AMD GPU Supply Exhausted by Crypto Miners, AIBs Now Directly Advertising to Them

> The rise in Bitcoin prices seems to have made altcoins rise in price in lockstep, for reasons I don't quite understand.

The Dutch Tulip Mania was not limited to Tulips of a single color.

The rise is because you can trade altcoins with bitcoins.

I don't why anyone would want to pay bitcoin for an unknown altcoin but I guess some people are gambling on an altcoin to become successful.

Can confirm: have friend of a friend who just invested about 2000 euros (or maybe more) in a machine that he installed at home in order to mine for ethereum. His decision was based on the price of ethereum doubling or so in the last month. He's not an IT guy, he paid "consultancy" services to a friend of his who set up the machine for him. We'll see how this will go. From the outside it sounds like a bubble.

Of course it's possible. (In fact, you can mine Ethereum on Nvidia and it's not too bad. GTX 1070 has the same performance as RX 480/580. The 1070 is more expensive but it also consumes less power. So you can achieve the same profit, just with a bit more time.)

But that wouldn't make any sense for Nvidia. They're enjoying their dominance over the gaming market. They have a lot of fanboy^Wmindshare and now even gamers who wanted an RX 580 can't even buy it because of miners.

I've definitely seen LTC referred to as the "silver" to BTCs "gold".

Don't know what an AIB is though.

The algorithm used by the coin is prohibitively expensive or provides little to no increase in performance compared to GPUs.

I'm only tangentially familiar with it so someone else please correct me if I'm wrong.

Etherium requires a significant memory footprint to compute, whereas BTC and LTC do not. As such, an ASIC was able to have a heap of compute power but very little memory and it'd crunch through as much hashing as a GPU with far less upfront cost.

Etherium on the other hand requires lots of memory, so to add on the memory to the ASIC you essentially kill its competitiveness against a mass-produced GPU from a capital investment point of view.

Mining algorithms that have aspects that are thought to be harder/more expensive to implement as ASIC chips.

For example, Ethereum implements a number of tactics to achieve that:

- relatively large memory size and bandwidth requirements.

- linearly growing memory requirements over time.

- announced plans to deprecate mining altogether and switch to proof-of-stake, turning all specialized hardware into pumpkins when it happens.

I don't know that it's necessarily enough to make ASIC miners impossible, but it seems to have had some success at keeping the bulk of the mining on GPUs, longer than some of its peers.

Some hash functions (eg. scrypt) are designed to make ASIC implementations cost-prohibitive, such as by requiring enough memory that off-chip DRAM working memory is needed. When the memory interface is the bottleneck, an ASIC is not going to offer substantial advantages over GPUs.

Bitcoin uses a hashing algorithm called SHA256. This algorithm is easily implemented in hardware and is very parallelizeable. It's a simple pipeline with some adds, rotations, bit shifts, xors, etc. Once people started to build ASICs to mine Bitcoin, GPU mining simply wasn't competetive.

There are many other types of hashing algorithms, many of which aren't as easily pipeline-able. For instance, if a hashing algorithm requires a few megabytes of memory, than making a custom ASIC isn't going to have such a slam-dunk advantage over a GPU.

I read a comment on reddit the other day the gist of which was (sorry, I don't remember the specifics and doubt I'll be able to find the comment again):

Generally, yes, as miners tend to tweak GPU settings to maximise their hashrate and it can cause issues when they are run like that long term.

Yes. Running a GPU at 100% continuously will significantly shorten the lifespan of the chip, the chances of picking up something that's not got much life left is high.