GPU mining no longer profitable after Ethereum merge
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There's a lot of stuff that isn't any better than crypto either, deepfakes, producing hundreds of thousands stable diffusion pics of the same scene.
Much of this is still a garbage fire of greenhouse gases and e-waste, used GPU prices won't change that. Many ml advances are simply more compute and bigger models in the end.
Fermi estimate: 10 million latest Xboxes, used for 1 hour per day.
Power estimates seem to vary from 120 W to 315 W, let's say 200 W including display. That's 2 GWh/day. Probably similar for Playstation, or at least close enough for a Fermi estimate. I'm going to guess similar for PC gaming also.
Smartphones are what, about 1 W? But a few billion of them? 1 hour per day makes that another GWh/day?
So probably about 7 GWh/day for Xbox + Playstation + PC + mobile, 2.5 TWh/year.
Bitcoin is estimated to use 131 TWh/year according to Wikipedia.
Yeah, you're right, it's not even close.
Anyways my main point was that a lot of things people do for fun are more or less directly bad for the environment, like for example creating dozens of silly images with stable diffusion. But it's still better than crypto mining imo, as doing "fun things" usually benefits you/your mental health.
Gaming is not an activity that produces something, likewise any form of entertainment for that matter. So in the sense that nothing comes from the electricity and time used, gaming is an "anti-environmental" activity.
I personally don't agree with any of this notion, because life is worthless if we can't accept life is pointless, but if we are striving for a world where consumption must always produce something then gaming is one of many things that must be eliminated.
But I sorta do... excessive gaming is a waste of human potential and GPU's.
I honestly regret spending a lot of my teen years playing games, I know that sounds ultra-boomer but the only thing games ever actually did for me was learning how to mod them and getting programming experience from that, something that simply doesn't exist on consoles and sadly many of the most popular games on Earth.
For a time/experience ratio that's not the best way to go about it. I would have been better off surfing and chasing girls with a bit of coding on the side.
If I could go back in time for ten minutes I would berate younger me for spending too long on an xbox, likely to the mocking amusement of my younger self.
A lot of things humans do don't produce anything, but are just done for fun and are unfortunately bad for the environment. That would even apply to surfing if you want, it produces plastic waste in the end.
> but the only thing games ever actually did for me was learning how to mod them and getting programming experience from that
Isn't that just a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence"? You're dismissing the fact that it lead you to learn programming, which is a valuable skill for many careers.
Are you sure younger you would have been the surfer dude? I think there is nothing wrong with just not being that extroverted as a teen, not being the cool guy girls flock to. That's not something you just decide to be. Now you can obviously say it would have been better to be the cool dude and be really good at coding at the same time, but that's just hindsight and assuming an ideal outcome, and that's just not how it usually works. there's probably a lot of people in their 40s who have partied way too much, had girls and enjoyed life and now regret not having been more of a nerd instead because being in IT seems the foolproof way of making a lot of money, while they struggle.
And just for fun, let's imagine you'd have gone surfing once a week as a teen and taken the car to the beach, how much would an half hour car ride mean for environmental impact, compared to a gaming rig at 300W?
Why are you twisting reality? People don't generate hundreds of thousands of stable diffusion pics of the same scene. Instead they generate dozens to hundreds of images carefully tweaking the prompt and the starter image.
But doing ML won't necessarily boost GPU sales because most deep learning work is shifted to the cloud.
I'd suggest focusing your irritation on advocating for universally clean generation of energy. Regardless of how much energy each of us uses, and regardless of what we use it for (even if it's something that you consider to be "useless"), most of us seem to agree that we don't want to pollute our air and ruin our planet. However, the moment you start attacking things that make other people happy, you are risking losing support for that fundamental goal.
There’s no such thing as completely green energy. Even wind turbines use materials that need mining, refining, transportation etc.
For sure, but there were many crypto operations with data centers that had hundreds or thousands of GPUs. For example, a report from JPR estimates that crypto miners bought 25% of all GPUs produced in 1H'2021.¹
¹ https://www.jonpeddie.com/blog/crypto-minings-half-a-billion...
They will just find other buyers.
But even so, at least that power would go to something useful (keeping buildings comfortable, purifying water, who knows what) rather than being burned in the crypto-pit.
> Perhaps you are right about power companies wanting to sell more power (although it seems like that is not the case for the marginal kWh given all that power companies do to incentive energy efficiency for their customers).
It is literally called a power company. They offer special rates for large customers. That alone creates a marketplace.
> But even so, at least that power would go to something useful (keeping buildings comfortable, purifying water, who knows what) rather than being burned in the crypto-pit.
Did you have a choice in where that power went to begin with? No.
"No one has the moral authority to tell you what is a good or bad use of energy (ex: watching the Kardashians)" -- https://twitter.com/danheld/status/1479135584685854729?lang=...
I consider that a moral opinion.
It’s not a “moral opinion” to accept someone else’s assessment of the utility of their own actions.
Is it a “moral opinion” to state a preference that crude oil is more useful when refined and injected into an ICE vehicle than if it’s burned on site in an oil well fire?
So if there's an unambiguous case of morally abhorrent energy use, everything else is up for debate. That tweet thread goes off the rails early, as it's clear the author is financially incentivized to not understand the position he is arguing against. So it's no surprise the argument is nonsense.
https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/bitcoin-energy-c...
Yes, and?
In other words, those things work because you directly or even indirectly support the system which causes those sorts of catastrophes to happen.
Does this include mean computer gaming? How about watching movies? Is it morally wrong if done using computer "burning joules..."?
Alternatively consider planned obsolescence. Devices are designed to break and be replaced rather than last today, as a rule. Consider just phones alone on this front. The amount of resources that consumes is unimaginable, and that goes well beyond just electricity or manpower.
Ultimately our entire society is built around the largely arbitrary expenditure of absolutely massive amounts of energy and resources to accomplish tasks that, in most cases, are not especially useful or necessary. Optimizing GDP, a goal of most all developed nations now a day, is often just a proxy for increasing waste. Buying the same phone 20 times gives a 20x boost to GDP relative to buying it once. And yet this is the metric we've chosen as a measure for progress.
We should all be judicious with how we use our limited resources. The market often serves to incentivize that good judgement. When the market starts incentivizing waste (e.g. “cryptocurrencies”) that’s when you need to start banning things.
The same thing happens with power companies and we get a net reduction in generation.
Of course if you are running from home generated power (e.g solar) then the equation changes, but so does the capital cost.
If 500 watts of electricity go into a heater or a computer, 500 watts of heat will come out, minus some light from leds and screen, some electricity on the ethernet cable, and other of these ignorable things.
If it does some usefull computation on the side, that's nice, but energy wise a 500 watt game computer is just as efficient as a 500 watt heater, if used for heating purposes.
So couple of years ago I permitted for my son to mine coins on GPU when it was cold allowing to him to earn like 2-4 Euros per day.
But then I stopped as I realized that this just promoted insanity of using proof of work in other places.
Mining BTC on a GPU isn't profitable.
You need a dedicated ASIC chip that is far more efficient at the task than a GPU if you want to hope turning a profit mining Bitcoin.
Something like this:
Eth thought that was a bad thing, so chose an algorithm that was intentionally difficult to implement in asic. They thought having gpus be the most efficient platform would be more decentralized and be more one person one vote compared to asics. As a result people use gpus for eth.
Password hashing algorithms (scrypt, argon2, etc) are generally designed to minimize the advantage custom hatdware gives.
> "The only coins showing profit have no market cap or liquidity. The profit is not real."
That is, the remaining PoW derived coins are not as profitable for miners, presumably not enough to cover their margins.
GPU prices may go down in the short term, but long term GPU speeds will stagnate.
I wish there was a way to put a 1 year timer on this comment to see who's right me or stuntkite.
I don't believe R&D funds will dry as well, since they will simply be relocated to AI and datacenter workloads which have been on the rise more recently.
This isn't just about pushing framerate. It's about vector processing being massively more efficient than CPU for almost everything and the tooling to start floating consumer needs that aren't just making pretty bleep bloops go boom boom for fun times is very, very mature.
Over the course of a GPU's lifetime (in your hypothetical use-case), how much of the cost is the GPU itself and how much electricity?
Humm. Someone beat me to this idea so I don't have to do it.
Been expecting this since working on edge computing software ecosystem at NVIDIA.
Note that this wave of datacenter GPUs doesn't support OpenGL or Vulkan, because they either don't have rasterizers at all (AMD MI250X) or have them only on two TPCs for basic SW compat and don't expose OGL/Vk via virtual functions (NVIDIA).
As such, better OpenCL drivers are what you should ask for. But then AMD's OpenCL drivers are not exactly that great, and NVIDIA's have their own quirks.
There is a similar cryptocurrency called curecoin for folding@home although I think they do use SHA-256 mining (i.e not useful computations) for part of the rewards
For PoW you dont just need work, you need work that can be easily verified, easily scaled difficulty levels, and difficult to cheat with - all with no centralized trusted authority.
Even when SETI/F@H was worth only fake internet points they already had problems with people cheating. What happens when its worth real money?
examples would be: Multiple PoWers independently producing solutions and then verifying each other (although this is wasteful as work is being duplicated)
PoWers achieving increasing status levels when not cheating over time, incentivising long-term honest behaviour
It won't work in the PoW scheme because there is presumably some cryptocurrency involved as a reward
> PoWers achieving increasing status levels when not cheating over time, incentivising long-term honest behaviour
We're talking millions of dollars here (if not more). In the real world people would easily spend years doing a long-con with that type of pay out. Why wouldn't they do so on the internet?
Take primes. How do you know the person generated new primes and didnt just have a bunch saved up? With hashes you have to hash the current block which is unpredictable, and also means as time goes on it gets harder and harder to have a competing chain, because you dont just have to solve the current block but also be better for all the preceeding chains.
Additionally NP-complete problems are hard because the average complexity tends not to be super hard, which is a major sticking point in this application. So you have to somehow verify the person is solving a hard instance of the problem and not an easy instance.
Even factoring large semiprimes isn't inherently useful -- it's an interesting mathematical exercise, but isn't a goal unto itself.
Otherwise, all of that cryptocurrency's mining power could instantly abandon that cryptocurrency for the other thing if market flucations give it a higher ROI than PoW.
This doesn't really exist though, since you can heat a house with a mining rig. It's no less efficient than resistive heating.
would we count protein prediction as machine learning? The learning part is possibly done, now people need to do model execution to invent new proteins.
Like what Peter Jackson did for "They Shall Not Grow Old".
The market knew that the PoS merge was coming. I'd have expected the market to therefore have already factored the PoS transition into GPU prices. Why do you think GPU prices are tanking now?
I know it's a pretty random question, but i honestly don't know anything about GPU's other than that my life would be a lot easier if I had one (I run an old Macbook Pro, and I have an old Asus laptop that runs a debian distro, and finally my very old gaming pc is a alienware alpha).
Otherwise it should work exactly as new.
First it probably won't work; certainly for the mac you will face driver issues that were beyond me the last time I tried (about three years ago). I suspect things are worse now... Nvidia have not been helpful. Probably you could get a radeon working as an egpu, but for ML you really need Nvida and Cuda (unless you are seriously into homebrewing code).
But the other issue is that you need to feed the beast - that is you need to pump data in and out of the GPU. For that you need a fairly fast CPU and fast ssd, and fast interconnects to the GPU. You also need power, a good power supply that can keep everything running -- including the fans... which need to be in a good box so that there is good airflow.. or quite quickly you will have no GPU!
Maybe build a box like this with a cheap nvidia GPU, get it working so you know that you have a viable rig, benchmark it to see if you are bottlenecked on the GPU (long time since I did this, so I'm not 100% how - but basically if the GPU is 90% for ages and everything else is sitting looking at it then that's a good sign). Then buy a top notch second hand (about £500 right now on ebay) and resell the cheap one. If you hit a hitch inbetween you know you have a problem to solve and haven't spent all your money. The extra points are for getting multiple GPU's running... again I did that in a corporate with supermicro boxes about 8 years ago and it drove me up the wall at the time... I suspect now it's possible to have 2 GPU's in a consumer box/motherboard but I am not sure what the state of play is.
Innovation on other use cases for GPUs were probably held back by excessive costs.
The dot-com boom bust caused a lot of dark fibre to be built - and i think the internet has been better for it. Without that dark fibre, the expansion of the internet wouldn't have been as easy and mainstream, as fast as it did.
But more importantly, it’s not even clear that buying a miner’s GPU is a good deal because these GPUs tend to be really worn out with short working lives.
Most people will probably be better off simply buying cheaper GPUs new, or buying slightly cheaper used GPUs on eBay that were not popular for mining.
Of course, a 2nd hand GPU might be a bit useless after the abuse of mining for many years (tho i think with proper cooling, and replacement of the fans, those GPUs should've been able to be kept in good working condition for resale).
GPUs were and still are in high demand anyway.
Crypto blocked real innovation for years.
Nvidia was spending money, time and energy to cater to them one way or the other instead of other areas were GPUs are actually good for society.
Your sentence is very generic and not sure why this should be an universal law. Putting money into the right thing might cause innovation not just money
Everyone Noncrypto is a long term customer getting the middle finger from them because they used the opportunity.
Nvidia is sitting on a bunch of ampere stock, the miner liquidation, and new gen cards coming out.
My guess is January-February when the Christmas buying season is past and all these are in full swing.
Flash memory is also experiencing a price crash.
Seems to be at least slightly true, by my amateur judgement. Sometimes I use https://vast.ai, and seems there is more offers than usual, currently ~180 instances available for rent.
Not really, no:
https://wccftech.com/hours-into-the-eth-merge-nvidia-geforce...
New 3000 series retail prices on the high end cards have been steadily dropping, and it seems like on ebay used prices have dropped 10% in the last month.
As for the 4000 series cards - they've stated in SEC filings that they will be trickling out stock to keep prices high.
AMD are the ones who are really fucked; their cards suck, and nobody bought them out of choice but desperation. Now that the market is glutted, people will heavily prefer nvidia cards.
Do they really suck? From some benchmarks i saw there are cards comparable to 3060-3070s (the 6800 IIRC) which is solid midrange competition.
All of this is accepted industry fact, and your devolving the discussion to personal insults is proof of this; otherwise you would have come armed with actual tests and reviews.
NVIDIA does have much higher market share and brand recognition from both ML and gamers for now, but AMD has been firing on all cylinders for quite a few years, and has built a terrific open source driver codebase to further refine.
Even throughout the 2010s AMD offered price-competitive models that definitely didn’t “suck” for what they cost, or require “desperation” to purchase.
I bought only AMD equipment for the last few years out of despise for the market manipulation by Intel/nVidia (see Intel x86 compiler/nVidia GameWorks, both not optimizing for their equipment but deoptimizing for competitors), and I have gotten completely adequate gear for the price paid. Not so much despair here.
Now that there is a great deal of excess capacity, presumably it would be possible to attack smaller chains in an attempt to glean some profit through double-spending, as those chains might now be vulnerable to larger-scale history-rewriting attacks.
step 2; start your fleet of GPUs on a secret 51% attack.
...
step n; profit.
You'll need to find a broker which both have and are willing to borrow that many coins for the coin you're about to attack.
My favorite wacky conspiracy theory is that proof-of-work was invented to slow down ai progress.
I know that bitcoin mining requires ASICS and GPUS can't compete with that, but I just assumed miners are just mining one of many possible coins, with Etherium being one of them.
It's be like if all women stopped going to Starbucks tomorrow, and you asked, "Why don't they just sell to the men?" Well they could, but they'd still be down ~50% in revenue.
Also, I hope every GPU miner's fireproof safe fails and all their money burns up.
We tried bunch of setups with Threadrippers and EPYC, at the end settled for the ROMED8-2T which is a monster motherboard.
The advantage of EPYC is that because it's so common, we can find used cheaper ones on ebay. They are a bit slower I believe, but we can deal with that by using Nvidia's DALI and decoding images on the GPU rather than CPU.
We're doing photogrammetry not machine learning, running some blackbox software that scaled best with clock speed so threadrippers were the most efficient option.
I put them in 4U supermicro boxes with a noctua cooler with 2 9000RPM delta fans attached to it with rip ties.
They must scream and push air like hell
Maybe some day I'll use it myself to train my plastic surgery outcome estimation visualization GAN or diffusion model if I can figure out how to fine-tune one.
It's not exactly a "clean" one, like a proper 2u/4u chassis and server grade GPUs but it does the job for 70-90% cheaper.
we mostly gave up and just got barebones machines since the cabling situation becomes pretty tricky, and the barebones total cost is low relative to the GPUs anyways.
The issue we had with barebones was cost and cooling, we use 30$ racks from Target and hang the GPUs with metal zip ties and a box fan from below, so they get lots of air and we don't break the bank and can easily roll them around.
the 2020 cycle was a triple whammy though
1) semiconductor and supply chain shock
2) cryptocurrencies zooming in price and profitability again
3) cryptocurrencies actually being used. in all prior cycles, blockchains were empty (although people got a glimpse of what congestion would be like, during the 2017 cycle). miners earned the subsidy made for people to show up at all. miners are also privy to a cut of transactions that occur, but this was close to 1% of the subsidy. in the 2020 cycle it was 250% on top of the subsidy, frequently, and way more than that as blocks were full. All mining calculators were wrong because they only show the predictable subsidy and not a forecast based on an average, but miners learned how profitable it was.
Automated Market Makers (Uniswap code and classes) and Automated Lending (Compound) were 2020 cycles killer apps built on top of 2017’s killer app of ERC20 tokens.
Followed by NFT’s and their marketplaces.
Other chains secured by GPUs will get this activity, periodically.
More people will be swayed if Ethereum mainnet works after further phases of its scaling plan, without user experience drawback. Ethereum post-merge still has some ambitious theoretical things, like sharding. This should have some drawbacks.
People think scaling isnt possible without drawbacks so are fine with lower bandwidth Proof of Work that just meters by transaction fees.
What was it before ETH PoW -> PoS merge?
And is 0.1 $/kWh average/normal?
Let me pull up my latest electric bill (which I almost have never looked at/have on autopay):
New Charges
Rate: RS-1 RESIDENTIAL SERVICE Base charge: $8.99
Non-fuel: (First 1000 kWh at $0.073710) (Over 1000 kWh at $0.083710) $76.74
Fuel: (First 1000 kWh at $0.034870) (Over 1000 kWh at $0.044870) $36.49
Electric service amount 122.22
20.99 in taxes / surcharges
Total $143.21
$143.21 for 1036 kWh in a 30 day timespan
0.138 $/kWh with taxes and fees I guess for me, I'm sure if I was doing crazy ASIC stuff at my house they'd charge me more/the rate would become less favorable
Looks like mining BTC would net be $0.85 a day profit with some kind of ASIC. $310/yr. Yikes.
Most of these coins only have value as scams that you could prop up then cash out by exchanging for BTC or ETH; so long as the "new coin of the day" hype train exists there will be a way to make money off of GPU mining. I guess there will always be suckers in this unregulated market.
- What chip should I buy? - When should I buy? Should I wait for prices to drop? Will new and improved chips be released anytime soon? - What are the advantages / disadvantages of each chip (3060 vs 3080, Nvidia vs AMD)? Which chip is most cost-efficient? What are each chips' specialties (e.g. specific type of neural network, graphics vs compute)?
I don't think AMD is really viable for ML. Nvidia has the mind share in that segment, so nearly all tools will work with Nvidia, while very few support AMD.
Performance seems to be prompt-independent; I'm using a docker container that seems to have disappeared, this modified version for amd cards with less than 10gb:
https://github.com/basujindal/stable-diffusion
and this workaround:
https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1756#issuec...
Anyway, don't "upgrade" to my budget AMD card. :-)
What settings precisely? Scale, steps and sampler being the most important ones (together with size, but you already shared that :) )
Right now, the bigger and faster, the better. And there's really no limit of the computing power you can throw at various tasks to make them run better. It almost looks like 90s again.
https://docs.paperspace.com/core/compute/machine-types/
1 x A100, 80GB is $3.19 / hour. 8 x A100, 80GB is about $25 / hour.
They have much less expensive machines. I used to use them to run steam games, but now proton is just too darn good. Their low end machines are OK for CAD software that supports real-time raytracing.
Disclosure, I'm head of product @ Crusoe Cloud. Feel free to ping me at mike at crusoecloud dot com if you've got questions or feedback.
https://www.crusoeenergy.com/digital-flare-mitigation has some more information.
We have a bunch of diseased pine trees. Assuming we don't have enough time to cut them down and burn them in the next 12 months, and that I am unscrupulous, I could sell you carbon credits through one of the bigger exchanges. You would never know, and it would be completely above board.
John Oliver had a particularly depressing segment on this recently.
(Totally off topic, but I'd love to biochar them instead. Using them for lumber and shipping them offsite are non-starters. Any ideas, anyone?)
Agreed that a lot of carbon offsets look like, "we were going to cut this section of the rainforest down, but if you pay us, we won't do that for X period of time." This is _actually_ reducing existing emissions.
Coreweave let me get a modern card box first go round. I'd go with coreweave if you are a weekend hacker who just wants access to a lil bit of beefy GPU.
YMMV.
Comparable 24gb vram 4xxx cards are also 1 slot bigger and many watts hungrier. If you want to be able to use a 800w PSU + 3 slots, and just need 24gb vram for say, running inference on a big diffusion model, then 3090 is still going to be your only option for a while.
They're pretty well priced right now, at $1k. If you need one, not much reason to wait, your time is probably worth more than saving a couple hundred bucks.
Used 3090s on eBay are $800 all day long. That price may drop a bit in the next week or so, but not much, as that 24GB of VRAM is the main draw for that over a 3080Ti.
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4090-ti.c3...
“”” So, which GPUs to choose if you need an upgrade in early 2022 for Deep Learning? We feel there are two yes/no questions that help you choose between A100, A6000, and 3090. These three together probably cover most of the use cases in training Deep Learning models:
Do you need multi-node distributed training? If the answer is yes, go for A100 80GB/40GB SXM4 because they are the only GPUs that support Infiniband. Without Infiniband, your distributed training simply would not scale. If the answer is no, see the next question.
How big is your model? That helps you to choose between A100 PCIe (80GB), A6000 (48GB), and 3090 (24GB). A couple of 3090s are adequate for mainstream academic research. Choose A6000 if you work with a large image/language model and need multi-GPU training to scale efficiently. An A6000 system should cover most of the use cases in the context of a single node. Only choose A100 PCIe 80GB when working on extremely large models “””
https://timdettmers.com/2020/09/07/which-gpu-for-deep-learni...
To be clear, no mass-produced GPU can profitably mine Bitcoin.
If you mean "free" as in "solar", then the amount of time to reach ROI would be so long that it wouldn't make much sense.
(This actually doesn't happen as much as it used to twenty years ago with step-by-step inventory checkins made possible w/ RFID chips and barcodes combined with mobile network connections).
The hardware capex for mining BTC with GPUs would outweigh any 'free' power you have access to. You can't just focus on one aspect of this business in order to calculate your ROI.
It sounds like your scenario is more or less "free" power, but you're not going to truly profit; you bought too many solar panels and you're trying to mitigate the losses. (And maybe the overbuilding was on purpose, as insurance against grid trouble, but it still means a good chunk of money lost.)
What does this even mean? The average solar panel lasts 25 years and starts to degrade in efficiency before that. And then you have batteries which of course are also going to degrade and need to be replaced over time. Many countries are starting to get more serious about e-waste as well now that China has decided it won't take the world's trash any more so you might even have to occur a cost for getting rid of used panels as well.
There's plenty of costs in solar energy, so what does "free" mean here? Are you trying to take into account the possibility of selling excess energy back to the grid?
Anyone mining on a GPU was likely mining Ethereum.
Ef that, I'm buying a 20GB 4080 when they come out for doing stable diffusion research and gaming. I'm still rocking a 1060. I doubt a 4080 is going to drop below $500, recession or not.
If you want the cheapest total spend where you buy your own hardware, it basically runs on any current-generation amd / nvidia / m1 card. I used a modified version of stable diffusion that works with < 10GB of DRAM on a AMD RX 6600XT. Check around before buying, obviously; I lucked out.
The modified version produces the same quality output, but has to page data in and out. It takes about 100 seconds per batch of five images. The card cost under $300, and is plugged into a ~ 10 year old Linux box. It's probably possible to go cheaper than that.
I wonder if this is the end of an era for GPU based mining. It's been a long time. I remember buying an R9 270X in 2014 from a guy that was mining Bitcoin, but had switched to ASICs. When I picked it up he was telling me he didn't win enough blocks with the ASICs and was going to sell them too.
I always wonder if that guy played his cards right and became a Bitcoin millionaire. Lol.
A delayed merge sounded like a good bet on paper. Eth has been promising PoS soon for years. It is understandable why some miners took the bet this time.
The problem with gambling in an iterated context: you will always lose eventually.
They also have more or less real-time pricing and price history for individual products. But it doesn't provide visibility into the used GPU market.
Broadly: what do you do when you can't go to Cancun like you planned? You bet on Doge and GME, apparently. (Or you declare yourself a "VC" and start handing out checks to 20-something quarantined hackers.) Then you just end up with more money you can't spend.
This has been hands-down the most ignorant view of the ETH-merge proponents. The floor of the currency is tied to the cost to mine. There's minimal cost to mine now. The price will fall. It's not a supply vs demand problem.
This is not true because of difficulty adjustment. If the price drops enough so miners are losing money, some of them quit, the difficulty adjusts downward, and the economics improve for the remaining miners.
I've been looking on eBay but can't see any change. I'd like to buy a lot of GPUs but don't know where to look
1 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1839341/000119312522...
Anecdata but, 3 years ago I got an old mining RX 580 4GB for ~120 CAD (about a $100). That card can run almost everything at 1080p and has been used a lot ever since.
Not only were ours undervolted, but also individually tuned for best performance/watt. A very difficult thing to do at my scale since the failure mode is a full machine crash.
Only thing that really degrades is the paste on the heatsink and that's fairly easy to fix.
Next up is just tracking inventory, making changes to the system, etc... this is over 8k individual computers in multiple data centers.
We also added a different class of hardware which was blade based... which increased the individual computers significantly. Ended up with a very cool iPXE boot solution for that.
I also built some pretty cool software to manage it all. It runs on the concept that each machine is an individual worker that knows how to self-heal itself. Even just distributing the software to so many machines reliably, is a challenge.
It has been a fun few years.
Edit: power supplies on the other hand... are a mess. Mostly hand soldered in China... they fail randomly due to the environment they run in. Sometimes, they "die", let rest for a day or two and then fire back up and run just fine.
Why do they reboot? We run on the edge of peak OC tuning performance by default and I've built an automated tuner which downclocks individual cards. This way, they get more stable over time, while maintaining their best possible performance.
Occasionally, we would reset the tunings and then let them auto tune back... this accounted for the seasonal variances because hotter cards are more prone to crashing.
Again, this isn't an actual issue and I have the data to prove it.
You wouldn't want my cards, because they don't have fans. Most people don't have adequate cooling for something like that.
It may still be a lot less 'shock' than normal use, where players have a 15 minute round, then low use for a couple minutes, etc, for hours.. and then turn the card off.
Thermal cycling is known to be bad for electronics-- this is well studied and documented. Sustained high temperatures are also bad, but it's only really bad when the temperatures are really high.
Certainly, thermal cycling can be an issue for electronics in general, but my experience with these specific cards says that it isn't an issue at all. At least certainly not as much as something that should dictate purchasing 'miner' cards or not.
Do you know what causes NVIDIA cards to have their output turn off (black screen) and the fan to go 100%?
Been happening to my 2000-series recently but I don’t know what to try to fix: cooling, PSU, or capacitors…
My guess is a vbios or driver bug. You could also be running into a tuning issue. GPUs are amazingly complex beasts.
Also, 70c is well into the temperature range that will significantly age capacitors.
My point stands: a capacitor that spends most of its life at room temperature except for a few hours at ~60c is going to last significantly longer than a mining card which spends 24x7 at 60-70c, regardless of temperature rating.
I don't think maintaining original MSRP, a month before next gen release, is all that great.
So why did the price drop so suddenly? Why didn’t everyone anticipate this and sell before? Probably some combination of laziness and belief that the merge wouldn’t work.
If they had been right, it would've meant more mining rewards going to fewer miners. So it's an understandable bet. They just bet wrong.
However a small part of me thinks some other coin/token/digital widget will gain traction and the whole GPU rush will come around again.
So in theory (but someone please correct me if I'm wrong), with that in mind, you should prefer cards that have been used for mining and undervolted, rather than cards from gamers that have been overclocked.
This is true, but it doesn't mean that the card runs any cooler. Yes, for mining it makes perfect sense to run it at a lower voltage. That doesn't stop your VRAM from getting pinned at 95c, and if you do that for long enough then it won't matter how hard you underclock your GPU. The clock speed doesn't directly correlate to your hash rate.
He did however note that the cards that he tested had been used in a relatively clean and dust-free environment. The biggest risk to buying a card that has been running 24/7 for years is that the cooling system is busted due to build-up of dust.
Given the Russian war on Ukraine, and the price of energy dropping in BRIC countries, does the Ethereum merge actually help Western interests? Ie. Does this mean that Russia, for example, can't leverage their cheap energy into crypto which can then be exchanged for cash?
Would that line of reasoning have led Western governments to lean on the Ethereum people to complete the merge?
</tinhat>
Regarding SR-IOV (if that's what it's still called); Can anybody suggest a decent resource for implementing it?
I know that alot of these mining cards will have been worked hard. I'm not afraid to reapply thermal paste, and if the price is right I can get a couple.
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
I recommend using either Debian or another Linux that's not RedHat based though, as the Nvidia drivers will disable themselves if they think they're running inside of a VM against a GeForce card, and Redhat patched out the components necessary to hide the flags from the Guest OS. Probably under pressure by Nvidia.
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/confusing-about-kvm-off-an...
You'll also have to double check that both the CPU and motherboard supports either Intel VT-d or AMD-Vi. CPU flags are easy enough, they'll be listed in /proc/cpuinfo, you'd have to look up your motherboard to see if it supports it or not though.
I can't believe that you can buy a card that'll do 15+ Tflops for like 500$.
I had given up on the singularity ever coming to pass, and the reason was CryptoCurrency. How could we ever upload our consciousness to the cloud if the cloud was fully occupied inventing imaginary wealth tokens? Because 'mining' can consume any amount of cpu horsepower, so there was never going to be any left for the singularity.
But now? There's a new hope.
Yah, well, mortal-me also eventually develops different motivations. There's still continuity and connectedness.
It's just fork(2).
Also some people might disagree with "digital copy of you != you". Personally, I do not care since it is close enough to immortality imho.
And consider: if I can upload, perhaps I can download. Perhaps my digital copy can live life 'faster'? In that case I live 1000 lives digitally and download that.
Now I'm essentially immortal, in my physical body, because I've lived for millennia!
At the very, very least its no worse than living this one life and dying anyway.
It would not be a dream any more than yesterday wasn't a dream.
You may enjoy authors Greg Egan or Dennis E. Taylor.
What if you add something to you that's knit into and augmenting your brain by 10%, and then as a little more of your brain withers, you add another chunk. Ultimately it reaches a point where your existing brain is doing none of the work and it's all machines, but there was arguably never a precipice crossed where it wasn't "you".
Yes.
And been that way for a very long time.
Can't remember exactly but IIRC Bitcoin GPU mining withered off around 2014 or so when the first ASIC miners came out [1]
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/04/26/the-rise-of-asics-a...
https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/the-history-of-cryptocurr...
https://thenextweb.com/news/a-brief-history-of-bitcoin-minin...
It creates real world cost to attempt to change history. Bitcoin is the most immutable database that humanity has ever created.
Is that no longer the case? It has been a couple years since I dabbled in mining XMR, that was definitely the case then.
Correct. The mining algorithm has been changed to be inefficient on GPUs and ASICs.
https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/randomx.html
Fiat currency has issues, but at least a government has the authority to conjure money out of nothing and hand it to the poor.
There was some crypto startup that wanted to do this and was going to different cities and doing retina scans. I wonder what happened to them?
I suppose you could outsource it by donating to GiveDirectly, but that would require conversion to real money and then (by GiveDirectly) to mobile phone payments. In that case, the cryptocurrency isn't solving much of the problem.
For a technology that claims to be decentralized, it is simply one more major flaw in an already terrible design.
No the central banks of the world are all working on fiat crypto, so we'll get the worst of both worlds.
> The barrier for entry in the legacy financial system is way way higher. Have you ever applied for a banking license?
One doesn't have to have a banking license to use the local fiat currency of one's nation (basically, one is born into it). And one must do almost nothing to get a check from the government if they decide to stimulate the economy by handing out money to those who showed they had very little on their last tax return.
If you're into UBI type stuff, yeah, there are multiple UBI projects on Ethereum https://www.proofofhumanity.id
There are a ton of other projects that allow people to share storage space, compute, art, information, etc to earn cryptocurrencies. People contribute what they can to the network, and are compensated for their efforts. Projects like gitcoin are raising millions of dollars for people who volunteer to provide public goods, from performing security audits on large open source projects, to cleaning plastic out of rivers (https://gitcoin.co/grants/). Seems to me like the Ethereum ecosystem is far more altruistic than many current governments.
Can you buy the same things for 1 USD as you could then? (no)
Just because you can join a staking pool which often takes a cut and makes it easy doesn't invalidate what is actually going on.
Both Ethereum's and Bitcoin's regular nodes don't make any money.
1. If you want to run a validator node, i.e. run the architecture you need to have 32 ETH to be eligible to provide this service. And it does not mean immediately that you will earn something. https://ethereum.org/en/staking/
2. If I stake the equivalent of 5 USD I will likely get a 5% return on it per year making it much less interesting from an investment perspective given volatility and opportunity cost.
3. Staked funds are locked and can't be used anywhere else or for anything else. At least GPUs can be used for mining AND general purpose computing.
4. It is much easier to go to any random money exchanger and go USD/EUR or USD/JPY
5. Getting a retail bank account can be done in a matter of minutes online.
This isn't exclusive to capitalism; there are other ideologies that work this way. However, they are ever more intolerably authoritarian than capitalism. Capitalists at least offer the promise of growing the economic universe alongside themselves - you can get 10x richer by taking 50% less profit in some businesses. But fascists, criminals, and dictators also play this game - not to create wealth and grow the size of the pie, but to shrink it so their share gets bigger. And without a government to enforce rules, capitalists will be out-moded, out-gunned, and out-played by thieves of various stripes every time.
Making this worse is the fact that Bitcoin mining is inherently and deliberately zero-sum. It has to be, because it pays in inflation (block subsidy) and confiscation (transaction fees). So capitalists can offer no wealth creation here.
In other words, Bitcoin is how authoritarians trolled right-libertarians into building and buying into a system that creates the thing they hate.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-patent-describes-tracki...
What do you mean? Holding a currency involves zero value creation.
Is there a currency - even theoretical - where 'capital-breeds-capital' is _not_ a side-effect?
In crypto, possessing money generates money, without investing it or putting the money "to work." This would be like if the dollar bills in your wallet periodically grew another dollar.
Maybe, but it is much more common to summon money out of nothing and give it to the rich. At least in the US this happens in the form of buying securities from entities that hold them, which from what I understand is kind of similar to proof of stake (you stake some of your currency by buying a security for a chance to get more when you sell it).
This is why I'd rather see development of privacy coins, like zcash, and less concerned with the decentralization issue (I've yet to see a project actually address centralization or even acknowledge the issue you're bringing up: momentum). We're moving away from a cashless society and while that has a lot of great benefits it also has a lot of detriments. So why not have digital cash then? ZKPs for transactions.
If you want to promote democracy you should also want to decrease the ability for authoritarians to arise, which in our modern era means how much data they can get their hands on and abuse. There's common cop-outs like how will taxes work etc, but society ran pretty smoothly on cash before. Companies still have to report incomes and salaries. We can still do consumption taxes. So we have our income and consumption easily solved. I'm even fine with a small transaction fee, which I know others aren't, but we already pay this in the world of credit cards (2-4%). I think we could really bring down the Visa/Mastercard tax (maybe something like 0.1%/0.5%?) and it would all be a win for everyone.
It is clear to me that cryptocurrencies aren't going to get us this world, so let's start thinking about other means.
They also have the authority to conjure money out of nothing and hand it to the rich.