Coinbase had IPO, meaning serious business bought their shares, hedge and pension funds - I would be careful expecting any kind of normalcy in the next 2-3 years.

Coinbase had a direct listing. There was no roadshow to line up institutional investors. I'm sure some big-time investors bought shares, but I'm sure some retail ones did, too. You know who sold? Early Coinbase investors and employees.

That's normal. The primary moneymaking product of small startups is ... stock.

>serious business bought their shares, hedge and pension funds

Your assuming that proves a point, but it doesn't.

I wouldn't count on it collapsing any time soon. Not with everyone from Visa to Time magazine jumping on the bandwagon

>I've never built a PC.

Definitely worthwhile. Basically lego for adults. Tons of good info here

https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapc/

There is a well known curse to Time/Newsweek/Businessweek covers. Things that make the front page there tend to do worse.

No guarantee, but it’s more of an anti signal.

That's regression to the mean and perfectly normal, there's a whole science associated with it. It's not a curse or even specific to any outlet. This is a suitable example: https://web.archive.org/web/20210121061334/http://wmbriggs.c...

Right. I just meant being in Time is not much of a signal

I meant Time accepts BTC for subscriptions now...not Time as in BTC making Time cover

>I wouldn't count on it collapsing any time soon. Not with everyone from Visa to Time magazine jumping on the bandwagon

"Jump on the bandwagon" Meaning: to support a cause only because it is popular to do so.

Sounds like a bubble. I encourage more people to jump on the bandwagon. I'm not in a hurry to get my new computer and the bigger the bubble gets the more cheap hardware will be available when it pops.

https://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/why-do-we-say...

Cryptocurrency is a logical response to central banks around the world trying to print their way out of their bad decisions instead of putting the ultra wealthy in their place.

That's why crypto isn't going anywhere and this will only get worse.

>Cryptocurrency is a logical response to central banks around the world trying to print their way out of their bad decisions instead of putting the ultra wealthy in their place.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. To me this sounds like political rhetoric not an argument.

Are you saying that cryptocurrency can replace central banks? Are you saying that cryptocurrency is some kind of revenge or punishment against central banks and wealthy? Are you saying something else??

It's literally how it started.

> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

What is the literal connection between that headline and the how cryptocurrencies started?

Presumably you're familiar with ebay?

(I wouldn't necessarily trust parts that have been worked to death btw)

I don't know how to make a shopping list and put the parts together.

I wouldn't count on the cheap hardware, it may be pretty much broken after endless full power use for mining.

I mined bitcoin, litecoin and later dogecoin on a bunch of workstations in a hot humid garage in Houston, Texas for years straight. I gave one of the workstations to a friend when I retired from mining in 2013 or so. It was still running fine when he retired it last year. Consumer electronics are much more durable than you would imagine.

Then maybe I was just unlucky, broke one GPU mining Bitcoin.

Miners usually undervolt the GPUs to mine at peak efficiency, not peak performance and power consumption. Since chip wear correlates with power usage and heat production, GPU usage for mining is actually much less taxing for the hardware than typical gaming use with its frequent overclocking and rapid alterations between low and maximum power use.

It is also important to realize the wear on the chips is relevant on the order of 100 years. What fails on the order of 1-5 years are capacitors and insulation on the power supply coil windings and fan motor windings, but the latter only sometimes.

Capacitors notably derate exponentially with increasing temperature as do many other things.

To echo the other commenters, mining is pretty gentle on GPUs insofar as constant use goes. ETH is memory bandwidth limited, so cards can be heavily undervolted and underclocked (while overclocking memory) saving power without negatively affecting hashrate. More power is wasteful. Typical ETH mining GPU temps are around 60C. I'd feel ok about buying a used card off someone who knows what they're doing mining.

The 3080 and 3090 are the singular exception. The GDDR6X runs extremely hot and frankly I think it's going to cause a bunch of early failures for even non-mining cards.