Ethereum mining is going away, and miners are not happy | Hacker News Reader

Ethereum mining is going away, and miners are not happy

bloomberg.com

40 pointsanonymousab23 comments

> Petzold is considering using his rigs for an aspect of digital video production known as rendering, which can require significant computing resources. “There are other uses for the cards”

This is an incredible quote.

People have realized that there are other uses for graphics cards than mining crypto currency - like, oh I don’t know, I guess graphics.

That's pretty funny. I assume this is in reference to the render project: https://rendertoken.com/

Basically a distributed rendering blockchain, where participants perform actual useful rendering in order to earn the token.

I don't know too much about it though, or whether there's actually much demand for on-demand rendering. I'd assume most potential "customers" would have concerns about their workloads being accessible to the public if they're working on something proprietary.

Is it possible to render an encrypted version of pre rendered data that outputs the rendered file in that same encrypted format that can only be decoded using the original private key it was encrypted with?

actually.. it should be possible! Search Homomorphic encryption, I don't know much about it, so I hope someone here can expand on this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

It seems like you'd have to know who is going to be rendering your pre-rendered source in order to encrypt it to them.

Also, the render nodes would have to be trusted (to not redistribute the content); I doubt this is what render token is doing.

No I mean the renderer has no ability to decrypt. Can you turn encrypted pre rendered data into finish encrypted rendered data without decrypting it.

Then only the owner could decrypt it back to a useable form.

I'm way out of my depth here, but my guess: no, and if it was even possible it would probably need to be handled at the GPU level.

the parent comment means something like render based off of homomorphic encryption.

I'm wondering if something similar could be done but for ML, using a distributed network of GPU to train a ML model in exchange of a payment for using the resources.

> running computing hardware on his balcony to earn cryptocurrency so he can buy clothing and other necessities.

With his tens of thousands of dollars of GFX cards.......

I go to work every day to buy clothing and other necessities.

I trade currency from my yacht to buy clothing and other necessities.

I rent my fleet of Ferrari's to buy clothing and other necessities.

Why does everything have to have some sob story attached to it these days? Seems like there just cannot be news anymore. Hey lets exploit the Ukranine war for clicks.

I sell drugs outside a school to buy my clothing and other necessities. Everybodies got to make a living.

Bloomberg has taken this to another level. It use to be a straight financial news source. I would imagine it is the effect of Twitter on the news in general.

I can’t wait to pick up a cheap GPU on ebay after the PoW switch.

I see a lot of people wanting to avoid cards that were used for mining, why is that?

24x7 heavy use decreases lifespan. It's not just the chip that's stress it's everything else on the PCB as well, fans,etc.

which is greatly exaggerated, as it's not constant use that decreases the lifespan, it's disjointed cooldown and heatup. If you leave a card on 24/7 theres not much of a heat gradient in regard to time. Is it getting stress? Sure. Is it killing the card? Not really.

The ramp up and down is more important than cumulative heat exposure for solid state components, but not for moving parts in the cooling system, and also electrolytic capacitors age much faster in a hot environment.

Miners usually underclock their cards to get higher efficiency out of them. Fans are very easily replaceable.

All use stresses the card, whether constant or periodic usage.

I'd still rather buy a card that has been used 2 hours a day for gaming than 24 hours for mining.

I'm not so sure about that. Mining cards are often undervolted to run at cooler temperatures and consume less power, while gaming cards are pushed to 100% and might even be overclocked. The fans might become problematic, but i think overall a mining card receives less stress in its lifetime

Just one?

>who’s been mining for a year, has earned only about $5,000 worth of crypto on his initial $30,000 hardware investment; he also pays about $650 in monthly electricity costs.

So he's spending more on electricity than he's making in crypto...

https://archive.ph/saZLY

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