I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with chips for ML workloads. It's important to recognize when consumers are being squeezed by multiple market forces.
The difference is that each additional iPhone or ML accelerator or cloud server CPU provides incrementally more utility. More ML accelerators means more ML processing.
Proof-of-work mining is the only system designed to get less efficient with each additional unit of compute power. Add another GPU to the mining network and the network will automatically become less efficient. More GPUs doesn’t mean more transactions, but the system pays people to essentially burn these GPUs.
That’s the complaint. Not that chips are being used, but that the marginal output of each additional GPU is negative.
Capital will always find the easiest path, and right now that's crypto and no one on HN is complaining about micro-VC activity.
I would argue that most ML processing by most "big data" companies also has marginal negative output for each additional GPU. Certainly anything to do with social media or adtech and a lot of analytics in general is a net negative for the world, while consuming electricity and processing hardware.
Yes, the hash rate of the network increases, thus the difficulty for an attacker to perform a double spend. But, arguably, that's an already insane level of resources, many orders of magnitude higher than what a bitcoin-like payment system would reasonably require.
So even if you consider the network socially useful, pouring thousands of times more hashing power that the network actually requires to perform its task securely is still a waste of resources.
Even if the security budget is zero-sum, the amount of actual security added to the network with each additional GPU is constant.
Security is an easy argument to reach for when you want to justify something stupid.
That's because the utility is not in processing transactions but the 'security' of the blockchain, which is funny considering the most of these blockchains are still looking for a use case that justifies their market cap and yet still run into performance limitations processing transactions.
The amount of security provided to the network is constant in the number of GPUs. As you add more GPUs, the network gets harder to attack. Does the network need as much security as it's paying for? Nobody is really sure, it's an open debate in the crypto industry.
These Proof of Waste systems aren't really a negative feedback loop, ultimately asset prices determine mining yield. Capacity will keep being added to the network until the difficulty rises such that you are required to destroy $99.99 of resources for $100 of crypto. Until that point it's worth buying more hardware and energy as you get a positive expected return.
Crypto and ML are each rather small aspects of the issue at hand.
This is driven by crypto, not DL.
The same might be said of event ticket resellers making a big markup.
But the reality is that, in the case of event tickets at least, it's very common for the original sellers and the resellers either to be secretly the same party, or at least have some kind of profit sharing agreement.
It's simply that the original seller doesn't want to be seen to be price gouging, so doesn't want to put the list price of an item up, but still wants to gain. That's frequently done by it being very expensive to become an 'approved seller' or similar.
If someone is willing to pay 2x MSRP for a GPU then the MSRP is wrong (or rather, it's just a "suggestion" as the S indicates). My only point is that up until recently, there was not a long-term secondary market for GPUs. That is a new phenomenon that has been driven by crypto (as opposed to a big reduction in supply or huge increase in PC gamers).
I don't see this at all. All these GPUs for non gaming use are a tiny drop in the ocean in comparison to the mainstream market.