Comment by blincoln | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blincoln | Hacker News Reader

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I'm sure there are a lot of significant factors, especially for different types of chip, but also pretty confident the shortages related to GPUs and similar are due in no small part to the massive buildouts of digital Chuck E. Cheese token factories, e.g.:

https://twitter.com/wired/status/1335445557788233728

https://twitter.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/14149943888208977...

https://twitter.com/dmgblockchain/status/1438547780646019086

AFAIK, the cost to add significant additional manufacturing capability for most products means that increased demand has to be forecast for a really long time to be worthwhile. Hence why it was still hard to find quality nitrile gloves, isopropyl alcohol, and Clorox wipes during 2020 even though everyone knew there was a bigger market for them for potentially quite awhile. I'm sure the chip and hardware manufacturers don't want to invest millions or billions in assembly line machines and then have buying levels drop back to pre-cryptocurrency-mania levels.

The market has decided that entertaining meatbags was worth less than evading taxes and stifling regulations.

It seems its invisible hand is a bit self-serving, go figure...

*Entertaining meat bags who throw a fit at the first hint of prices rising in response to demand.

Perhaps if the gamers wouldn’t jump to calling any price increase over an MSRP defined in 2019 “gouging”, there would be some incentive to prioritize those parts.

Instead, the fair thing to do is to force everyone to camp on Twitter and wait for the “20 Xbox One X/PS5/GTX#### available at Walmart [update: sold out]” post lottery.

It is amazing to me that manufacturers (to be fair, per gamers’ demands) are giving money away to scalpers, instead of using the revenue from higher prices to buy more manufacturing and shipping capacity.

Good news about all those chucky tokens is that gpus will iterate and innovate much faster than otherwise.

This does not follow at all; the GPUs were already iterating basically as fast as they can go - after all, why would it be, it's not sped up by putting more on the production line or more engineers on the design side.

NVIDIA at least have been trying anti-cryptomining measures in their firmware. A form of defensive innovation, I suppose.

The crypto advocates really do not want to hear it, but their proof-of-waste scheme has big negative externalities for other people.

>it's not sped up by putting more on the production line or more engineers on the design side

Of course it is.

If revenue fell by 90%, nvidia would spend much less on R&D and progress would be much slower.

If revenue doubled, nvidia would spend much more on R&D and progress would speed up.

If revenue fell to $0, nvidia would go out of business, spend $0 on R&D, and progress would halt.

There's a direct, although not linear, relationship. The more money there is, the faster progress is (as long as you trust nvidia to spend it wisely and execute)

I don't mine crypto, but I like fast tech, so I say let the money keep flooding in so we all benefit.

The demand from gaming & workstation & datacenter is absolutely huge, revenue would not fall without buttcoiners because the GPUs would still fly off the shelves.

In fact buttminers create a new risk for the vendors: whenever buttcoins seriously crash, the market will suddenly be flooded with used GPUs.

Proof-of-work is not the only workable consensus mechanism, as Ethereum moves from a PoW to a PoS model Soon(*) that should improve.

(*) {currentDate} + 18 months*

Highly doubt that this will reduce the amount of mining in the world. Eth miners will mostly just switch to a different shitcoin. As long as BTC is dominant, mining will keep wasting gigatons of power. And how exactly would anyone dethrone BTC? The first mover advantage is everything, and nothing else has it.

How? By not being massively expensive but still being equally secure (in addition to doing more than just moving ledger entries from one wallet to another) Crypto 'mining' is not a fundamental or necessary feature of the universe - it is a very strange, very short duration thing that will show up in the history books as one of those wildly irresponsible and completely ridiculous things people did for a little while until they figured out a better way to do it. It will show up on the same chapter as biplanes and trench warfare 100 years from now.

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