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Comment by photon-torpedo | Hacker News Reader

Prices for used GPUs are also inflated, though I think they have started to come down a bit. Once Ethereum moves to proof-of-stake (early 2022?) the market will probably get flooded with used GPUs.

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I’m saving up for the flood of old GPUs. I can finally realize my dream of taking all my ML work off the cloud once I scoop up some old mining GPUs for relatively cheap

You really may be waiting a good while. And if a desirable used model is ever a decent price, it’ll be a unit burnt out from mining fake money that’s only used to buy real money or a mail order of LSD.

Mining usually does not "burn out" a GPU. Most miners cool their cards adequately and undervolt them. If a GPU is somehow damaged from mining then it’s typically observable - it either does not work or it artifacts quickly, making it easy to detect and avoid.

Even if they do that, they’re still running it 24/7/365 for possibly years at a time. Wouldn’t that be some serious wear and tear? Genuine question - I have no clue.

Most of the wear and tear on a GPU is going to come from temperature changes due to the workload changing, or, for the fans, the card spinning the fans at start up, ramping up and ramping down due to a change in load, or halting the fans at shutdown.

It's very possible that an undervolted, well-ventilated card, run with a steady workload 24/7/365 for three years would have _less_ wear and tear than a card used for gaming and then shut down every night for three years.

I don't think proof-of-stake will actually work. Not because of any technical reasons, but because 95% of the people involved in crypto just see it as a free money printing machine. Once their hardware is no longer useful for mining, they will just move to some other proof-of-work crypto.

It's incredibly unfortunate that Bitcoin and similar proof-of-work currencies blew up and remained hot commodities. Because I do think that cryptocurrency is abstractly a very exciting idea, but the popular implementations are fundamentally abysmal.

If proof-of-stake works out, particularly as a currency people can actually use, then maybe nobody wants to buy Bitcoin anymore and the whole thing dries up as only speculators are left.

Just to be clear, Bitcoin isn't creating any GPU demand now; mining ASICs are too good. Ethereum is also becoming ASIC-dominated, but being scrypt-based reduces the ASIC advantage.

Miners will probably move to Ethereum classic.

If many miners move to another cryptocurrency, the difficulty for that network will go up, to the point that it's no longer profitable to mine it (electricity costs exceed income). Unless the price for the cryptocurrency goes up as well, but it won't magically do that just because of an influx of miners. After all, those other networks don't have the utility that Ethereum has.

Ethereum Classic will probably be 500 dollar at the end of this bull run. It will be worth it for miners.

This. I have a gut feeling that a lot of mining rigs were bought with credit and haven’t paid for themselves yet. Those rigs will find a new asset to mine rather than being dumped. Outlawing mining is the only thing I see that causes prices to move downward

Like how China banned it in May, and it has been creeping back? You can't ban mining. At least not in any jurisdiction with free speech type laws. Be careful what you are asking for -- the ability to run arbitrary software should not be controlled by governments.

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