In 2019 RX470 were $70, RX580 $100 | Hacker News Reader

In 2019 RX470 were $70, RX580 $100

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295 pointsalbxxdx276 comments

I have 6 digits worth of these chips. They've been running fine for years in all sorts of weather conditions. Mining does not destroy cards.

The paste goes bad, but is easily replaced (majority of our cards have been running just fine with OEM old paste). We don't have fans on the cards, but if we did those would go bad and easily replaced. But the cards themselves, really don't go bad very often.

If you're thinking about picking some up, don't worry about the mining part, but definitely use that to try to get a discount.

One thing I find kind of interesting about this -- the folks dumping cards on the market had farms. Those running mining farms are playing a numbers game

This involves under-clocking and under-volting the cards, while also ensuring they're cooled well.

I think an argument could be made that mined-on cards are more well cared for than those owned by your average gamer.

There's not some 'destroy the ASIC' instruction. Work is work.

Mined on cards undergo fewer duty cycles, I wonder how the calculus works out between one long mild duty cycle compared to many more that are also more extreme.

Most large farms don't have the ability to properly tune cards for best ROI. At scale, it is too hard because each card is a snowflake in terms of performance. In order to tune, you're basically pushing the card to the limits of underclock/undervolt... which means the card crashes. Therefore, most large farms actually undertuned, for stability, which is the least abusive on the cards.

If the card crashes due to tuning, the machine crashes, and the rest of the cards are taken offline until the machine reboots. In order to change settings, you have to reboot the entire machine too. It is a pain in the ass to find optimal tuning at scale.

There is no publicly available software to 'autotune' cards at scale. It took me a long time to first learn how to tune cards (by hand tuning thousands of cards and getting a feeling for things) and then once I figured that out, I built software to do this. It required changes in the AMD driver to get it to output in the kernel messages, which card was crashing. It required updating the mining software itself. It was a nutty insane project, but it worked well. We hit our target hashrate / power usage.

What are you doing now? Did you shut the project down entirely?

Some is shut down, some is mining other coins. Kind of a wait and see time right now.

The planet thanks you for shutting down. Don't worry, I'd say the same for any tobacco executive.

Our power is unused hydro, in a geographic location full of other data centers for all the large tech companies.

This comment is just your continued trolling with your anti-crypto trope. Please try another tactic.

Update: I got downvoted to -4 on this one after getting several upvotes. Makes me think that articbull has multiple accounts and is just gaming the system.

There's no such thing. That power should be connected to the grid instead of wasted or put to productive use, not to mention all those GPUs that are about to head for the landfill after a long life of guessing random numbers and warming up the outside. Wasting the power for money disincentivizes storage and grid connection.

You are hilarious, your crypto hatred has clouded your judgement. Since you have so much karma here, you don't mind saying silly things and losing points left and right.

Transmission of power is expensive and lossy. These data centers are in a very remote location that isn't heavily populated. That's why they are there to begin with! The power would absolutely go to waste otherwise. That's also why we picked that area... power was cheap because it wasn't being used.

Our GPUs are 'new old stock'. They were already produced, sitting in warehouses not doing anything, and would have gone to waste anyway.

Update: Similar with the downvotes...

> You are hilarious, your crypto hatred has clouded your judgement. Since you have so much karma here, you don't mind saying silly things and losing points left and right.

First question, where do you think I got most of the karma? Sentiment here is broadly against crypto and has been for years (although it comes and goes). The pro side is loud, but enjoys far less support than you might imagine.

> Transmission of power is expensive and lossy.

No, it isn't. Transmission of power is super efficient. The EIA says the US lost only 5% of its electricity to T&D over the 2016-2020 period. [1] Expensive it may be, but that's not a reason not to do it. A single long power line from Boston to LA would only see ~25% loss from one end to the other. The whole Ohm's law thing (P=IV), we use transformers that are 99%+ efficient to raise the voltage to ~345kV and big fat wires to reduce current and resistance and hence transmission line losses.

> That's also why we picked that area... power was cheap because it wasn't being used.

It should be used to do something productive, not generate e-waste.

> Our GPUs are 'new old stock'. They were already produced, sitting in warehouses not doing anything, and would have gone to waste anyway.

Or, prices would have gone down and more people would have bought them. I can't see 3060s getting scrapped due to lack of demand when they were going for $850 a pop.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3

> Sentiment here is broadly against crypto and has been for years.

Agreed. However, I'd hope that 'against crypto' was less of one dude ranting endlessly, which is really boring and should get down voted.

> Transmission of power is super efficient.

We're not talking about efficiency. Transmission is expensive. Which goes beyond efficiency. You have to factor in the cost of the lines themselves, which are based on distance. I've seen these costs first hand, have you?

> It should be used to do something productive, not generate e-waste.

Oh yes, please define productive for me.

> Or, prices would have gone down and more people would have bought them.

They weren't for sale to the public. Nor would they ever have been.

> I can't see 3060s getting scrapped due to lack of demand when they were going for $850 a pop.

Huh? This whole thread is about RX4xx, which is what my cards are.

It’s the storage that’s the problem, not the transmission. Have talked with several in this business, their take is that it allows plants to have extra capacity to expand to meet peak needs, instead of flirting with disaster. Most plants are hard to spin up and down, so having an alternative way to monetize the energy creation is super important.

In the past, it was aluminum smelting pots, which can't go cold or they take a huge amount of effort to spin up again. They built huge dams just for this [0].

When those plants shut down, the power, which was transmitted directly to the plants, had nowhere to go. Sending it somewhere else requires building high voltage transmission towers, which is very expensive to build as well as maintain.

Coinmint [1] took over the old Alcoa plant and is now pulling power from that dam. As it was explained to me by the head electrician when I visited, Coinmint is doing the dam a favor by having a constant draw of power to replace what was once the smelters. They also are paying for the electricity, which helps with maintenance of the dam, which is effectively a national resource.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses-Saunders_Power_Dam

[1] https://www.coinmint.one/

> "It’s the storage that’s the problem, not the transmission... Most plants are hard to spin up and down"

This is true for nuclear and some types of fossil-fuel power plants. But for hydro, all you have to do to vary the power output is adjust the amount of water running through the turbines. Plus, hydro plants that have their own storage lakes/dams have built-in storage: any water you're not using for generation can be saved in the lake for when it's needed.

(OK, some rivers have minimum flow requirements so that fish don't die and water can be used downstream etc...)

> "A single long power line from Boston to LA would only see ~25% loss from one end to the other."

It would actually be less than that using a modern HVDC transmission line. Losses for HVDC are around 3% per 1000 km of cable, and around 0.7% for the converter stations at each end. So around 15% loss for a theoretical Boston-to-LA HVDC.

According to the HN moderators, if you suspect someone is manipulating votes in some way, you're supposed to e-mail the moderators to have them look at it rather than making an accusation in your post.

Sure. Apologies for calling that out in my update. That said, I don't feel it is worth @dang's time to waste on validating if someone with 24k karma is using fake accounts. As soon as I posted that update, the karma on the comment reversed.

> downvoted

You are very likely mistaking normal HN herd behaviour - plenty of people are going to think bullshit to “unused hydro”.

Also “Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.” and “Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.” - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you assume that HN is full of good people, and respond accordingly, you will learn more and have more fun. If you assume HN is full of bad people causing trouble, why would you stick around? Good communities are built upon trusting cooperators and learning the valid signals of trust.

Right after that update, I went from -4 to +2.

> plenty of people are going to think bullshit to “unused hydro”.

Maybe... but the way I went up and then suddenly went down to -4, was super odd.

> If you assume that HN is full of good people, and respond accordingly, you will learn more and have more fun..

I've been around here, with an account, since 2009. It is the only community I participate in any more. I believe that HN is full of great people and that the content is about as good as you're going to get these days. This is why accounts such as articbull are becoming boring to me. All it is is anti-crypto hatred that is often not fully factual. Equating me to a tobacco exec is just icing on the cake. Sorry for calling that out.

Not only have I debated this person multiple times, but on a search about settlement a HN thread came up and he had the top comment citing the infamous Mora et al study which makes the naive assumption that required hash for a proof of work network scales linearly with transaction volume, rather than block volume (which come at a constant rate no matter what the total hash is).

This person is a successful troll, and a pathetic thinker.

I don’t particularly like crypto but I don’t think we need to rehash the same debate again. Isn’t it interesting to hear what this guy is going to do? Passing judgement does not improve the conversation.

Considering the current state of PoW mining, it doesn’t seem to me like there is much advantage to holding secrets on auto tuning and diagnostics… (correct me if I’m wrong), would you consider releasing any of that work to the community? Auto tuning and diagnostic information would be incredibly useful for almost everyone.

My knowledge is very specific to just these cards.

The only 'secret', which isn't a secret, was that I realized that since this is hardware, we know the maximum settings (hash/watt) that should be possible. Therefore, I set the cards to that best setting and then tune down from there. This is the opposite train of thinking than most other miners.

Most people think, let's start low and then tune up from there to make them 'faster'. The cards crash when they can't handle the settings, so it turns out that tuning down is a better way to tune since they stop crashing when they are stable... and thus don't need tuning from there. There are 3 different sets of 'knobs' to tweak, so I had to build an algo to adjust the knobs in the right order to tune things down. I just had the concept of 'current -> next settings'.

Temperature and power fluctuations can make the cards crash too... so by always tuning down, you're always heading towards more stability instead of instability. Since neither of those could be controlled, machines would reboot randomly all the time.

The software I built was a golang daemon that ran on each machine and watched for these crashes and modified the tuning of each card individually. The daemon is pretty cool as it is effectively a task runner. I had different tasks to configure and monitor the machines as well. The machines are all independent, idempotent and self-healing workers. Reliably distributing the software to 20k different workers, is a fun challenge. There are a ton of unit tests, so that helped a lot.

If I have the energy, I may rip out the tasks from the daemon, turn it into a library and open source that. It is kind of a fun project that could be useful for others trying to manage large scale individual workers. Tasks could easily be 'apt install' or monitoring utilities. I even bundled node_exporter into the binary, so that we could monitor the machines with prometheus.

With Ethereum no longer in the game the total USD issuance for GPU mining probably dropped over 80%. Is your strategy to just wait out for miners to capitulate until mining is profitable again? Are you not worried that this will crater the value of your hardware?

We bootstrapped the company on mining, knowing full well that it would eventually end, and our business model goes beyond just mining ETH.

That was another reason to go with the RX4/5 series... fastest route to ROI.

You should really pivot and start selling that software. Package it up with a nice pretty bow and wrapper and it could be a very lucrative product.

Yeah if I had to guess, the main concern with very long periods of load is going to involve moving parts rather than anything else. So pretty much the fan is likely to go but not much else.

They usually undervolt/clock the GPU, but not the memory. VRAM temps can be an issue and only some miners will try to address that properly with copper shims, etc.

The 3090 is notoriously bad for mining because it has memory chips on both sides of the board, leading to more heating in one spot and poor cooling for the 'back side' chip. Other cards tolerate it much better, but it can be an issue.

So while overall mining cards should be good, there are some specific issues to watch out for. A failed memory chip is not an easy fix, requiring a reball/replacement of that chip.

100% accurate. ethash is memory bound. I've definitely seen 'memory go bad'... but at our scale, the percentage failure rate on that is in the single low digits. Additionally, we have cards that run just fine for years on end.

Maybe, as you suggest, it is just something that is more card specific.

>>I think an argument could be made that mined-on cards are more well cared for than those owned by your average gamer.

What strikes me though is people are rarely discussing mileage, only nature of work.

The video card in my gaming computer works, on average, maybe 1hr/week (some weeks more, most weeks 0). So right out of the gate, my video card has been working basically 168 times less long than any mining card running 24x7. We are talking more than two orders of magnitude difference in "mileage", before we discuss how well or poorly it has been taken care of.

My understanding is that it's similar to a car, changing state (starting/stopping) is much more damaging that running the same thing, at the same temperature/voltage for extended period of time.

I've rebooted GPUs hundreds of times to find the optimal tuning parameters. Failures after a reboot were very few and long term over the entire collection of GPUs, we've seen very few failures. Definitely within operating parameters.

Most of the "damage" that happens to a GPU is due to thermal expansion, which happens at to a more extreme degree if you're cold booting a game and then from a hot gaming state back down to cold. Where are with mining it's usually running constantly at a more or less stable temperature, thus it experiences much less of stress from the thermal expansion side of things.

I fully agree with your point. However, this only applies when miners are buying new cards. I live in Vietnam, crypto mining/usage is pretty big, during the last crypto craze a few months (a year?) ago, all miners are willing to buy old cards, used cards, even broken cards at high price, I sold my 570 for $300.

Furthermore, flashing custom mining BIOS, what I’m told is that every miner here has to do or it wouldn’t be profitable, voids warranty.

Not the same card but five years ago I bought a refurbished GTX 1080 Ti that was previously used for mining. Still running smoothly to this day, no issues whatsoever.

but the perception is already that gpu used in mining are tough to sell as buyers know most of the GPUs bought in the past few years were most likely to have been used in mining.

seeing more and more people just waiting out to buy the newer cards so it seems like the price needs to come down a lot more to convince people to buy a gpu used in mining.

just my two cents based on observing reddit threads

Same but around 3 years ago. Likely the best purchase I have made.

Just wondering if, for a second, you considered that repasting or replacing fans is a large effort for normal folks who just want a video card?

This sounds like the perfect opportunity to buy a retail off the shelf card with a warranty!

What kind of question is that.

Presumably they bought these cards, took the fans off them, hooked up a custom water-cooling setup, etc.; and when selling them, are taking the pile of fans they shucked and putting them back on the cards with fresh paste.

We bought the cards directly from an OEM, with heatsinks on them instead of fans.

We use a case based cooling system. ie: an enclosed box with fans. 12 cards in a box. This is lower power, fewer fans (5 instead of 12), and better cooling than putting fans on each card. Also easier to replace a fan on a case than a card.

At my scale, water cooling doesn't work and isn't cost efficient. Air is a surprisingly great cooling system.

What does the actual heatsink look like one the card? Wondering if I can do this on my home system assuming I have good airflow on my case

It looks just like a heatsink. Big aluminum bladed block.

It might work, I don't know... airflow on the box itself wasn't enough, but there were 12 cards in the box, we also had to have external airflow as well. A single card probably wouldn't be too much of an issue though.

That said, we aren't parting out single cards... it would be more like if you wanted to buy 5-10k of them. ;-)

My logic would be that these cards are for consumer usage, and mining means 24/7 100% load. So, a year mining would be like 5 years of gaming, and even then you gamed 5 hours a day, every single day! So, mining might not destroy cards, but it's heavy use.

I think the used goods buyers' attitude is similar to those in the car market. Never mind the miles, if a car had heavy users, like a pizza company's delivery vehicle, it looks different in the market than a garage-stored family car used to visit the relatives.

There is no such thing as 100% load in ETH GPU mining. The bottleneck is the memory controller, not the GPU itself. That's why 5+ year old cards are still more ROI efficient than the latest greatest cards. The only way to speed things up is to speed up the memory.

Other algos take advantage of more of the GPU side of things as well. ProgPoW, if it had passed, would have done that. From what I understand, RVN also does as well... and uses more power too.

Counterpoint, heavy use mostly doesn't apply to solid-state devices (much how the expected lifespan of an incandescent bulb is independent of its previous usage), and to the extent it would matter the effect is probably dwarfed by not being stuck in a gaming PC full of dust and experiencing constant thermal shock as the games ramp up and down.

To the pizza car analogy, when I was in that game I put a hard 60k miles/yr on such vehicles, but I also regularly change the oil, keep great tires and brakes on them, replace bushings and other suspension components at the first sign of issue, etc... Partly because driving that many miles makes issues easy to spot due to familiarity and temporal coherence and partly because it is cheaper to fix many such things sooner rather than later after they've jostled something else out of place. Nobody ever asked if it was a pizza car. I listed it as well maintained and got top dollar each time because it was and their inspections showed that to be true.

Counter counter point, chips break down over time even though they’re solid state. The flow of electricity through a chip will slowly degrade the metal traces inside it. At the nanometer scale, it doesn’t take much to ruin a logic gate. This is called electromigration.

You can care for that car (or chip) all you want, but chips aren’t cars. It’s a slow process, and may not happen on the timescale of mining, but it happens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_aging

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-dependent_gate_oxide_brea...

> heavy use mostly doesn't apply to solid-state devices

It kinda does. The effects are small, but increase as the fab node gets smaller.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration

> heavy use mostly doesn't apply to solid-state devices

Sorry, but this is pretty much incorrect. Copper migrates, even in solid state devices, and those copper migrations cause breaks and shorts, which cause errors and failures. The smaller the scale, the faster this happens. There is absolutely a MTBF even for solid-state devices.

This entire slide deck is worth the perusal, if only for the "whoah, that actually happens?!" moments. But here's a relevant slide for this claim:

https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observed...

The money quote: "Commercial semiconductor road maps show component reliability timescales are being reduced to 5-7 years." (with attribution)

Another fascinating slide is this one, which shows how an IC can start to have a timing issue after being in service for a time.

https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observed...

We've definitely seen 'memory go bad'. But, our failure rate is in the single digits, across a huge sample set across multiple years and in relatively extreme conditions (4 seasons, outdoors).

If you're buying something for like half of retail and rolling the dice on it, I think it is a fair bet. Even if you only get 1-2 more years out of a card that has been used before (for any purpose), then you've done well.

Half of retail (which is still high) for a mining card with expired warranty? No thanks.

Ok, $10, but you have to pay for shipping and min order is 10k. ;-)

For clarity, because @derac is confused below... this is a joke. Hence the winky face.

Your incentive is to propagandize this point. you have 100k+ cards to sell on the market, by your own admission.

It is amazing how crazy HN can get. I'm not propagandizing anything.

If we sell them for pennies on the dollar or e-waste them, doesn't matter to me.

We ROI'd these cards already.

Whoa crazy to point out someone's conflict of interest. CrAzY

You are sitting on 10m+ of stock and you don't care about the money. OK bud guess I must be schizophrenic, damn.

You are literally trying to sell your cards to a sister comment...

"Ok, $10, but you have to pay for shipping and min order is 10k. ;-)"

There is no conflict of interest, I'm not trying to sell cards here on HN.

You are literally making stuff up now. The 10m+ of stock is worthless if nobody would buy it. If anything, it'll cost us to e-waste it. So, the price ceiling, if we were to sell it, is simply the cost e-waste and moving it around.

That was a winky face... a joke. I was kidding because the OP was unhappy with the statement of half price, which I also made up as a random baseline.

The goal is changing the public discourse. Thus the word propaganda. You wouldn't be propagandizing this point of view if you didn't think you would change people's minds. You are fully aware that this forum has an outsized influence on the tech/programming community.

Edit: to me it's clear that you are acting in bad faith since you called me crazy for pointing out an obvious conflict of interest.

1. I didn't call you crazy, I said "it is amazing how crazy HN can get."

2. Tell me exactly how would it benefit me to change public discourse around the long term reliability of GPUs? The most I can think of is that it might drive up the prices of used cards a tiny bit in a very saturated market, but I doubt it. Especially since I'm just one data point and I'm only posting here on HN. Plus, as I said, I don't care what our cards sell for. Our baseline cost at this point, is to offset any price of e-waste and shipping.

3. I shared my findings about long term reliability because this is a tech community and I thought they'd be interested in it! OMG, I'm such a horrible person for thinking this way! That is sarcasm.

4. Allowing people to realize that mined on GPUs are actually ok (not all, but generally better than common thought) might mean that a few more find useful homes and not end up as e-waste. That's a good thing! I even suggested that people use it as a way to negotiate the price down!

Fwiw, I don't think you're a bad person. I think you have a conflict of interest and they way you are responding to criticism is weird. You also handwaved the copper migration issue. Meh. Carry on. Personally, I took that as you calling me crazy. If that wasn't your intention, fair enough.

Your criticism is to say that I'm spreading propaganda, which is untrue and it is fair for me to respond to that.

Now you're at it again with the criticism. I'm not handwaving anything. I'm stating what I saw after having the fairly rare experience of running 100k+ GPUs over multiple years in harsh environments.

Let's turn that around, do you have any experience with this at all? Or do you just criticize people?

It also doesn't benefit me in any way to share information like this. I'm only sharing this information now because we're pretty much done with this phase of the business, so I can talk about things a bit more openly, and it seems relevant to share on a thread about RX cards.

I didn't say it was not ok to respond. Calling people crazy is the weird part.

You did handwave that, we can agree to disagree.

I didn't even say you are or aren't doing anything nefarious. I pointed out a conflict of interest (incentive to propagandize) and you responded by calling me crazy. Now you are saying "All I do is criticize". Boohoo to you sir.

Good luck with everything. I wish the best for you.

"Assume good intent." This comment, as with all of your other ones in this chain, blatantly violate HN guidelines. Accusing people of "shilling" or "spreading propaganda" only makes this forum worse.

Dude it's nuts how often people sling the "shill" insult on HN. One of the laziest insults by far, and I'd guess incorrect very near 100% of the time.

Thanks for that slide deck! Many treasures to be found within.

Any time I share it, I go through it again. It's so dang fun.

> (much how the expected lifespan of an incandescent bulb is independent of its previous usage)

Either I'm reading this sentence incorrectly or there is something else I don't understand. How can that statement be true?

It's possible if you have a completely flat failure rate. For every time unit spend it has x% failure rate. An example is a piece of rock on the side of the road. Everyday it has a small chance to be smashed by a car. But that chance doesn't increase or decrease over time. Unless external factors change

Whether it's true for light bulbs I don't know.

I guess the bulb does not degrade over time, it just break at some point when some random events occur.

I don't think that's true, the filament evaporates (sublimes?, sublimates?) from the heat and eventually it is too thin to support itself and breaks. That's how I always understood the main failure mode of incadescent bulbs and that's why the above statement confuses me

On the other hand 24/7 usage means no thermal cycling, probably eliminating failures caused by solder joint cracking.

The machines reboot a lot for auto tuning. Plenty of thermal cycling that happens in all temperatures. Still didn't see any issues.

PSU's, on the other hand, are mostly hand soldered in China and have all sorts of issues.

Who/what do you like for PSUs for operating in that harsh environment?

We've run a ton of different PSU's. Everything from super cheap no-name chinese stuff to refurb/tested high end HP server class. None of them are super reliable.

undervolted use because not every processing component needs to be used

very different than a car

but valid questions to ask to whoever you are buying from used

The garage-stored car will be a bag of shite, though. You'd be far better going for the delivery vehicle.

I trust mining GPUs a lot more than gamer owned GPUs tbh. Better ventilation, severe undervolting, not even maxing the gpu itself and the fans are not actually spinning that fast.

It's not just the thermal paste that goes. There are more parts that are affected by the constant heat. Capacitors in the first place

Yeah, electrolytic capacitors derate due to time under load, exponentialy accelerated by temperature increases.

FWIW: "the paste can be replaced easily" is 100% true for like 1% of GPU consumers. As long as you replace the paste before resale, it's great. Otherwise the buyer might perceive that they have a card that's dead or slowed way down because "mining destroyed it."

The seller can replace the thermal paste first if it's so easy. It's in their interest to fetch higher prices. Not my job.

I was just thinking today about many years ago when I test drove a used car and heard whistling from the roof. Saleswoman said it was easy to fix. It must've happened during every test drive and possibly dissuaded some buyers, so why hadn't the dealer already fixed it? I bought the car, and guess what, the whistling wasn't fixable.

I believe you out of sheer respect for your auto card tuning project, but in general someone with $1M of a product to sell has a conflict of interest with giving good advice about its quality.

Conflict of interest doesn't mean wrong, but is an indicator that one should take the claim dubiously until it can be backed up.

I have a lot more than $1m (new) of these cards. 6 digits of CARDS, not value.

We have zero cards for sale right now. Nobody wants them because they are heat sinks and not fans.

Yeah I don't really understand this worry about buying cards used for mining. If you're worried about wear I'd still rather take a miner's card than one that was used by a heavy gamer and routinely pushed to the limit.

I feel like people dislike cryptominers (IMO reasonably, and for all sorts of reasons) and want to punish them all the way by preventing them from liquidating their stocks of cards, but I don't think it's a good reason to make stuff up.

I wouldn't buy a card that I know was used for mining because I'm effectively boycotting miners, not because of some made up technical excuse.

I'd not be worried about wear but about whatever meddling was done with the firmware (edit: or hardware). Maybe an experienced miner knows how to easily return it back to stock, but who knows who you're dealing with. Someone else can take the chance.

Also, PC gamers are the last group I would expect to successfully boycott something. They'll install some spyware-ridden game launcher just to get a $5 discount on a game, while complaining about it. What discount will they resist for a mined-on GPU? $50? Assuming they even know it was mined on.

Easy to reset the firmware (vbios) to stock.

Hardware fuses.

The only problem I have with miners is that I don't understand the economics. My understanding is that air conditioning in data centres is a non-trivial cost. So the question is pretty much a balance of: Is air conditioning so expensive that it's cheaper for miners to blast these cards at high temperatures and accept a failure rate, or is the maths behind (cost * mean time between failures) so high that the miners are actually selling off good used equipment.

You could tell me that either of those things dominate, I don't know. But I would want to have atleast an idea of this before I bought a used miners GPU.

Having said that, I wouldn't buy a gamer's old GPU.

The economics are simple: capex + opex. As long as you have an idea of ROI and can lower the cap+op as much as possible, you're making money. Otherwise, you're buying the coin directly.

You can't run the cards at high temps or they crash. They also have built in thermal protection where they shut down at about 85c (depends on the settings).

Miners also undervolt/underclock the cards. Lower power is better for opex in the equation above. =) This means they aren't run as hard as you might think. ethash as an algo is also memory hard, so the GPU portion isn't 100% at all. That's why older cards are still in use and more ROI efficient.

Last crypto crash years ago I bought a used Titan XP for an insane price after the miners started having to dump them super cheap. Still running it today and it has chewed through even the craziest games. They probably bought it for way more so I don't think it is really effective to "boycott" them by not buying the card if you are the one getting a super good deal.

what are you mining these days?

Yeah, with all this "GPU prices are falling woo-hoo" people seem to be forgetting they're still paying above MSRP for cards that are both two years old and were overpriced on launch. I bought an EVGA 1070 SC shortly after launch and paid $400. If Nvidia thinks I'm going to fork over $600 for a two year old 3070 they can sit and spin.

Nvidia only sets a MSRP not the selling price which the manufacturer sets.

Nvidia does set the price for Founders Edition cards sold under their own name though, although they only account for a small part of the overall card supply.

Nvidia sets the price for all cards that use their chips as part of their OEM agreements. Partners used to get around this by doing things such as adding more memory, OC, and other features which allowed them to charge a premium in those cases. Nvidia has clamped own on this over the years. It's gotten so bad that EVGA famously stopped all GPU development this year in reaction to the declining margins and increasing hostility from Nvidia.

The point is MSRP used to be a relatively safe assumption of selling price (AFAIK it also has been for quite a while), and now it's way lower than what we actually end up paying.

Given the recent evga split, this is actually not the case. Nvidia has contracts to provide them with a great deal of control over end user pricing.

Nvidia literally mandates the pricing their "partners" can sell each card ( it's an interval )

It's widely known Nvidia is a bitch to work with. It has been "fine" because Nvidia was pretty much the only game in town and because of Bitcoin/Covid/floods/locusts/etc the prices have been ridiculous for years and everybody made their sweet money, now things are starting to become sane and the usual crocodiles are starting to cry..

I don't feel pity for anyone, everybody other the the final real consumer made a lot of money.

> I don't feel pity for anyone, everybody other the the final real consumer made a lot of money.

And most of the final real consumers just lost out on inexpensively running Minecraft shaders in 4K or whatever, so eh, life moves on.

I heard in the recent coverage of EVGA ending their partnership with NVIDIA and pulling out of the GPU market that NVIDIA not only sets the MSRP, they also set floor and ceiling for the selling prices.

Also, EVGA CEO claimed that it wouldn't be feasible compete with NVIDIA's pricing for Founder's Edition cards, which are usually cheaper.

That's not true. NVIDIA sets a min and max price range you can sell at (both to board partners AND to retail partners). LTT has talked about it at length in the past, including on last week's WAN Show. It was also cited by EVGA last week as one of the reasons they opted to stop selling GPUs.

Han told the YouTubers that NVIDIA had stopped treating EVGA as a true partner over the years despite their history. https://www.engadget.com/evga-is-leaving-the-gpu-market-and-...

1.NVIDIA had allegedly stopped informing EVGA about new product announcements and important information, such as suggested retail pricing and availability

2.NVIDIA's first-party Founders Edition cards undercut the prices of their counterparts from EVGA and other partners, forcing the vendors to mark down their prices.

Do you have a source?

Sure, NVIDIA sets an MSRP, but that MSRP is a sticker price given to consumers and not representative of what the manufacturers pay for the chips themselves. Manufacturers need to make somewhat of a profit, but NVIDIA has encroached on this profit from its manufacturers since the 10-series came out. JayzTwoCents on YouTube recently discussed this while reporting on a meeting he had with EVGA's CEO about EVGA's recent break with NVIDIA [1].

When the 10-series came about, NVIDIA launched the a limited run of the founder's edition graphics cards at $100 above MSRP. Before the 10-series graphics cards, NVIDIA didn't sell cards themselves and went out of its way to make this seem as if this was a limited edition sort of product. Then the 20-series came out with a continuous run of founder's edition cards which were priced at MSRP, directly competing with their previous board partners.

Tie this along with the previous attempts to strongarm manufacturers via GPP and chip supply allocations, and I tend to give the gift of charity to the manufacturers and not NVIDIA.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12Hcbx33Rb4&t=61s

I love this alt-history, because the contemporary view at the time was that the 10-series MSRP was "fake", that it was impossible to find cards under the $700 MSRP, and that the whole thing was a scheme from NVIDIA to market a lower number than you could pay in practice and upcharge for the blower cooler.

Partner cards were stacking up in the $725-800 range for 6 months after launch, so they came in above the MSRP, which people justified because they were "premium cards". Very few vendors offered any products at the actual MSRP, EVGA had one that was "only" $20 above MSRP and Zotac had something similar and those two low-cost models were impossible to find for a long time.

Now it has gone from "NVIDIA wants to upcharge you for a blower cooler" and it's a dastardly plan from NVIDIA to undercut partners.

everyone is real riled up by that EVGA ceo's tantrum but even GN told you to take it with a grain of salt, and other board partners have confirmed that in the last 2 years they've been running 10x their usual profits due to mining. The EVGA ceo spinning it like partners been losing hundreds of dollars per card for years now is false and untrue. Being a partner is generally around 10% margin and even a smaller partner like EVGA should be able to get around 5%. Losing hundreds of dollars per card is something that happened in like, the last month, partners made very healthy margins selling into the mining boom, and the CEO is being disingenuous by pretending that they've lost a bunch of money on it/are running super low margins. Mining was great for margins.

https://www.igorslab.de/en/evga-pulls-the-plug-with-loud-ban...

I think most people are aware that the prices need to come down another 50% or more until we're approaching "cheap".

Wouldn't we expect a similar price increase over the last 5 years, if only due to inflation and the 25% tariff?

You'd expect that increase to be applied to a significant discount for the card being two years old.

Also the tariff was paused 6 months ago, retroactively refunding back to 11 months ago. It should have minimal effect on current stock.

Consider AMD.

If you don't need NVIDIA specific features (e.g. ray tracing performance, CUDA), you can get the same level of performance [0] offered by a 3070 for around 350$-450$ in the form of an RX 6700/RX 6750 XT [1][2]. You also get more VRAM with these cards - 12GB instead of the 8GB of the 3070.

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html

[1]: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=6700+xt&Order=1&N=4841%2010000...

[2]: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=6750+xt&Order=1&N=100007709&is...

for just gaming AMD is the way to go if you are on a tight budget. they had driver issues which are now fixed so they offer both good performance and price. too bad all ML stuff require CUDA :(

Sadly I do much of my gaming over Moonlight which is Nvidia-exclusive and beats the pants off Steam Link. Also I find the AMD naming conventions somewhat confusing and I can never judge the relative performance of an AMD card by its model number.

I'm a huge Moonlight fan so this is an issue for me as well, but just an FYI, a lot of people have good luck with Sunshine https://github.com/loki-47-6F-64/sunshine - which is a Moonlight compatible host that uses ffmpeg (and works w/ AMD cards).

I'm in the market for an upgrade and will wait until Nov 3 to see what RDNA3 brings to see if it's worth paying for a new card vs last-gen used card pricing.

How does the latency compare to Moonlight? I'm lag-sensitive to the point GeForce Now is immediately nauseating in first-person games.

> Also I find the AMD naming conventions somewhat confusing and I can never judge the relative performance of an AMD card by its model number

It's really quite simple and very similar to NVIDIA's naming scheme.

First digit is the generation (currently 6XXX)

Second digit is the relative performance (64XX < 65XX < 66XX < 67XX < 68XX < 69XX)

"XT" suffix - similar to NVidia's "Super" designation. Non-Zero third digit is like Nvidia's "Ti" designation: 6600 < 6600 XT < 6650 XT.

I've used Steam's remote play/streaming setup for years without issue. What makes Moonlight better?

AMD is also the way to go for non-Windows users. There are hopes that NVIDIA drivers will become usable in wake of the wake of Lapsus$ hijinx, but for now AMD cards work so much better with GNU/Linux

The lapsus hack doesn't matter, no body is going to Read trade secret code.

What actually matters is the announcement of an open source kernel driver, similar to how AMD does it, which will allow for third party drivers like Mesa to exist, instead of manually reverse engineering everything.

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc...

The nvidia drivers work great on linux in my experience, so long as you stay away from wayland.

Recently bought a RX 6600 for (€/$ 285), very happy besides not being able to (easily at least) try out stable fusion ;)

You may be able to by building PyTorch with ROCm bindings.

That’s what I meant with "easily" ;) With the effort for it, the 6600 apparently only being borderline able to run it, and my general hate for everything python related, I’d rather not try it.

They don't think you're going to buy it, but they know someone is going to.

Yup, iirc i paid $1600 (or maybe $1800? I forget) for a new 3080TI. It hurt. However i'd do it again if/when i need to. Ideally i won't for another few years, but you get me.

Clearly i can afford to do this though. But this isn't just gaming either, i create CG on this machine, digitally sculpt, etc.

> Our strategy is to reduce the sell-in - reduce the sell-in this quarter, next quarter to let channel inventory correct. Obviously, we're off the highs and the macro condition turned sharply worse. And so, our first strategy is to reduce sell-in in the next couple of quarters to correct channel inventory. We've also instituted programs to price position our current products to prepare for next-generation products.

-Jensen Huang, Nvidia Q2 Earnings Call to Investors. Paraphrased here: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-prelimin...

JayzTwoCents has a video that speculates on what it means: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15FX4pez1dw

Short version though, Jay thinks NVidia's trying to reduce the supply of 3xxx cards on the market so that they can hopefully keep prices high-ish and position the 4xxx cards at a higher price bracket then the 3xxx, selling both at the same time.

*eyeroll*

Looks like I will not be buying a new Nvidia anytime soon

I vaguely recall like 10 years you could get a then-decent GPU for like $120. But maybe I'm comparing against, like, the "best-buy special" slightly out of date card or something. I wonder if some of that market has been wiped out by the slow creep of iGPU performance.

MSI's 3090 Ti was hovering around $1099 on Amazon, new-in-box, last week. Nobody should buy a used 3070 for $600 - brand new ones are ~$550 right now: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=rtx+3070

I don't buy a new gpu when it's too expensive. I don't play a game when my current gpu can't run it. I may be boring, but I don't see much difference in graphics quality compared to 5 or 10 years ago... Software seems to just have gotten worse. Whenever I buy new hardware, I feel like I'm indirectly part of the problem, where devs are forced to cut corners bc of budget and time constraints as they're shipping low par software.

Software has definitely gotten worse, and tbh it will only keep getting worse. I really like this talk by [the possibly notorious] Jonathan Blow on the software industry and software in general decomposing [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

I went to buy a k620 six months ago. It was $100. It's back down to $30, like it was 2 years ago. So I've definitely seen movement, just maybe not at the top?

I keep reading there will be all these cheap GPUs available, which is great, but I then ask where I can buy them but all I get is ebay, and then when I check ebay, they still aren’t cheap. Where will all these miners be selling them? So I can buy a few.

Prices are falling quickly. 3090 was ~$900 on ebay last week. You can now pick one up for $600. Look at the auctions buy it now prices take longer to drop.

Auction prices also have a strange habit of increasing over time.

(A quick ebay search shows that 98+% of sold auctions for 3090s did so at a price of >700$.[1])

[1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=3090&_sacat=0...

Best Buy had them sub $1000. Still close too [1].

[1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3090-ti-tita...

Has people been mining with 3090? I thought you didn't need that much vram for mining and that other cards would be much more cost effective.

The top end cards were just regular scalping in a similar vein to the ps5, opportunists. The mining was just icing on the cake.

> The mining was just icing on the cake.

No, 3090 didn't make sense to use for mining. Too low profit compared to what you had to pay for it. There is better cards to get for mining, even if they have worse performance. Performance per $ makes the rules.

Prices are definitely dropping, but $600 seems like a stretch. I searched for “rtx 3090”, checked “used” only, sold items, only auctions. Last 5 sold were $715, $812, $840, $760, $870 (I skipped a few outliers that were actually 3090 Ti).

eBay, craigslist, facebook marketplace, hardware enthusiast forums, etc.

But it's going to take them time to get them prepped for sale, so they're not going to show up all at once.

(In case you hadn't seen it, I found more about Italian POW parolees at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32890349 . Apologies all for threadjacking.)

I can't seem to find a 3080 under 750 euro in EU (used or new). Actually ebay.de prices seem to be still higher than store prices.

A lot of miners are probably still in the denial phase thinking they'll mine a PoW fork of ETH or the remaining GPU-friendly proof-of-work coins like ETC or monero.

It's easy to fall for it: if they look at what their mining power will make if applied to the pre-merge difficulty and rewards, it probably does look okay. Of course, in reality all the ex-ETH miners doing this will make difficulty go through the roof facing a constant reward, taking them below water.

Some who understand the above may think that price of other PoW coins will increase matching increased work ("there's more work, work is value, more work higher price, right?").

Then at some point all this will unfold, taking PoW coin prices down, which will increase coin sales to pay shortfall on electricity bills, which feeds itself, so once all this is done one can expect both very cheap GPUs and cheap ETC. LOL.

Then we'll probably get a bit of bungee jumping on the share prices of AMD, Nvidia, etc as the stock market participant interpret the associated blip in new GPU sales as "the end of gaming" etc.

I wonder if it would make sense for a GPU miner to switch over to becoming a stable diffusion render farm or something.

Monero isn't gpu friendly.

/r/buildapcsales /r/hardwareswap

It's just starting to kick in.

Most miners stuck it out to the bitter end. Hashrate was only down around 20% from the peak at the switch to PoS. Then it takes a few days to take apart the rigs and get them ready for listing. And that's only for the ones that aren't trying to mine something else, or simply are in denial.

But the main counterpoint to the GPU supply increase is the pent up demand from two years of usurious GPU pricing. A lot of people are ready to finally upgrade as soon as prices are reasonable.

Expect the market to soften - and it is, 3060ti prices are down like $40 over a couple days on eBay - but I also wouldn't expect bargain prices.

>With the inclusion of a new competitor, Intel, this means this time there will be 4 players offering GPUs to the market: AMD, Nvidia, miners and Intel.

Poor Intel, they paper launched at the right time, but actually (possibly) launching right as that market is going to crash, even with competitive pricing they are going to be up against what will be a saturated second-hand market.

Then there will be time to stabalise and iron out their drivers that the others had years/decades to do instead of going from scratch.

Do hope Intel rides it out on GPU's as they do seem to be onto something, but the market can be so cruel and times are a changing on many levels that will see a shift from a sellers market to a buyers market due to far less buyers and recessions globally hitting many a wallet.

And Apple, since they now make their own integrated graphics instead of using Intel for integrated and AMD for dedicated.

I got one of these cheap RX580s in 2019, and, after not really using it for much, proceeded to use it to mine ETH throughout 2021. I was shocked that such an affordable GPU could mine (somewhat) profitably; I did the math, and it seemed like the card would pay for itself if I mined for a few months.

...and then I discovered US crypto taxes, which triggered on every single incremental payout from the mining pool I used (NiceHash). Taxes completely wiped out my mining profits. And now after the merge it won't be profitable to mine ETH again anyway. :/

I'm now trying to get the card to run Stable Diffusion, and I'm having a terrible time with that too, since it's just old enough to not support the latest Linux ROCm driver.

> ..and then I discovered US crypto taxes, which triggered on every single incremental payout from the mining pool I used

How much were you earning off a single GPU? Surely low enough to fit under your standard deduction?

There was probably a way I could have figured out how to keep the profits, but because I only made a few hundred from mining, and I had other capital gains (from stocks) that made that whole part of my taxes complicated, it just wasn't worth the effort and the risk of an audit to try to find a loophole. I printed the forms from TaxBit and paid what it said.

People say that US taxes are kept complicated because the tax prep companies profit, or because Republican politicians benefit from frustration at taxes. But I think this is a bigger reason: a lot of people, myself included, when faced with paying extra taxes that just "don't seem right", would rather pay extra that go through the complication of figuring out how to fix them. So the government gets extra tax revenue that they technically didn't require.

> People say that US taxes are kept complicated because the tax prep companies profit, or because Republican politicians benefit from frustration at taxes. But I think this is a bigger reason: a lot of people, myself included, when faced with paying extra taxes that just "don't seem right", would rather pay extra that go through the complication of figuring out how to fix them. So the government gets extra tax revenue that they technically didn't require.

So you think people overpay more commonly when faced with complexity and confusion in the tax code vs. underpaying or not paying at all? Is that right?

Also the confusion you're describing is also what drives your first reason:

> People say that US taxes are kept complicated because the tax prep companies profit

People need to use professional services because they're not sure.

It's pretty well acknowledged that the American tax system is heavily under the influence of lobbyists from tax filing companies like Intuit. You don't see these sorts of problems in other countries for individual or self employment taxes

The tax code is too complex. I've consulted professional tax accountants three times over the last decade. Professionals don't understand it either.

The first one was an oaf in Los Angeles that charged me $500 to redo a back-of-the-envelope calculation I had already done.

The second one was an older lady in Silicon Valley. You would think she would have known how ISOs work, but she messed up the calculations anyway. There were no penalties, but she felt bad enough that she filed my taxes for free. She got cancer and retired 6 months later.

The third was a friend that prepares taxes for billionaires. His retainer is something like $15K per year. His software's calculations disagreed with my homemade spreadsheet by $40K. In April my spreadsheet ended up within a few thousand of TurboTax. He's still kicking himself over that...

If you're working a fulltime job, you're very likely to already be well over the standard deduction. It still sounds like the commenter doesn't fully understand the tax situation and might have paid more than they truly owed, but I can't imagine they'd owe $0 on the profits if they're in the US unless they had minimal other income that year.

In the US, especially absent a large mortgage or significant charitable deductions, it's very possible--even probable--that, given tax changes about five years ago, you're within your standard deduction. I certainly am in a normal year.

I think we're saying different things. If I'm reading correctly, you're saying that most people don't need to itemize and can take the standard deduction, and I certainly agree. I'm saying that OP will need to report even a small amount of income from crypto mining since their income (not itemized deductions) will be more than the standard deduction and the crypto mining will cause them to owe additional income tax.

I’m confused, taxes only apply to profit and you can write off the expenses of the video card.

They might not have known that. You’d be surprised how often people say “Taxes completely wiped out my profits becuase I didn’t realize I could deduct my expenses!” Also, in some industries, like marijuana distribution, you really can’t deduct a lot of your expenses.

If it was with a single card there probably isn't enough expense to go over the standard deduction.

Your ability to deduct business expenses using Schedule C has nothing to do with the standard deduction. (And if you don't treat it as a business expense, you probably can't deduct it no matter what.)

That's not how that works. For business expenses you put business income against expenses on schedule C. Only the net income is considered for taxes. Many people think they need to do something special to have a business but you don't. However, it can be a good idea to create a free EIN for the business and maintain real books (using ledger, for example, or by hand) and a separate checking account.

Why not?

I assume we're talking legal distribution else you wouldn't be paying taxes anyway

> else you wouldn't be paying taxes anyway

That's how they get you.

NC sells "unauthorized substance" tax stamps, which you can buy (in theory) anonymously with cash, to pay your taxes on income from illegal distribution.

Mostly it's an excuse to extract money from people who (obviously) didn't pay their drug taxes [1].

[1] https://ncpolicywatch.com/2021/06/28/the-nc-drug-tax-is-desi...

Seriously, there should be a way of challenging a conviction for not paying this tax (or any other tax), if the way to pay the tax is reasonably impossible to use for an average human.

I'd be fine with it if you could buy these stickers at any random store/kiosk/post office (like the tax stamps in Croatia that got phased out last year [1]), if you could mail-order them in advance, or if you could pay them online, and there was a written rule that not just makes it a misdemeanor for DoR staff to forward data, but outright poisons the whole investigation.

[1] https://www.expatincroatia.com/what-is-a-tax-stamp-and-why-d...

The IRS makes it really easy to just say you owe money and pay them, without saying much about why you owe them money. So there really isn't an excuse. I assume the NC system is for state taxes, not federal. For the IRS, you just put some numbers down and they usually won't ask for specific details. Later, if you get caught, the IRS will ask if you paid your taxes, and...if you did, they won't get you for tax evasion.

There is no “legal distribution” of marijuana in federal law, and it’s the federal law that’s most of the tax burden. The federal law simply does not allow you to deduct expenses on marijuana business.

But if you have a business selling whatever, you have expenses. Why does the federal tax agency even care what you're doing to make that money?

I assume federal law doesn't actively say it's illegal, and I assume federal law doesn't exhaustively list what can be an expense or not, so if your business is incurring a legitimate expense?

Further. Who decides what you are selling. Yes it may be marijuana in the box, but if there are other value added things, surely you could argue that that is an incidental ingredient, and you're really selling fancy packaging.

For a country where it's all about free enterprise etc. Things are half made awkward. In the UK if you have a legitimate business expense related to your business you can expense it. And setting up a business basically involves getting a tax number to do your tax return.

It's illegal: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/280E

No deduction or credit shall be allowed for any amount paid or incurred during the taxable year in carrying on any trade or business if such trade or business (or the activities which comprise such trade or business) consists of trafficking in controlled substances (within the meaning of schedule I and II of the Controlled Substances Act) which is prohibited by Federal law or the law of any State in which such trade or business is conducted.

Under federal law, marijuana is Schedule 1. While it is used in medical treatment in some states, this use is not legal federally. https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/drug-scheduling

Schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Some examples of Schedule I drugs are: heroin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), marijuana (cannabis), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy), methaqualone, and peyote.

Those in the business of selling marijuana are doing so illegally in the hopes the federal government continues to not enforce the law. :(

So they're breaking the law by selling drugs? I assume they aren't paying taxes anyway then?!?

Yes, they are breaking laws by selling drugs. No, they still pay taxes. The reason is that the federal drug enforcement agency that could go after them for breaking the low most likely will not do that, whereas IRS highly likely will go after them for not paying the taxes.

Most countries prevent that dilemma by making the taxation rate of criminally acquired income 100%.

The point is not to actually enforce these laws. If that sounds schizophrenic to you, that's because it is.

If you're not incorporated, business expenses are only deductible if they exceed 2% of AGI[0, p2], so for a hobbyist miner it is quite plausible that they can't write it off.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p529.pdf

I recommend using an accountant.

I am not one.

However, my understanding is that all of this might be best handled as a Sole Proprietorship and filed using Schedule C - Profit and Loss from a Business.

Not tax advice

If you're just some average person, no, you aren't writing off the expenses. You should just add it to Schedule 1 line 8z "Other Income" and write "crypto mining" as what it is from. If you're just some average person, the actual tax on that money is going to be something like 10-15%.

You can save a lot of time and effort: If it's not profitable when you pay your taxes, it isn't profitable. It's a hobby.

Not tax advice, but I'm pretty sure you can just file it under a Schedule C as business income, and then you definitely can deduct the expenses from the business income with no 2% minimum.

Quick note since it wasn't totally clear from the sibling comments that this is totally wrong. The cited document is describing a completely different kind of "deduction" for a completely different reason and has nothing at all to do with the ability to "deduct" business costs from profits. The underlying principle is that only profits from business activity are taxable, not gross income.

In case anyone is wondering, the cited document discusses _unreimbursed_ _employee_ expenses. This means something like: you used your guest room as an office to perform remote work for your employer, and they didn't give you any rent for that space. In some times past you could actually pay less tax by declaring that you had rented your guest room to your employer but they hadn't paid you the rent, and so that's now a loss to you upon which you don't pay tax. This document says "nope, you can't do that any more".

> you can write off the expenses of the video card.

As a random person who buys a graphic card to mine coin you can deduct the card price ?

Only if you are a "business" and using it for business purposes. And the IRS has all sorts of things to detect a hobby vs a business - https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/earning-side-income-is-it-a-hob...

So for example if you build a workshop in your garage and start making fine wood items, even if you sell them it may not be a business, and count as a hobby.

Usually the IRS is trying to find people with "perpetually money-losing businesses that are deducting each year" but you could get caught up in some cases.

This doesn't make sense. Your tax on creating the coin is only your marginal tax rate. Even if you had a 37% tax rate that means the other 63% was being eaten by electricity?

Yes, I was making a very small marginal profit after electricity. And the tax rate was around 30% once you combine federal and Massachusetts taxes, I don't remember exactly what it was. And anything I cashed out was double-taxed: first the payout from NiceHash, then the conversion from BTC (what they pay out in) to USD.

> And anything I cashed out was double-taxed

That's not how US taxes work. You're not "double-taxed" because when you sell your coins, you only pay tax on the capital gains i.e. the difference from the original value, which you were already taxed on. (Assuming you correctly and accurately report the sale, that is.)

In other words, each dollar you receive is taxed as income or as capital gains, but not both.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by triggering taxes "on every single payout". This is no different from a job that's taxed "on every single paycheck" -- all you have to actually report is the total at the end of the year.

That's what I thought too. It didn't make sense at the time, and still doesn't, but the TaxBit forms showed a tax on both the payouts and the BTC->USD transaction. There was probably something I could have done to remove one of them, but I don't know enough about capital gains taxes to figure it out, and paying a professional would have cost as much as the tax I was trying to avoid.

You would get taxed twice, but it wouldn't stack. If you earned $15 of Bitcoin, you'd get $15 added onto your tax bill at payout. Then if Bitcoin jumped to $20 and you sold it a couple months later, you'd have the $5 difference of short-term capital gains taxes added on then.

You often have to correctly document each step (and I don't know if the law is "smart" enough yet to allow you to deduct the electricity charge unless you set the whole thing up as a 'company') and allow it to know the "cost basis" for each step.

When you count your income from mining, you need to create an equal cost basis at that time. The value of the coins when you received them is your cost basis. If you didn't do that, you paid way too much in taxes.

(If you hold them for longer than a year before you sell them, you can be paying long-term capital gains which is cheaper than short-term. Unless you're in losses in which case it doesn't matter.)

Just to clarify: there's no such thing as "US crypto taxes". There are taxes, levied on things like income and capital gains. Crypto transactions can constitute taxable events same as trading any other kind of asset can.

In this case it sounds like this TaxBit software is buggy / not full featured and shouldn't be relied upon. Same applies in some cases to TurboTax also, but you'd think it would be possible to handle such a simple scenario correctly.

IANAL but to my understanding its kind of a stretch to call it double-taxed.

Note: the below is assuming you're doing this mining activity as a private person and not setting it up as a separate legal entity like an LLC or something.

Simplifying, lets say 1BTC==$1USD at time of NiceHash payout, and you received 10 bitcoin. You'd then pay something like your regular income tax rate, lets say 30% on that. So the tax on mining income was $3. You'd still potentially have 10BTC, assuming you paid the tax with other dollars on hand instead of instantly selling.

Then crypto goes up from 1BTC==$1 to 1BTC==$1.50. Your crypto is now worth 10 * 1.5 = $15USD. When you go to sell, you don't pay tax on the full $15 you just pay the tax on the gains, $5. So you'd pay the capital gains tax, probably 15% to you, on that $5 so $0.75USD.

You don't pay the capital gains tax rate on the entire value of your crypto, only the gain in value. So from a USD perspective you didn't get double taxed. You had an income of $10, then you had an "income" of $5 when you realized the gains. That's two different taxable events, not a single one. If you exchanged the BTC to USD immediately at the distribution, you wouldn't of had a capital gains tax as you wouldn't have theoretically experienced any gains/losses on that distribution.

IANAL, this is not tax advice, I am entirely a lay person. If I'm wrong please correct me.

What happens is tax software, unless specifically told (and some will ask) will assign a cost-basis of $0 to something it doesn't know about, which makes the whole $15 appear as a capital gain.

This exactly. Unless you're using a suite that's specifically built for crypto traders, there's no way the software can know that income on day X (which you pay income tax on) is from the same bucket that an asset as was sold later on day Y.

You have to tell the software about your cost basis, which is only a problem if you're mining. It's smart enough to figure out buying and selling on the same platform, but it is not smart enough to figure out that some income was related to later sales and track your cost basis unless you make those connections yourself.

This is why I paid a firm to do my crypto reconciliation... which too costs an arm and a leg.

Yeah if you're in for a penny you're in for a pound as they say. Sometimes I think that most of the algorithms should just go away and we should just trade 10 times a year, from a spreadsheet. Then I remember that those algorithms all came from the primordial spreadsheet soup, and just laugh.

If you listed it as a side business you should also be able to deduct the electricity expense (and the cost of the GPU, depreciated over some expected lifetime) as a business expense against the revenue you made from mining.

You pay income tax on the crypto when you mine it at the market value at the time of mining - then your cost basis becomes the price that you paid (for future gain + loss computations).

The reporting requirement is quite annoying, so for a single card/rig it's probably not worth it - but should still make money.

There shouldn't ever be a case where you have to pay more in tax than you made mining (with one exception: you keep your mining income in crypto and the crypto tanks).

Taxes can't make you lose money. You're taxes are a percent of the profit. That's how it works. You can't be forced into unprofitability because of taxes, but your profits will decrease by whatever percentage of profit your tax rate is.

They don’t factor in the electricity you pay for to get the coin. So when you get your tax bill for $20 of btc, and you paid $15 in electricity to get it, you still owe federal and state taxes on the $20, not the $5. If you set it up as a business you might be able to write off electricity.

See: https://www.bitcointaxsolutions.com/blog/can-i-deduct-mining....

But that's insane. That's.a 37% tax on revenue, not income. Nothing else is taxed like that.

I’m not a tax avoidance advocate but you really reported your few hundred in mining profits? In similar situations I’d wage 99% of miners don’t report and have never had problems.

You're reasoning for violating the law is that the probability if getting caught is low?

Pretty much everyone uses this mentality with some law.

Ever go 46 MPH in a 45 MPH zone?

Tax evasion and speeding are not in the same category of crime, not even close. One is generally an infraction (not even a misdemeanor) and the other is a felony.

fr speeding can cause injury to others especially when done more than a bit, unless you're a highly trained driver or smth. tax evasion causes no physical harm to anyone.

Evading a few bucks from running numbers on your graphics card is not laundering money to fund trafficking or depriving schools of books.

If it's a rounding error, then they're both negligible crimes.

Worth noting: I also reported a few thousand in trading profits, which were part of the same forms. So I couldn't just ignore crypto entirely on my taxes, and I used TaxBit to autogenerate the forms; it required everything in my transaction history to be accounted for, including all of the mining transactions.

Yeah, this is another reason why so many people are suspicious of the push for "cash like" systems - like cash, they enable tax evasion. Which is one of those things we can each let slide for a bit on small amounts, but when it starts distorting the rest of the market we're not going to put up with.

> which triggered on every single incremental payout from the mining pool I used

I can't really see how small taxes spread out over small pay-outs would be different from a large tax over the total. It's your marginal tax rate anyway.

Same story, bought an RX580 to build a budget gaming box, ended up mining with it to pay for the rig. Electricity in Oregon is pretty cheap, and I optimized well (30Mh/s), but my margins were healthy.

I switched to another pool that paid out less often after realizing the accounting nightmare that nicehash makes. I did make a cost basis tracker, not sure if the APIs still work tho: https://github.com/igmcdowell/nicehash-basis-tracker

As others said, you should pay taxes on the initial value of coins on receipt, but when you convert to fiat you only owe taxes on the change in value since you received it (your cost basis). You might even have a small loss at this point if the value of BTC dipped between receipt and sale.

Usual IANAL/Tax person disclaimer.

I got a painful reminder of this in the spring.

The RX 570 I had in my build died. I paid around $199 CAD for it.

Retail for an RX 6400 was around double that, and based on benchmarks online, it would have provided worse performance, which is shocking 5 years later.

I sucked up purchasing an RTX 3050 for around $400 since it was at least a performance increase, albeit not very high on the bang for my bucks scale.

you had to buy a video card during the biggest supply crunch of video cards in some time. It's not surprising.

I bought the RX580 (card that i'm still using) at 100 too from ebay few years ago

I will not buy one of these new overpriced cards, hopefully mine will last long enough to see correct prices again

I don't game that much anymore so screw them

I bought a 1060 for 300€ in the mining boom in 2017 and later switched to an RX580 for 100€ (sold and bought). Now I'm thinking of buying a new GPU if the prices are down enough for me to justify it.

The RX580 just isn't enough for my 1440p@144Hz E.g. I had to use FSR 1.0 with Ghostrunner to achieve the 100+ fps I want. And that just doesn't look good enough. For my Steam Deck 40Hz is fine, since I play with joysticks.

That’s roughly equivalent to my aging Nvidia 970, I think and that’s also mostly fine. The price of new cards is still ridiculous afaict.

Ignoring the upside/downside of buying used mining cards, is anyone else purposefully not buying to punish those who hoarded all the GPUs with an inability to profitably exit a commons-harming hustle so they might think twice before trying it again?

If it is commons-harming, it should be addressed by the commons - through politics.

I should be free to use energy as I wish, just that the cost of externalities should be internalized (i.e. taxes for greenhouse emissions should be baked into the price of electricity, or alternatively the fossil fuel used in the first place).

As such, prices would give us a mechanism to judge the TRUE total cost of, say, leaving a light on versus its productivity benefits.

At the moment, you are free to do so, but everyone else is free to think you're a giant pile of cow dung for doing it, and screwing over the planet in the process. Hopefully, the commons will strike bank by cracking down hard on crypto to effectively wipe out any profits and deter future schemes that emerge faster than regulators can stay on top of them.

BTC being portrayed as "bad for the environment" is just as ridiculous as trying to guilt people into buying meat alternatives or electric cars because their way of life is "bad for the environment".

Almost 90% of the world's pollution comes from unregulated factories in China spewing literal tons of waste into the air and water - Nike, Apple, BMW, Adidas, etc factories [0]. If these companies were forced to care about the environment or move manufacturing back into their home countries, the "environmental crisis" would be solved overnight.

But this can't happen because the companies will make less money - so instead they shift the blame onto the consumer: BTC is bad, plastic straws are bad, think about your "carbon footprint" (a term invented by big oil thinktanks to shift blame back onto their customers [1]). Nothing that private citizens do has any impact whatsoever on the environment when compared to the actions of these corporations. Only difference is they have billions of dollars to spend convincing you it's your fault.

[0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...

We get that you're playing cookie clicker with real life money / thousands of dollars of computer hardware but you don't need to act like you're doing the world a service with it. It's inherently wasteful because proof of work is inherently wasteful. All it is, is a massive energy sink for the sole (uncharismatic) purpose of gaming a digital currency's value back and forth to USD for profit. At the very least factories actually produce goods. All crypto produces is speculation, its original existence as a "currency" almost completely vestigial to it's current purpose as cynical gambling chip held in reference to actual hard currency. Also the fact that this is even in the same stratosphere as the world's global manufacturing hub is fucking mortifying, how the hell is that justifyable? How is that not inefficient to the point of lunacy? What does that add to society?

They aren't going to regulate shit, 90% of Congress still calls the computer tower the hard drive. They aren't going to regulate dirty fuels either because whether they produce pollution is now a matter of "opinion" tied inherently to partisan brainrot.

Clicked skip cutscene and got a Series X instead.

Sounds like ESG investing. The dynamics are the same. You want to punish The Bad Guys by withholding something from them, either capital or purchasing dollars. However, doing so creates an imbalance in the markets so they end up getting underpriced, which turns into a transfer of wealth from the people with moral convictions to people without.

People think that if there were no scalpers, that they would be able to get a card at MSRP. But that's completely misguided. They wouldn't be able to get a card at all.

Affordable, widely available, obtainable. In a supply constrained market, you can only choose two of those. Scalpers make it so it's widely available and obtainable. But no other option would help everyone get cards at MSRP.

Most interesting thing about this post is honestly the site. While right now it seems like 90% of the content is created by the founders (every board has only one user posting) the approach is quite interesting and with some tweaks it could be a great platform for some more information focused hobbies.

It's Pinterest meets Fark.

I noticed this too. I hope it has some legs, would be nice to see another competitor in the space.

I hate crypto because now a good graphics card costs as much as a decent cpu/board/ram combined.

Give it 2 months, I'm pretty sure price will drop a lot.

Not for much longer: between the merge, the chip shortage end in sight, and competitors, things are going to get better.

I still find it hard to believe that creating demand for something is bad for its future. Should I hate gamers for driving demand for my consumer card which I buy for machine learning?

Your example isn't the same. The manufacturers wouldn't be able to do enough volume to bring down card prices for AI without gamers. The gamers are actually bringing your price down.

This is a bubble created mostly by crypto that is driving prices up because their demand greatly exceeds supply.

Most of the time, 1 gamer = 1 card; for crypto, it's like a dozen guys run hundreds if not thousands of GPUs. It's basically hoarding a finite resource.

If gamers ever cause GPU stock to be unavailable for literally years and drive prices up to triple their msrp, yes. Then you can be mad at gamers.

While the shortages are real I've bought GPUs during those years, never for even 2x MSRP (though obviously more than MSRP). Prices have also surely increased due to gamers at times (even if less so) without me hating them, and MSRP has clearly been set quite low compared to costs and the past - look at EVGA barely managing to profit by selling at the prices set by NVIDIA which would hardly be due to the increased demand.

At any rate, I'm just not convinced that the extra demand for years isn't good for the GPU industry - e.g. I'd imagine 10 years down the line the GPU industry to be better off in the world in which it had increased demand for years over the world where it didn't. Hell, maybe it even directly helped with scaling up for the increasing ML demand.

"EVGA barely managing to profit

...

Hell, maybe it even directly helped with scaling up for the increasing ML demand."

This makes no sense. Any architecture 10 years in the future would be different and require retooling. It's also yet to be seen what demand ML will even generate in 10 years (it's been all the rage for the last 10 and we're nowhere close to those predictions). The money would be one that I could agree with helping in the future, but similar to what you said profit forecasts are low, so they won't even have that.

EVGA's profits might've been low but as far as I can see NVIDIA's profit and growth has increased significantly since Ethereum launched[0] and money today helps with R&D for tomorrow (and R&D budgets have increased even more).

0. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/revenu...

Sure, but if I remember correctly they are giving shareholder guidance that the future profits look bleak. Again, this is a big bubble mostly caused by crypto.

> At any rate, I'm just not convinced that the extra demand for years isn't good for the GPU industry

The demand disappeared last Thursday night.

It's not about creating demand. It's about creating wild swings in demand AND supply. Miners buy en masse when profitable and sell when not. That's what messes up the market. Gamers won't do that.

You're right. $NVDA went from $2.6B in R&D for FY2019 to $6.3B for FY2022; and they've done a few cloud acquisitions in the meantime. They'll go through a tough period, sales wise, as the market gets flooded with second-hand stuff, but their fundamentals are solid.

Steady demand (ie gamers) is good for making investments into the future. A massive flood of temporary demand (ie crypto) is dangerous. If they make huge investments to be able to meet crypto demand and it disappears in two years, then the manufacturers are overextended (probably on loans); they might go under when the flood abates or they might drive prices down to levels which cannot sustain future investment. The flood of crypto demand also harms their steady market of gamers: witness how much resentment has been expressed toward crypto and Nvidia in this thread.

No, you should thank them for giving constant demand for consumer products. Without them you would be paying enterprise prices for the same cards...

Wait until you see some of the new motherboard prices for AMDs AM5 platform. The top end rivals that of the new graphics cards

RX470 and RX480 are quite nice cards for Linux workstation. Support for 5 displays, and most importantly great opensource drivers. I am buying couple...

Any AMD card is really. RX6600's are 2x as powerful as rx480s, and are approaching 200 dollars. Dunno about their workstation ability though

My PowerColor Fighter RX6600 works completely fine on Ubuntu 22.04. No stability issues at all, and even ROCm works. The GPU itself supports 5 simultaneous displays but the card has only 4 outputs: 3 DP 1.4a and 1 HDMI 2.1

Well, I’m saying it may not perform for workstation workloads as well as nvidia cards, because cuda, but I also dont know how well supported workstation/pro features are with nvidia cards on Linux.

Older kernels may not work with newest AMD cards. Some old Debian stable, CentOS and so on. RX 480 is sure bet!

I picked up an RX580 when restrictions tightened at one point in my country and I decided to build a gaming PC (to play Doom 2016 first and foremost) - cost me what works out to $243 (5999 CZK). It was the cheapest non-bad card I could find at that point, but I timed it well as there were basically no gfx cards around for months and months afterwards. When they started showing up again everything was astronomical in value and sold out quickly.

Nice little card, handled admirably whatever I threw at it (Cyberpunk struggled a little, though).

I got a 1080ti SC2 hybrid (water cooled) for $500 in 2019. Great purchase, has carried me all the way till now.

Honestly haven't really started a new game that pushed it too hard until I upgraded to 144hz.

I’ve been shocked by how long the 1080 has remained a top performing chip, and watched the price increase year after year.

Strange times indeed.

it hasn't been a top performing chip since the 20x0 series came out. It's just been ok for 1080p.

The 1080 is faster than the 2060 and the 2070.

I bought a Titan XP for even less after the 2018 crash (350$) which is basically a faster 1080 ti with a lot more RAM. Still running it to this day and it destroys pretty much everything I throw at it. Watching it go up and up in price during the last few years has been hilarious considering I have been using the thing since 2018 and bought it used to begin with.

2022 is definitely the year for being lied to and gaslight and purposefully confused about pricing and quality.

And overcharging in shops seems to have become commonplace in UK/Ireland

The post seems to be talking about the unbranded Chinese cards. I have never tried those, not sure if it was the same performance/drivers. But in 2019 bought a RX570 on ebay to 150$ and sold it next year for the same. They're a bit cheaper now, but its price range does not allow much change. More expensive cards have more variation

Are there any reliability issues with used mining cards?

AFAIK most miners undervolted their cards to maximise profitability vs. power/cooling requirements. Would applying new thermal paste + replacing fans on the cooler be enough?

> Are there any reliability issues with used mining cards?

Yes.

Specifically, voltage regulators tend - for some reason I am not familar with - wear out and die.

I'd be very careful when buying a second-hand GPU that was used for mining.

> Would applying new thermal paste + replacing fans on the cooler be enough?

Doubtful.

Yes but I have owned several with no issues. I usually will only buy from sellers who have lots of positive feedback. New sellers have nothing to lose.

There's a nice Linus Tech Tips video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKqVvXTanzI

The tl;dw is that used cards don't perform worse than new cards - your card either works, or it doesn't. But like any electronics, they have an "expiration date", and if it's been used for 2 years, it's 2 years closer to dying. It's up to you to decide if the discount of a used card might be worth it.

But what's the bathtub curve on GPUs though?

I'm guessing like most electronics, if they don't break in the first few months, they'll probably last until they're thrown away.

Depends how long until you throw them away.

A bathtub curve needs to come back up, right?

Yes. And when was the last time you had a processor fail, or ram, or motherboard?

I've had one motherboard on a laptop go. And that was due to flexing at the hinge. Everything else was mechanical, and I keep pcs for longer than average. My current laptop is 7 years old I believe.

Everything fails eventually, and I agree, usually once they're a certain age they keep going a while.

How many I've had fail? Or how many I've replaced?

I worked for a few years in a warranty depot doing desktop and laptop repair. I've replaced a lot of parts outside of that first few months.

I keep my stuff around a good long time too.

I replaced a 5 year old GPU in my desktop just this spring. Tossed a desktop motherboard that would no longer POST with known good parts this summer that was probably about 7 years old. A couple of laptops hit the recycle bin last year because their screens stopped displaying a picture, but it wasn't physical damage or the cable. They were probably close to 8 years old.

Stuff happens, as they say.

> The tl;dw is that used cards don't perform worse than new cards - your card either works, or it doesn't.

For electronics, it is often not just "either works, or it doesn't", but there is also decreased reliability (increased rate of random crashes and restarts). We ran many PCs as routers in often inadequate temperature conditions and that was pretty common failure mode.

Was going to say, "it either works or it doesn't" doesn't even match my experience using home routers at obviously tiny scale. Every router needs a reboot sometimes, question is how often. My parents' router is on a lamp timer now to ensure it reboots daily. Amortized like 1 "9" of reliability. A better one maybe gets 3 "9"s.

The "it works or it doesn't" was opposed to "used cards perform worse" (which they don't).

Not necessarily more than any other card. As long as it's been running within component specs (especially temperatures), I wouldn't be worried.

It's obviously been running fine under high loads, so why would it just decide to stop working fine?

I think the major issue is that many cards have been running outside of specs for a long time. High loads tends to increase the risk of that, so the problem lies in figuring out the case for the card you're interested in.

> It's obviously been running fine under high loads, so why would it just decide to stop working fine?

I think most people don't really get how durability works with solid state electronics. It makes sense that a truck used under high loads for 2 years straight is going to show some issues. If I was buying a used tube guitar amp and the seller told me it had been left continously playing a test tone at maximum volume for years I'd assume the tubes and speaker cone are F'd.

The idea of "it's been running fine for 2 years under high load, so that's a good sign it will continue to run" is correct but very unintuitive.

Nonsense. I bought an RX570 in April 2019 and it cost me €210, or about $235.

have a intel mac i9, stable diffusion with openvino take about 5 minutes per prompt.

looking to build a linux machine for stable diffusion, will watch out for good deals for RTX 3090 TI

I think an investigation is needed because I feel like Nvidia and AMD are price fixing, and we're not having a whole lot of luck with competitors in the space.

Trough all 2019, and also in 2020 you could buy a RX470 4GB used for $70 including shipping at Aliexpress...

Haha. I bought a brand new 1050 for one of the kid's builds (For a system that would happily run Minecraft) from eBay. Pretty much a year to the day it suddenly wouldn't be recognised by the Nvidia drivers on booting.

Turned out it had a hacked firmware.

I now only buy my graphics cards from reputable sources..

you bought gts450

is this a link to someone's reddit post lol

I also remember the Riva TNT2 and Vooodoo 2 being released in the late 90s/early-00s for $230-$300. Big prices on video cards are not a new thing.

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