...is incorrect. The total crypto market cap collapsed because of interest rate hikes.
Nvidia's stock dropped 68%. Is that because it didn't bring anything useful for society? No. It was trading at a premium because of low rates.
Let's take a deeper cut, why does something collapse when interest rates rise?
The equities market was already running at artificially inflated values for some sectors (like technology), which means there isn't much growth potential (if everything is deemed to be already overpriced), and so the outflows were quite significant from those sectors, accentuating the inverse relationship between equities and interest rates.
The other thing that surprises me is the sheer number of currencies that currently exist - I had thought there would be a massive shake-out in the market but so far they seem to be multiplying like fungus.
Is that a rhetorical question? It flows to the 1%. Current levels of wealth inequality are unprecedented in American history. We work hard to support the lavish lifestyles of the rich.
If we could combine today's technology with 1970s levels of wealth equality, we could probably retire in 1970s level comfort by the time we reach age 40.
US interest rate go up, bitcoin go down!
Argentina interest rate go up, bitcoin go up!
Contradiction.
What you pointed out tho is important: fiat is a confidence game at the end of the day, and it doesn't matter how much yield a fiat offers if it lacks confidence.
Bitcoin is more or less a measure of how much confidence people have in their respective fiat currencies.
Not sure if you truly grasp the global impact that the United States fed policy has.
It's constantly been peaking and collapsing since 2013, when there were no US interest rate increases. The 2017 peak happened in the middle of a US interest rate increase cycle. The 2021 peak happened 6 months before the most recent US interest rate increase cycle. I'm sure interest rates were varying in other countries on different schedules, but blaming a crypto market collapse on interest rate hikes doesn't seem to square with the data.
Denominate the Bitcoin market cap in US M1 money supply. You will then see that it peaked in 2017, 2019, and 2021 (twice). This ratio also bottomed recently.
Effectively, when the central bank that manages the word's reserve currency starts printing money (or there is an anticipation of printing), Bitcoin appreciates. The opposite happens during tightening (ie rate hikes).
NVDA is up 140% for similar reasons: the market anticipates the tightening cycle is over.
It's up more than Bitcoin because of the AI narrative. It's also possible money is moving out of bank stocks (compare to KRE or XLF), small/mid-cap stocks (compare to IWM), and other semiconductor stocks (compare to SMH). This trend could mean-revert into the new quarter.
The comment I was originally addressing was about the decline, not the rally.
I only wanted to point out that this article is inane.
They are a pretty big win for those who believe in personal liberty.
Yeah sure still not society relevant.
And look what happens in Germany, it's much better to push for legalization.
People need to stand up for rights
For comparison, to use a bank card you first need to provide all your details to bank which can share them with anyone they want, and then your application can be rejected for arbitrary reasons. And after this again the bank can share information about anything you bought with the card. There is even an official organization for sharing data about consumers loan history and this is totally not a crime in our weird society.
It is quite a very poor use with such "crime" happening all on a public and transparent blockchain, making it very easy to trace all of that (even if they use a tumbler / mixer) with the funds certainly seized and frozen as soon as it hits the exchange.
In fact criminals and scammers still use banks and Zelle to facilitate their criminal enterprise - [0] [1] in the trillions of dollars.
[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-fil...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/business/payments-fraud-z...
Once again, Bitcoin is worse for scammers, criminals and ransomware than using Zelle and the banks for fraud.
You should be asking why the banks continue to move trillions of dollars of illicit funds for criminals for years without them doing anything. Same with Zelle.
The law however arbitrary and flawed is the source of morals for most adults.
George Carlin said it best with “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist."
Crypto's main use is crime insofar as its main use is denying monopolistic/governmental control, and anything that the government bans is a crime.
With sufficient tracking of non-cryptocurrencies and physical goods governments could largely kill dark net markets by making it too hard to buy anything physical with your cryptocurrency. Imagine KYC but applied to every transaction instead of just large ones.
Making dark markets too easy isn't a win for personal liberty. Its a step on the road to a dystopia with little personal liberty or privacy because every time something seriously bad happens a few due to dark markets that would not have been possible in the legal markets the general public will demand something be done about it, which will result in government being granted more power.
Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections. Fools.
There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left.
Those protections are not perfect, true, but still orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all.
And as to monopoly on physical force, there is a reason for it, too. Take a look at African countries for what happens when people are allowed to take things into their own hands. Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens when there is no government that can project physical force.
Our civilisation is far from perfect but it is a civilisation. It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety. So think about it the next time you start imagining how good it would be without all this pesky civilisation around you. Because it is much better and productive to try to iteratively fix what we already have than decide to erase everything and start a complete rewrite.
Can you give an example? Do you actually know any of these people?
> Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections
Not me, So not everybody.
> There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left.
The reason is that their protocols are inherently unsafe. Similarly, there is a reason Bitcoin was made to be unregulated -- to protect the little guys from having their share devalued by trillion dollar bail-outs for the super rich.
> orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all
Better for who? Maybe better for you, but certainly not everyone.
> Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens
The video game??
> It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety.
Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system.
I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect our pop culture is being intentionally Marvel-ized to keep full-grown adults' mental models of the world at a grade school level. (We have to stop Voldemort!! Captain Gandalf needs our support, and people who question him are traitors!!)
> Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system.
The crux of the issue, I think, and why I doubt decentralized stores of value will be legal for much longer.
"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!" - Mayer Amschel Rothschild, probably apocryphally
(mike741) > > The video game??
(JPws_Prntr_Fngr) > I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect our pop culture is being intentionally Marvel-ized to keep full-grown adults' mental models of the world at a grade school level. (We have to stop Voldemort!! Captain Gandalf needs our support, and people who question him are traitors!!)
This article sums it up:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210122122555/https://waitbutwh....
Essentially, what has happened is the application of Disney movie/show narratives taken outside of their intended context: What was meant as the starting point for guiding children on morality has instead been used as the ultimate end-goal & a shining beacon of what is considered to be moral or immoral.
In simpler terms, this is the "Disney-ification" of the political world: We're the good ones, they're the enemy, they must be opposed/defeated/unalived.
From the article:
> In high-rung politics, it’s understood that people aren’t 1s and 0s—they’re all 0.5s, each in their own messy, complicated, unique way. And to people who see people as 0.5s, it’s clear that PDW narratives not only dehumanize their opponents, they dehumanize everybody into fake cartoon people.
> https://web.archive.org/web/20210122122555im_/https://28oa9i...
Is this a serious comment?
So, end in the end, a terrible example of why trusting the organized crime behind crypto is superior to the usual crowd and whether it has contributed anything useful to society. It's more of an example of how paranoia can blind one to reality.
Cashflow without government involvement is the absolute opposite of democratic freedom. Take literally any autocratic government ripe with corruption, look at Russia, China et al. Look at any large criminal organization which tries to avoid democratically elected governmental regulation of their cashflows.
Instead of being free, in a world with no oversight of how money is exchanged, 99.9% of people will wake up in modern servitude to a tiny rich oligarchy which owns all the assets and brutally opresses their slaves.
How this is not apparent to anyone is beyond me.
We already found a solution to the problem of being treated unfairly by a government: the judicial branch.
Think your money is frozen unfairly? Then sue. Easy as that.
Crypto is the opposite where miners hold as much power as developers to create a balance.
You can't sue in Canada when the government introduces wartime measures. Like Canada was under attack
I explicitly gave the judicial branch as implemented in Western democratic societies as an example.
I'm no expert in Canadian politics, but to me it seems reasonable to assume that, just like in any other Western democratic society, the gov introducing wartime measures isn't what's day to day due process 99.9% of the time.
So you arguing based on extreme examples, which are at least partially out of context isn't really adding anything substantial to the discussion at hand I think.
How do miners hold as much power as big ass capitalists in a crypto world??
Look at the numbers for the distribution of crypto whales: https://insights.glassnode.com/bitcoin-supply-distribution-r...
Look at basic economic theory: Those who hold access to the means of production will accrue capital steadily over time.
Always has been that way, always will be.
Whether you mine a currency and then spend, or a government mints a currency, distributes it to you and then you spend has no effect on the matter.
I have no horse in this conversation about government, but I think it's important to note that neither developers nor miners hold any direct power in creating a balance on a properly decentralized blockchain. Their only power is insofar as they are able to convince users to collectively change their node software to introduce code that creates such a balance. A chain's developers are generally in a much better position to convince users of that than its miners (or stakers) are.
“Freedom Is Slavery” - 1984
It's exactly the same problem as:
Day 1: "I'm glad I finally got medicine for my chronic condition."
Day 2: "Wow, this medicine is making me feel so much better!"
Day 3: "I feel great! I don't need this medicine anymore!"
Day 4: "Man, why do I feel so terrible??"
What’s horrifying is leaving your apartment building in downtown Ottawa and being spit on and verbally harassed for wearing a mask.
What’s horrifying is smelling the literal human shit in the streets waft up through your apartment building’s ventilation system and into your unit.
What’s horrifying is seeing half of your country not care about any of that because “it’s peaceful”.
That smell comes from parliament.
The reason crypto never took off is because the government effectively backs a lot of the currency transactions indirectly, which makes engaging in such transactions a lot less risky for everyone involved. If such trust in the government wasn't there, everyone would have jumped on crypto ten-fold.
Yes, government has control over aspects of life, and humanity collectively organized governments specifically to have that power, because humanity early on realized that humans are emotion-prone individuals that cannot be trusted. All the anti-state rhetoric that you ever read completely ignores that fact.
Yes, there are going to be some negatives associated with this transfer of power that are going to happen, no complex systems like that are perfect. You probably would want someones account frozen if they were directly donating large sums of money to a terrorist group that was planning attacks on US. There are good cases for use of power, and bad ones. The fact that we aren't living in totalitarian regimes and still have plenty of individual of freedoms means that the system is working pretty well.
Not to worry the wartime act will be used on something you personally care about but by that time your rights will be gone.
How's the syphillis and HIV treating you? Oh what's that? You live in a society that actively limits the spread of these diseases by carefully limiting rights, so you're free to live your life without these diseases? Nice concept.
It was replaced by the Emergencies Act, which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, unlike its predecessors.
It just goes to show how knowledgeable the previous poster is on the subject.
> which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Indeed indeed. However, it does limit the rights and freedoms in the Charter, and it does so in a way that the Charter allows. The Charter provides an escape hatch in exceptional circumstances, and that is not by accident: it is by design. And anyone who would design the Charter without this escape hatch probably has no business being in governance, because it would just be a ticking time bomb to a constitutional crisis.
You don't have as many rights or protections as you believe. You don't even have property rights in Canada.
This is hilariously false.
What you're throwing into the mix is a suspension of human rights for... unethical research? Failing to see the distinction is really not something I can help you with.
When I used the example of STIs, I was alluding to things like how the "duty to report" [1] and the criminalization of very limited and targeted behaviours [2] have the effect of narrowing very specific rights in very specific circumstances. These are policies that are reasonable and that generally are designed to limit rights and freedoms as little as possible in order to achieve a particular goal. We're not talking about suspending rights just because it's "convenient", and I wasn't alluding to using humans as guinea pigs for unethical research programmes... I don't know what you were thinking.
You apparently don't see the difference, but that doesn't mean you have special insight-- if anything, it just means you're confused about the principles at play (or, perhaps more charitably, you're assuming that I'm a fool and are misinterpreting what I'm saying).
---
[1] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001929.htm
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/policies/law/states/exposure.html
^ The provided links are US-centred (because I'm assuming most readers are American) but one can easily find very similar policies in Canada or almost any other developed country.
1) The listener might be disease-free regardless of society's efforts (the limitation's benefit might not be relatable)
2) We live in a society that actively spreads diseases in the name of protection and profit (the justification behind limitations might be engineered)
3) These diseases still exist in unknown quantities (the limitations might be ineffective)
A better example would be something like seat belts or speed limits because:
1) The listener is far more likely to have been in or around a vehicle than they are to have contracted syphilis. (the limitation's benefit is relatable)
2) There are no instances of seat belts or speed limits having been used to justify excessive harm. (the limitation's benefit cannot be argued as having been engineered)
3) The impact on safety is far easier to measure and compare. (the limitation's effectiveness can be measured immediately)
But if you don't believe any of this to be relevant, than I must accept that. Apologies for interjecting. Thank you for your time.
1) it's exactly the type of infectious disease that public health experts deal with routinely. See the first link I provided for a long list of others.
2) it's not an "extreme" concern in the sense that there's no real danger of syphillis posing an immediate existential threat: it's a very mundane example
3) there are limitations on rights today, in most developed countries, centred around the chosen example. There are tradeoffs in place today which, similarly to seatbelts, are generally well tolerated by society.
4) it is in some sense better than the seatbelt example because it involves population dynamics (exponential growth and all the models we must make use of to make well-informed policy decisions), which are a different beast. Seatbelt behaviour is linear and has an individual blast radius. Infectious diseases are non-linear and have a collective blast radius.
There's a reason there was no trucker convoy protest over seatbelt laws: people were panicking because they didn't know anything about infectious diseases and didn't understand the motivation for taking public health action. It's an almost-classic case of fear of the unknown, and yet there were always similar types of measures in plain sight.
People who have hiv or syphilis do not get fired from a working from home position with the Canadian government because they refuse to take a vaccine.
Your worldview is limited.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fbi-seized-40-000-couple-1515... [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/civil_forfeiture
They enable people to buy medicine that is otherwise too expensive to get from official channels.
Fundamentally, that’s a kind of transfer of wealth in and of itself. My favorite examples were people with subsidized electric bills who kinda scored on that arbitrage until everyone wised up.
I think it's worth putting into perspective though that machine learning kicked off in the 60s, whereas there wasn't any notable progress on the byzantine generals problem until 2009 (and even the concept of proof-of-work wasn't formalized until 1993). Distributed ledger technology is still relatively young compared to machine learning.
AI has followed the classic Gartner hype cycle [1]. There was the trigger in the 1960s-90s, the peak of inflated expectations in 2000-2010 with every other company bragging about "AI this" or "machine learning that" while having nothing of any use to show for it, then finally the "slope of enlightenment" from the 2010s-present where AI is actually becoming useful to people in their everyday lives.
Crypto may be on the way out - or - it may be following a similar curve on a shifted timeline. For example: Trigger in 2009, peak of inflated expectations 2017 (cryptokitties), trough of disillusionment 2017-2030, slope of enlightenment 2030-2040.
PyTorch: Initial release September 2016; 6 years ago
Tensorflow: Initial release November 9, 2015; 7 years ago
> In 1983, a research paper titled "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments" by David Chaum introduced the idea of digital cash.
> The first artificial neural network was invented in 1958 by psychologist Frank Rosenblatt.
In the limit, the dates don't really matter. I'd wager both fields have had roughly the same human capital afforded to them - I'd be happy to be shown otherwise.
Neural networks really only had a scaling problem to overcome, and most people knew it. What's the technical problem with crypto?
* The waste of Proof Of Work (in terms of both on-chain economics and off-chain externalities). Introduced in 2009, solved in 2023 with Ethereum's final Proof Of Stake update (earlier if you look at smaller cryptos or if you count Ethereum's half-finished PoS algo starting in 2020).
* The inability to scale transaction throughput. Became a problem with Bitcoin in 2015, partially solved by Ethereum in 2022 with Layer 2 chains, to be fully solved in 2024-2027 with data availability sampling and generalized zero knowledge roll-ups.
* The inability to reach quick finality. Bitcoin provided 30 to 60 minute probabilistic finality. Ethereum provided similar probabilistic finality with much more predictability. Ethereum's PoS update gave it 15-minute economic finality. Future updates promise 12-second on-chain economic finality. Zero knowledge rollups promise instant economic finality.
* Miner extractable value (MEV). Too deep a topic to get into here, but it's a problem that plagues existing public smart contracts and that has solutions (like proposer-builder separation) that are currently in concept phase (2-5 years until wide implementation).
* History and state expiry. Basically, the ability for a blockchain to prune very old data that is no longer needed to keep consensus. 3-5 years out imo. This will allow for blockchains that don't constantly grow in size the longer they run.
This is incorrect. During 90s NNs were just one of the approaches to machine learning. It was not even clear how far ML as a field could go.
You can twist it any way you want, but AI/ML is older than cryptocurrencies.
Applying your same "modern AI is less than 10 years old", modern cryptocurrency really dates no older than Bitcoin. That took off say maybe 2010-12 or so, while the AI research was really kicking off around 2012-2014.
They're roughly the same age on both scales, Bitcoin is probably a bit older than modern AI and AI fundamentals are probably a bit older than cryptocurrency fundamentals, it sounds like. But this is arguing about 2 years +/- for the modern stuff and 5y +/- for the 70s/80s stuff.
just ask it ;)
Absolutely correct.
At least cryptocurrencies like Ethereum found an alternative consensus method that is efficient and environmentally friendly, unlike what I am seeing in AI and deep neural networks for decades which that still has not changed with the way on how models continue to get larger and require more planet incinerating power and will currently require millions and in the future, billions of dollars to train. As long as they stay inefficient, Nvidia will continue smiling knowing that.
The end result is a pseduo-intelligent black box that confidently hallucinates and can get confused by a single bad input - rendering it useless. Once it all goes wrong, then it gets re-trained / fine-tuned again, wasting more energy. Inference requiring tons of GPUs is also wasteful and inefficient.
The moment we switch to better and efficient alternative in training deep neural networks at scale, that I would call a 'breakthrough' in AI rather than throwing more data, more GPUs at the problem.
What are you talking about? The inaccessibility of the models and the heavy gatekeeping by the big players is leading to more and more open source models that can run on an average gaming GPU or a Mac M1. It seems like every day on HN there is another post on another super-optimized version of something that was once only accessible to those with huge server farms or cloud budgets. You're seeing announcements like Stanford's Alpaca that specifically mention how it can run on low-budget commodity hardware or a few hundred dollars in the cloud.
I'd say efficiency and optimization is one of the hottest areas in large language models right now, although the motivation is less for climate reasons and more for 'I want to do this on my own hardware and have no safety censors' reasons.
In the late 90s/early 2000s when the internet/web was really picking up steam powerful and entrenched players like Microsoft were throwing their weight around and trying to dominate the space like they did personal computers. Ditto Sun, etc.
Then the open source community got together and ate their lunch. Who remembers Netcraft statistics for Windows + IIS vs Linux + Apache?
OpenAI, Meta, Google, to some extent Nvidia, etc are doing their best to go the closed/commercial/proprietary/gated/costly route (again) - and open source is already hitting back hard against all of these and as has been shown before, starting to catch-up/outpace them at incredible speed.
It did not collapse. Only GPU mining collapsed (shitcoins). ASIC-based mining is going strong (Bitcoin). Disk-based mining is going strong (Chia).
The price and market cap both collapsed. https://www.coinbase.com/price/chia-network tells me the latest daily volume is less than $5M USD.
It seems difficult to reconcile “we’re actively trying to stop cryptominers from buying our product” actions with “we’re against cryptomining only because they’re not buying our product” views.
the demand for machines that turn a quarter into a dollar is effectively infinite. It is always rational to turn $0.99 into $1, only bounded by the risk that you can't do that in the future and the machine loses its value. But as there are more machines in the market, that $0.25 starts to approach the $0.99 return, because mining rewards are distributed across more GPUs so each has less expected return.
(and this is ignoring some weird effects like some miners being willing to run at a loss due to stolen electricity/using it to move money past currency controls/etc)
So in effect cryptomining has this super weird demand curve where the demand is infinite, then as you approach the break-even point it slows and stops, unless the price spikes again. And it can also flip and suddenly you're left with miners selling a bunch of used GPUs that undercut all the inventory you geared up to produce at 2x your normal sellthrough.
Literally the only way to cope with that is an instantaneous supply chain - you need to be able to produce enough GPUs to immediately saturate demand and push to the "nobody makes any profit anymore" stage of the curve. But that's not possible in silicon fabrication even in a perfectly ideal scenario - you are doing really well if (like NVIDIA) you can gear up to produce 2x your usual production. There just isn't enough VRAM production on the planet to produce 100x your normal quantity for 2 months, let alone the GPUs themselves. And then you'd have to ramp it all immediately back down too.
And even then, once miners are done they flip all that production back into the secondhand market (often with higher defect rates, the current batch are suffering from GPU cores that explode due to moisture from when miners powerwashed them, as well as memory failing due to prolonged high-temperature operation, and miners are repainting markings on dies to obscure this).
You can't build a supply chain to support that. It's not physically possible. Again, 2014 and 2017 showed this. And the inventory overhangs in 2015 and 2018 showed this too.
The only answer is to get miners onto their own line of products so that it doesn't starve the rest of the market for 2 years and then snap back and flood the market with excess inventory (both unsold and secondhand). People really don't like the idea of being told what they can do with their cards but you can't balance a supply chain around crypto boom/bust cycles, it is not physically possible.
Mining during your spare time is a consolation prize for GPUs being unaffordable, it just gets you back to where you started. And we are now seeing the downside of the inventory overhang resulting from mining - both AMD and NVIDIA are slow-walking the new generation to let existing inventory (mostly NVIDIA) burn through. And that happened in 2018 too.
Ethereum is done for now, but I am in the camp that there will likely be more PoW coins that evolve in the 5+ year timeframe and put us back into the same situation. NVIDIA needs to put perfcounters on their cores that look at alignment and memory coalescing. If ~0% of your memory accesses are aligned and ~0% are coalesced that's highly likely to be a mining workload, since everybody else at least tries to align/coalesce to benefit from higher effective bandwidth, but this is inherently impossible in proof-of-work algorithms since the algorithm is supposed to be making inherently random, unpredictable access patterns. So you can detect kernels that are doing inherently unaligned work, and back that up with a whitelist from the driver of things that you know are good (validated via TPM that the driver hasn't been tampered), and slow down everything not on that list that seems like a mining workload.
And I mean slow down significantly, not just slow down 50%. NVIDIA wasn't interested in stopping mining, they only slowed themselves down to the same level as AMD so they wouldn't be preferentially sucked off the shelves.
And it turns out the secondhand dumps from miners aren't particularly cheap either, and didn't magically give us 3080s too cheap to meter. I said before that people often didn't do the math in the 2017 boom either, prices really only dropped about 30% from pre-boom prices (which were already significantly below launch MSRP - 480 4GB/8GB were $150/175 ish in early 2017, 1080 was down to low $400s, etc). It's tough to get a read on what a "true" pre-boom price is for Ampere/RDNA2 since they launched during the pandemic, supply issues, and really into the start of the mining boom ramp-up, there isn't a good reference. But I think that "roughly 30% below the 'true' baseline" figure has held pretty true.
(and again, the miners did dump, that's why there's GPUs with the dies exploding because they powerwashed them! they're also even making their way back into the supply chain as new/refurbished at times, because a powerwashed and remarked GPU looks pretty dang clean!)
What was a legitimate problem was being preferentially sucked off shelves by miners. When NVIDIA was 2x as good as AMD, and it led to NVIDIA cards being priced 2x as high as AMD, that was a problem, they were taking heat in tech media and potentially losing users to AMD. And that was happening - prices lined up perfectly according to hashrate, and AMD cards had lower hashrates because they had narrower memory buses and infinity cache didn't help mining.
Solution: drop the hash rate by half. Now you are no longer preferentially being sucked off shelves and LHR cards should approximate the price of their AMD counterparts. And if there is a bust, you are both equally affected.
So it wasn't a fullhearted "we want miners OUT of the gaming market". If that was the case you'd have slowed it down by like 90-95%. They were happy to have the sales from miners, they just didn't want to suffer a competitive disadvantage relative to AMD due to miners gobbling up inventory. And if miners dumped a ton of inventory and pushed prices down, that would affect AMD equally too.
--
On the other hand that strategy kind of missed in that AMD simply opted not to participate in the GPU market, when consoles were eating up 80% of their wafers off the top and the CPU market could shift their remaining wafers at 10x the margin of GPUs. See my other comment about the impossible boom/bust cycle of GPUs and AMD's answer is: simply don't participate in the GPU market during this cycle.
It took almost a full year for any of the 6000 series cards to show up in Steam Hardware Survey at a mere 0.15%. NVIDIA had 7-8% of the market being 30-series around the same point - and I doubt 30-series are being used in LAN cafes in china, that is a 1060/1650 phenomenon not one that hits all cards equally. And actually 6700XT rapidly overtook all three of the higher cards combined. AMD just barely made any of the 6800/6800XT/6900 series at all, for the first year.
You can't blame them when one $649-MSRP 6800XT with 520mm^2 of silicon and $200-300 of other BOM cost, could be sold as six 5800X processors (81mm^2 CCD, GloFo 12nm IO die) each with an MSRP of $449, or as 3/4 of an Epyc 64C that sells for $10k MSRP, with essentially no BOM cost. You are talking about selling the same piece of silicon for $200, $2700, or $7500, it's not a hard choice to make. And they could absolutely sell the CPUs at or above MSRP, and that's after cranking MSRP and dropping value SKUs already. So they did a token launch (as late as possible) to satisfy their legal obligation to investors and went and made some fucking money, and simply chose not to participate in the GPU bubble this time.
Increasingly I think the discrete GPU market is just a backstop for AMD. It's a place to soak up excess wafers if they order too much for CPUs and Epyc, and it's a slush fund of wafers if they have unexpected demand from CPUs and Epyc and consoles. It's not something they put an R&D focus on (a major chunk of RNDA1 and RDNA2's early-stage R&D were largely funded by Sony and MS) and it's not something they put first in their manufacturing priority. It's also why they're lagging on the features side of the equation - consoles are paying for the R&D and consoles don't care about tensor cores or video encoder quality or optical flow engines, and won't pay for it in their chips or even fund the R&D.
dGPUs are just a sponge to soak up any excess in the rest of the business, or squeeze a little extra out of. Not a focus anymore. Maybe that changes if they're the first to multi-GCD and have a real shot to win, but, in the current scenario they get 80% of the revenue for 20% of the effort and that's what they're doing.
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Now the other side of the "AMD simply chose not to participate in the GPU market" coin: it's all still a single market and AMD has to wait for the inventory to burn off too, even if it's NVIDIA inventory. OEMs like Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, etc aren't buying RDNA3 GPUs for their beige boxes or laptops if they have a bunch of Ampere sitting around, even if AMD inventory isn't high itself. Same for the secondary market, it doesn't matter if you are selling new RDNA3 cards if there are a bunch of used miner cards at great prices and people are buying used instead of new. It's all one market.
Some of the drop in marketshare despite deep price cuts is due to exactly this: OEMs aren't buying right now. Not buying anyone, but what's sitting in their stockpile is NVIDIA cards. And AMD can't make the big deals with OEMs that make up the majority of the market - the DIY market is a fraction of the overall market and AMD is selling great there (see: mindfactory numbers) due to aggressive pricing, but OEMs had piles of Ampere they need to get rid of. JPR did have some errors in the last set of numbers but still, the numbers for AMD are not great even then and that's the reason IMO, it's not DIY sales it's OEM sales.
I think the fact that they launched laptop Navi 33 in January but delayed the desktop until June is due to this: it's an inventory problem, and there is a lot of dGPU inventory still piled up. Not theirs, but that doesn't really matter.
The most influential crypto companies were already incorporated in the west.
Most of these blockchain R&D companies (and their investors) are still in the bootstrapping phase anyways. They're looking ahead 3+ years before they expect their product to go parabolic, so the actions of one or two governments in the mean time is just noise.
Unless you mistakenly thought that the crypto industry has been built on solid foundational end-user demand for products this whole time.
No, the crypto mining industry collapsed because the largest GPU-mined cryptocurrency (Ethereum) removed the ability for people to mine it with GPUs. Crypto obviously does not "need parallel processing" in the way that Nvidia GPUs provide it, because Ethereum removed that requirement entirely.
Nvidia's statement is like a shovel manufacturer declaring gold mining dead because people are no longer buying shovels (because they moved on to backhoes).