gpu exemption expired in January.
Crypto is affecting prices but they aren’t causing the supply issues. I don’t think amd has produced many 6800/6900s. Ryzen 5800/5900 cpus are rarely in stock.
Nurofen, and ibuprofen. I assume it's a winning strategy as the products have been on sale for an (un)reasonable amount of time in some countries now.
If you want to talk about acetaminophen/paracetamol than brand names would be Efferalgan or Tylenol
You're right, Nurofen contains ibuprofen in it's main product range, not paracetamol.
The point is a generic drug was branded to solve specific ailments, when it acts in exactly the same way in all cases.
Also, undervolting isn’t always the correct choice it depends on how valuable the coin being minded is relative to energy costs. Someone mining in their dorm room for example may not be paying based on electricity useage.
My understanding was that gaming cards are pushed far harder, at higher temps, with fluctuating power and thermals, which causes more issues than a single stable power limit and temperature
You might be thinking of spinning disk drives rather than GPUs. A lot of people suggest that leaving an HDD powered up and spinning is better than spinning up and down frequently, due to the temperature going up and down a lot and the added wear on this mechanical device. This is completely different from a GPU though.
Miner cards have longer, sustained high temps. This is bad for life.
Gamer cards have lots of thermal cycles. This is very bad for life.
Miner cards are more likely to be undervolted to improve power efficiency and thermals. This is good for life. (Lower peak temperature, less electromigration).
Gamer cards are more likely to be overvolted and overclocked to improve peak performance. This is very bad for life. (higher peak temperatures, more electromigration).
https://www.dfrsolutions.com/hubfs/Resources/services/Temper...
The major risk factor for GPU’s is electromigration which is a major factor in GPU lifespan and directly relates to usage. A 40 hour a week gamer is extremely rare, but a mining GPU is pulling 168 hours a week.
Solder fatigue breaking of solder balls is common. I have fixed lots of GPUs by reflowing them. GPUs do cycle over a large temperature range-- delta-T can be 50C+. While maps are loading, etc, you can have delta-T's of 25C+ every few minutes.
Indeed, you have lots of people doing this:
https://turbofuture.com/computers/How-to-Fix-a-Dead-Graphics... https://www.instructables.com/How-to-repair-your-Graphics-Ca... https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Temporarily+Repair+a+Lost+Cause...
This is a thermal cycling induced failure mode. (Of course, a home oven doesn't accomplish proper reflow, so this is more of a "fix things for a couple months" trick as described in the posts).
That said, specific manufacturers can always introduce defects so your mileage may vary.
A) solder joint failure (thermal cycling) B) capacitor failure (sustained heat).
Electromigration is a distant, end-of-life condition-- representing only a tiny fraction of failures of non-overvolted devices in a normal use period.
As your link itself says, in the top answer:
"But then there is an important question: How much does this decrease the lifespan? Knowing this, should you make sure that your graphics card stays cool all the time? My guess is no, unless an error was made at the design stage. Circuits are designed with these worst-case situations in mind, and made such that they will survive if they are pushed to the limits for the rated lifetime of the manufacturer. "
I have no data to back this up but anecdotally this makes a huge difference in wear.
Electromigration matters on the order of 100 years.
Intel messed up their life expectancy calculations, and thus they died after 2~3 years. I think 2 are still alive.
Only the B2 stepping of chipsets should be affected by this tough.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/intel-discovers-bug-in-6...
https://techreport.com/news/20326/intel-finds-flaw-in-sandy-...
I'll probably just upgrade to Zen3 soon, so it'd not be worth the effort (the machine in question is off and in storage).
Here’s a fun report from NASA that I love to cite (it is also the citation for my lifespan claim).
https://c3.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/ObservedFail...
Both pages are focused on aerospace engineering (and perhaps fault-tolerant systems in general), so I'm not sure how I'd rate them as authoritative sources for the lifespan of electronics in general. Possible faults in a gaming GPU might not be as critical if they cause something to fail once a year, for example.
Though I'm not sure how much actual damage you'd see in practice, whether the ICs tend to die with intense use before e.g. the capacitors mentioned above.
When I started buying new parts as an adult, the failure rates of e.g. GPUs were pretty disappointing in comparison to the biased expectations I had from those survivor PCs.
I'm really sad about new laptops having everything soldered on. If something fails, you either need a good reflow station (and skills) or you have to toss the whole thing, which is insane.
It also makes parts ridiculously expensive, like a system board for a Dell Precision now goes for ~$500 where it used to be under $100. All because the CPU, GPU, VRAM and even RAM are soldered on.
Honestly, I hate where all of this is going. So much for everyone going green.
It depends what you mean by "wear out". Hardware does fail with time.
To put things in perspective, not so long ago it was believed that below a certain stress delta some materials were immune to fatigue and practically eternal. However it was soon apparent that that belief was not factual, and a phenomenon labelled very high cycle fatigue started to become a research topic. This type of fatigue is characterized by cracks being induced even at very low stress levels due to defects such as impurities and even crystal size in metal matrices.
Not to mention crypto miners will often have the GPUs overclocked on top of running full tilt to get every last hash out of it. It's about as brutal of a situation as you can get for a GPU.
This is false because miners often undervolt to achieve better efficiency. The popular GPU mining algorithms are all memory-bound, so you can undervolt your core clocks quite a bit and still get >95% of the original performance.
For collage dorms for example rarely charge based on electricity use. Some apartment complexes also include electricity as part of the rent.
Most people prioritize the longevity of the cards. Resale value is not negligible.
Those situations are rare. A student in a college dorm isn't going to be able to afford multiple GPUs for a mining rig, and if he's mining with one GPU, he's likely going to keep it when the crash comes rather than trying to sell it into a flooded market. Apartment mining is more believable, but even then power consumption is going to be an issue for them because of noise. They're also going to be vastly outnumbered (in terms of GPUs operated) by professional miners because most people don't have a few thousand dollars to drop on generating highly speculative assets.
I have met several counter examples.
you absolutely can wear out a GPU with excessive mining.
Do you think the copper wiring in your house also wears out?
Another less related to electronics, is simple heat cycles.
You are aware that this already happens to BTC ASICs when the new generation of ASIC comes out, right? Straight to the landfill. BTC is very wasteful, this is not new.
> 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.
Combine with their after market value (see https://youtu.be/XfIibTBaoMM), this is no more than Nividia trying to spin goodwill whilst padding their bottom line.
You should of course make your own judgments, but many people do not consider that a good tradeoff.
Out of total energy production that's closer to 0.07% (~170,000 TWh in 2019 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...).
Unlike actual people mining farms can be placed right next to power source so it's easier to use Nuclear / Wind / Solar / Hydro for such purposes.
While electricity transportation is an issue, it's not a huge one compared to the likes of storage and actually having something generating electricity. And, as it turns out, a lot of the mining farms just use coal (https://decrypt.co/43848/why-bitcoin-miners-dont-use-more-re...), with only around 40% of the energy coming from renewables. Even if they were only using renewables, it's still not zero carbon, since renewables also need to be built & since the total power consumption is increased, older coal plants might be used for longer.
For something, where the economic value is comparatively low.
That's 0.1% of total CO2 emissions per year (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...) and 0.074% of global CO2eq (https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector).
I'd probably agree that this is still pretty high for what amount to digital hording.
On the other hand the seccond most popular blockchain Ethereum is estimated at half the energy consumption (https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption), has a plan to move to proof of stake and has a lot more economic value.
The space is still new and bitcoin has first mover's advantage, name recognition and trust (most hashrate, most reviewed codebase, etc).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio... puts the latest number at 173,340 TWh in 2019. This is an underestimate for the current value as energy consumption has been increasing.
https://cbeci.org/ estimates the annualised consumption based on a 7 day moving average of 120.87 TWh for bitcoin. To be generous let's assume all cryptocurrency mining is double that for 241.74 TWh.
That's only 0.14% of the total energy production, a lot of which comes from renuables (abundant cheap electricity means more profits for miners).
Even if you assume the worst case of 1100 gCO2eq/kWh (https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/post/postpn...) that's 265.914 Million Tonnes and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-... shows the 2019 value at 36.44 Billion Tonnes
That's a grave overestimate of 0.73% assuming the most pollution energy production and even then it doesn't even compare to any other sector: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Right here it says `20 863 TWh` which is nearly 10 times your worst case.
It's huge for pushing numbers around, but hardly "one of the biggest contributions".
What Nvidia is doing is like a dad making his kids share their sweets in a 50:50 ratio by taking advantage of the fact that one of his kids has a peanut allergy and the other has a walnut allergy and therefore 50% of the sweets contain peanuts and the other 50% walnuts.
Who can really blame NVidia for this? The actual target market for these products, gamers and the lower end graphics professionals, have been plagued by supply issues. In the long term NVidia stands more to gain by providing consistent supply.
There's lots of old graphics cards no one sells or buys as well
What does "the same crypto market" mean?
The only saving grace they had were hacky Looking Glass style solutions.
Also, you just don't buy that hardware - so it's not "what you can use your hardware for" - unless they're retroactively updating drivers to prevent the same use of already purchased projects.
I'd argue your concern is an issue only due to patents that may prevent a competitor from coming in and making a competing product if the main producers are engaging in bad behaviours.
Edit to add: I love the downvotes - they're such a strong way to sway someone's thoughts on something, so much effort gets put into clicking a downvote too - it must be serious business!
That abusive practice is the only thing enabling this kind of business pivot. The pivot also doesn't even achieve what Nvidia claims to be setting out for, because they are splitting already limited capacity to support two distinct product lines thereby halving the overall supply available. If anything, this is just making sure everyone pays inflated prices due to scarcity.
What I'll say is that the absurdity of this trite dismissal presents a large undertaking for anyone to begin to try and teach you what cryptocurrencies are.
Most of the silicon valley billionaires acknowledge it as a promising technology, if that doesn't warrant some serious (read: many hours of difficult reading) consideration than expecting strangers on a message board to help you do it seems a bit entitled.
I'll grant you that trite dismissal of cryptocurrencies in general is quite common on HN.
Are you talking about your trite dismissal of my stating it's a global MLM scheme - which it fits the pattern for precisely? And also a Ponzi scheme because the final latest adopters are left holding the bag - meanwhile wealth was unnecessarily transferred weighted towards the earliest adopters.
Blockchain is a promising technology, designing it like Bitcoin to align people through financial gain (of an MLM) has unavoidable-unfixable pitfalls. You're welcome to go through my comment history to read more about the actual solution. You're making assumptions too that my stating it's an MLM scheme isn't backed up.
I find it hilarious, the irony, of you claiming my comment is a trite dismissal - as yours has exactly the same depth as mine, with the only truth you state is that blockchain is a "promising technology."
Your holier-than-thou defensive comments, articulated almost poetically, is getting more common though - as the more intelligent sucked into the MLM scheme get defensive and their guard goes up - feeling the need to defend their position, needing the price of Bitcoin to go up and up and up; while you're financially incentivized to write and spend energy, and others like myself with counter-narratives aren't financially incentivized to do so.
How many companies and technologies is this true or? Does this make them all MLM schemes?
Nothing about your response indicates you're giving me a generous interpretation at all, especially given how much of this response is you dumping rhetoric on me. Being snarky and in the same breath elaborately calling me "holier-than-thou" seems like we're just going to have a name calling arms race.
Similarly, the notion that more intelligent people are 'sucked in and defensive' is the true explanation, and you don't seem receptive to another interpretation to intelligent people thinking a technology is promising...it seems we may as well just leave it here. Thanks for your time.
Companies exist to make a profit and many of them do so by providing a service or by selling goods. The profit is paid out through dividends or stock buy backs. As an owner of a stock you have to do absolutely nothing to extract value from that stock. The company is automatically paying out money to you. There is no need to worry about finding a future buyer of your stock because you are assuming that people are analyzing the value of the company and buying it based on that analysis, because if the company keeps doing stock buybacks forever eventually your shares will be the only ones left and if you sell your shares you have cashed out your money without selling to a different investor.
With Bitcoin there are no dividends or buybacks. The only way you can realize value from Bitcoin as an investment is by hoping another investor is buying it from you. These complaints apply to gold as well. It doesn't generate revenue, it produces little value beyond industrial uses, all it should do is track inflation and tracking inflation is a very low bar and in practice cryptocurrencies and gold are outpacing inflation. Stocks too but if you were to invest based on fundamentals there will be a day in the future when your analysis will be spot on. Fundamentals would tell you to stay away from Tesla stock.
But this isn't where problems end, it's where they start. Currencies are not supposed to appreciate. They are supposed to stay the same over long periods of time with a small amount of inflation (around 2%). Bitcoin failed to become a currency and that's why it's worthless.
>you don't seem receptive to another interpretation to intelligent people thinking a technology is promising
I know you are not talking about me but I specifically stated that literally any other cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin is fine, even Ethereum is better than Bitcoin. The insistence that a single specific flawed cryptocurrency is worthy of defense is what really irritates me. There is no need to defend Bitcoin. Stop defending it. You can talk about any other cryptocurrency. You can talk about decentralized apps, you can talk about lightning, you can talk about defi, you can talk about uniswap or rubic, you can talk about prediction markets. Please, talk about anything other than Bitcoin and if you do talk about Bitcoin recognize its flaws and weaknesses.
The analogy was simply because GP posited that the pattern of wealth transfer from late to early adopters indicated an MLM scheme and that's clearly a shared trait among companies which are not MLM schemes.
It is not at all the defining trait of an MLM scheme.
I'm not trying to be rude, but the rest of your comments have nothing to do with anything I've said. I'm not taking a maximalist position, and I also don't agree that we should "stop talking about Bitcoin". It's evolving, so whatever you think or observe about it is on some level subject to change.
The unfortunate reality is that Bitcoin advocates all sound like people who bought into an MLM scheme. They desperately convince others that it has value and should go up.
That doesn't make it an MLM scheme any more than Tesla is.
And the counter balance I see generally are similar to the other commenter, people who will unload angry rhetoric but demonstrate no understanding of the Nakamoto Consensus algorithm much less address any of its merits.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
NVDA's stance is that miners are the reason for scarce GPUs, but it is not. There has been scarcity since the 3xxx series was announced, similarly for AMD. The reality is that there is simply not enough silicon being produced; with AAPL hogging TSM's 5nm for a year, AMD and NVDA competing for 7nm wafers for AMD's CPUs, GPUs, and the console's SOCs and for NVDA's GPUs, and soon to be joined by INTC.
By cutting 3xxx production for gaming to accommodate crypto they ensure that there won't be second hand gpus flooding the market and eating their profits once the craze is over. Why is that? because it will not be as cost effective to miners to buy 3060s instead of the dedicated chips because of lower performance per watt. Once the craze is over, the miners won't be able to liquidate their dedicated cards, thus, the demand for GPUs for gaming remains intact, thus, they will be able to sell their 3xxx series and 4xxx series without getting screwed over by second hands and they will not be stuck with a huge inventory as was the case in 2018.
Edit:
Infact, the second hand 3060s would outcompete anything NVDA could offer in 1080p and 1440p gaming and anything NVDA could release with their 4xxx cards. In addition, there isn't enough incentive to even go beyond 1080p or 1440p for gaming. Which is why you will see NVDA pushing how great 4k and even 8k gaming is with their recent publicity stunt for 8k gaming on a 3090.
Right, like you point out, in 2018, Nvidia was making a lot of money on leftover 1080s. And they’re proposing to not do that this time. Are you suggesting that gamers are going to bypass a $330 card for a year in hopes that mining will crash and they can get a used one for $200 that’s been running hot for an entire year, and then after waiting, give up on that and buy a brand new GPU?
> The reality is that there is simply not enough silicon being produced.
You say potato, I say demand. You’re hand-wavily suggesting that mining is not affecting supply at all. That’s just not true. Mining demand is making an already bad problem (for gamers) much worse, just like it did last time.
What is the huge profit windfall you’re suggesting happens after this current mining bubble pops? Nvidia isn’t going to have an oversupply of cards to sell, and they aren’t hiking the price of the 3060.
This all seems completely speculative too. You’re complaining about a supposed future problem, and ignoring what this does for gamers today.
And it’s weird to frame this as gamers being screwed by Nvidia just because there could have been some awesome second hand market later. The fact is that gamers were totally screwed by miners in the first place when cards weren’t available for a year and the second hand prices were quadruple the list price. It’s not a huge gift to gamers that the market is flooded with cheap leftovers after they were hosed and frustrated and extorted by miners for a year or two.
In return they're only given the 3060 which is still profitable for miners and Nividia refuses to restrict mining on any other gaming Geforce series card.rxqy
Miners are also screwing over gamers by buying their gaming cards today. In future miners will be a positive for games as they flood the used market with gaming cards.
Neither are altruistic here.
That's an assumption, it's speculation. If true, it means there will be no 3060s for gamers because they'll sell out as CMP, in contradiction to what Nvidia said. We will see if your assumption comes true...
I don't know why your speculative assumption makes any sense. If the chips that could be sold to gamers were being sold to miners instead and effectively "screwing" gamers, then it means that there's no point to segmenting the market, no advantage for Nvidia. It would be no different than letting miners buy the 3060s, and just not having CMP cards.
> In future miners will be a positive for games as they flood the used market with gaming cards.
That doesn't make up for the losses to gamers up front, it does not compensate by 100%, it can't. It would be better (for gamers) if there was no bubble.
Re very used: no. Cards used for mining are a) undervolted and b) underclocked, both increase lifespan and I'd take them over an overclocked card used for gaming, plus they don't run that hot because at those scales cooling is expensive.
> Right, like you point out, in 2018, Nvidia was making a lot of money on leftover 1080s. And they’re proposing to not do that this time.
I never said NVDA was making money off leftover 1080s because there weren't left over 1080s, it was 1050tis which they are selling off again. The same 1050tis that they held onto during 2018.
> Are you suggesting that gamers are going to bypass a $330 card for a year in hopes that mining will crash and they can get a used one for $200 that’s been running hot for an entire year, and then after waiting, give up on that and buy a brand new GPU?
As I mentioned above, mining GPUs are usually in better conditions than in some dusty and improperly cooled rig and, simply put, there aren't $330 cards for anyone to buy. If people wish to buy $330 cards, they can buy them, but for me, at 21x9 1080p@60 there is no reason to upgrade from my used 1080ti, and had I really needed something better, I'd consider a used 3060.
> You say potato, I say demand. You’re hand-wavily suggesting that mining is not affecting supply at all. That’s just not true. Mining demand is making an already bad problem (for gamers) much worse, just like it did last time.
I never said mining isn't affecting demand but, a) the crypto rally started loooong after NVDA had supply issues, b) Amd has supply issues with their CPUs and they are utterly irrelevant to mining, c) this generation of consoles made with the same wafers can't meet the demand. The demand was there before this cycle of mining frenzy.
> What is the huge profit windfall you’re suggesting happens after this current mining bubble pops? Nvidia isn’t going to have an oversupply of cards to sell, and they aren’t hiking the price of the 3060.
They won't because they are artificially limiting the hashrate, and they are producing more chips for mining. Last time around, people managed to get around the no display issue and could game on "mining gpus" (see Linus Tech Tips, they have 2 videos on the topic), but now NVDA is locking people outside with firmware making reusing mining gpus impossible.
I am complaining exactly because NVDA is taking care of their shareholders and their bottom lines. I am complaining because it goes against my interests.
Gamers are not screwed by miners, gamers are screwed because the pandemic caused a huge influx of people demanding chips, so much so, that even automotive manufactures can't find chips.
I am tired of this conversation and you are either taking my sentences out of context and blow them out of proportion.
So you are already certain you want to buy a used 3060 next year?
> I never said mining isn't affecting demand
You said "NVDA's stance is that miners are the reason for scarce GPUs, but it is not."
> the crypto rally started loooong after NVDA had supply issues
This is irrelevant. You mean this time, right? There wasn't a supply problem last time before bitcoin miners bought everything. It doesn't make any difference to gamers which contributor to scarcity came first, when you're talking about 3060 sales that haven't started yet.
> I am tired of this conversation and you are either taking my sentences out of context and blow them out of proportion.
I think you're taking this entire issue out of context and blowing it out of proportion. You claimed gamers are being screwed, when they're not, they're actually being helped. Many gamers here and on other threads are happy that Nvidia is taking steps to curb miner scalping of the 3060. The change here is to a single model, the 3060. Segmenting that market over this single model helps gamers today, and is not going to kill the second hand market for gaming cards. All other models will be untouched, and the 3060 will still be available second hand.
I wanted to buy a graphics card to run my models. I don't have the $$$ to buy a datacenter card for it and in general, I am affected by the demand and the scalpers. I was considering 3060 because my models are small and it is faster than my 1080ti, but at 21x9 1080p@60hz, it's not an upgrade for my gaming experience because that is capped by the monitor, and I am really not willing to buy a new monitor.
> You said "NVDA's stance is that miners are the reason for scarce GPUs, but it is not."
The reason is mentioned before, too much demand for chips, not enough fabrication. You instead, blame the scarcity on mining, mining is part of the demand but is not the main factor.
Linus and many others, me included, disagree with your opinion that NVDA is helping gamers. NVDA does not care about gamers, they are a corporation, they care for their bottom line and their stock price.
This argument that Nvidia is a company is a straw man. Valve is as much a corporation that doesn't care about gamers as Nvidia. I guarantee that Nvidia cares about gamers, precisely because gamers have a huge influence on NVDA's stock price and bottom line.
I love Linux, but Linus has a vested interest in opposing Nvidia in public, and has a long history of making inflammatory remarks, even to people he works with. Using his opinion as support of your claims here undermines the credibility of the discussion, as far as I'm concerned.
To attempt to move the goalpost back to where you first placed them, the question here is whether reserving 3060 sales for gamers is good or bad for gamers. You claim it's bad for gamers vs the second hand market next year, and I claim it's good for gamers vs the first hand market today. We haven't actually disagreed about this yet, because you haven't addressed how your opinion affects gamers right now.
I agree that this might lead to a different second hand market next year. It is true that the second hand sales next year might not be as low without first having a big mining bubble that first prices gamers out and then crashes. I just don't believe that cheap cards later makes up for what miners have already done to you. If you do, it seems like you're ignoring some of the big downsides of what's happened before and what's happening now.
> I am affected by the demand and the scalpers. I was considering 3060
If you want to buy a 3060 now, I don't understand why you can't see the CMP announcement as a good thing for you and your own bottom line.
If you want to buy a used, mined 3060 later, and give your money to a miner and not Nvidia, then I do understand your points.
But so you count reductionist click bait opinion commentary on YouTube as "evidence"? Commentary that comes from a company who's profit motive is driven by clicks and attention? Saying that companies primarily care about their bottom line is tautological, it contains no information. It's still a straw man regarding whether or not segmenting 3060s is a net positive for gamers.
Last chance... you still haven't addressed the first-hand market effect on gamers of trying to get miners to buy something else. You haven't yet backed your claim that this is bad for gamers right now. I've basically agreed with what you said might happen, that the second hand market won't look like what happened in 2018. I can only assume that if ad-hominems are going to be the response to an honest question to what you said, then you don't actually have an answer?
The thing Linus didn’t address, and the thing people don’t seem to understand about the basic economics of the situation is that there is no amazing second hand market getting flooded with cheap GPUs without first getting hosed by miners, having the prices go through the roof and not being able to get one for the next year. If that happens, then yeah, sure, the used ones will be cheap some time later, and you don’t get to choose when or even if mining crashes before the next GPU update. If that’s really what you want... enjoy.
That video is primarily an ad. It’s an ad for a VPN service and literally a ball-shaving kit. “If you imagine it any other way, then congratulations, you played yourself.” - Linus.
Instead, during a global silicon shortage, nvidia is producing silicon that has one use and then into the trash.
And your theory doesn’t explain two things: - how this hurts gamers now, and - why if Nvidia just wanted profit and the chips are useful for games, why wouldn’t Nvidia simply do nothing and let the miners buy all the 3060s. Wouldn’t that be the most profitable thing here?
In fact, why wouldn’t Nvidia just hike the price of the 3060? They could make a lot more money on miners if they wanted to, and really screw gamers. But that’s not what’s happening. So from a gamer’s perspective, I just don’t get being mad at Nvidia rather than being mad at the miners who caused this to happen, again.
No it is not. If they mis-predict when the mining craze ends, they will be stuck with a huge inventory and no way to deal with it. The reason they will be stuck with the inventory is because the miners will be able to sell the second hand cards at a rate that NVDA simply can't compete with, so they end up as the bag holders just like it happened with the 1xxx series.
Infact, I'd wager that DLSS and RTX were used as a hacky solution to drive people away from the 1xxx series because the 1xxx series was more than sufficient for 1080p gaming - which is the most common resolution. The 3xxx series, even the 3060 is an overkill even for 1440p let alone 1080p.
This, to me, suggests that had NVDA not gimped the hashrate of the 3060, once the craze was over and the market was flooded with 2nd hand 3060, people would not be incentivised to buy anything above a used 3060 because it is a) an overkill for 1440p@120hz and b) it has much higher perf/$ than anything NVDA could offer with the 3xxx or 4xxx series and it wouldn't make any sense to go with anything higher anyways because 4k gaming doesn't seem worth it unless you are playing on a TV.
There isn't a game option survey but I'd bet most gamers with mid range cards run AAA games on medium as they value being able to play over a beautiful slideshow.
> I'd bet most gamers with mid range cards run AAA games on medium as they value being able to play over a beautiful slideshow.
Exactly, I agree. That statement supports what I said and contradicts parent's comment "the 1xxx series was more than sufficient for 1080p gaming".
> Last time I checked, there weren’t all that many games that run at 60Hz 1080p and never dip.
CITATION NEEDED.
The 3060ti is benchmarked at 4k hitting mid to low 50s in high settings in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and hitting 100fps at 1440p with 0.1% minimums at 90fps.
Then why do you care at all about the 3060 segmentation into CMP cards?
Finally, the truth of the matter. ;)
Chip binning is nothing new, the article even explains this phenomenon.
I have used this service to play a few different games which I have licenses too where the developer no longer supports Mac; oddly this seems to have gotten worse with M1 chips.
If a developer wasn't around or willing to recompile and test their game on x64 to support Catalina (which dropped support for 32-bit apps), then it's not surprising to me that they are also unable or unwilling to recompile and test and support the game on M1 ARM chips.
Honestly, the worrying part is that NVIDIA may block this. If I remember right, they did something similar back in 2017 with the P106 mining cards (GTX 1060 equivalent) when people bought them for cheap.
No? Why would they need to be in different machines? You can stream from one GPU to another, whether they're in the same machine or not. One GPU may be a cheap little one built into your motherboard. You probably already have it anyway!
And even if you did need two machines... again that's how gaming streaming services work. Cheap end-user machines or iPad or just TV, and then a gaming system streaming video output somewhere else.
Thats not really called "streaming". So given that somewhere in this thread there was a youtube link on how to do that, which required testmode in Windows - it's still not practical.
The data would literally be streamed along a bus from one storage to another. The name ‘streaming’ literally appears in some APIs you’d use to do it!
That's exactly what streaming means as a technical term:
Examples:
https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL_TextureAccess
Make up your mind. If I counter your "video streaming" argument, you can't come with "but I meant streaming on the same device" without even mentioning either a technology, or the most important thing there (the frame buffer). Now you want streaming to mean something that is used in game engines. How those 3 links help in making the mining card usable is for you to proof.
Could it possibly even be usable as a second card in a SLI setup?
I want to know if I could use one as a second card for 3D rendering. Although I guess the render farm people will know about that and suck those all up...
Well yeah, because the alternative would be that the miners dump them on the secondary market to gamers.
I think we can probably all agree that corporations should have some responsibility in the ramifications of their products.
It has been tried 2 years ago on LinusTechTips: https://youtu.be/TY4s35uULg4
TL;DW: Very weird and extremely unofficial, but it can be done.
These might still be some cheap rendering cards on Linux when they're used up.
Needs quite a bit of driver fuckery to have it recognized as either a GTX 980m or a Quadro M5000m, and you lose HDMI/DP output, but it's not a bad card for an upgrade if you only use the internal display.
I'm surprised there are no MXM to PCIe x16 adapters, these kinds of cards are cheaper than desktop ones (due to the market/pricing being totally screwed) while providing similar performance.
"RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent."
open source drivers have been long due. Now there is real $Billions staked on that need.
The CMP version is a straight-to-landfill product. As soon as it stops being profitable for mining it will have zero resale value, and become e-waste.