GameboyRMH said:Turns out that industrial-scale mining is still profitable at these prices, and as such, energy usage has continued to climb unabated:
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/18/16901422/bitcoin-price-crash-energy-emissions
China's crackdown may have the helpful side effect of moving the mining operations away from the coal power plants.
That article made me feel a lot less guilty about the energy I use for messing with cars.
Since this has become our official cryptocurreny thread, I thought was pretty funny (via CNBC via Google News)
AMD, Nvidia must do more to stop cryptominers from causing PC gaming card shortages, price gouging
I'm not sure I understand the arguments here. The author is advocating for capital expenditures on the part of AMD and Nvidia or quantity controls on the part of retailers so he, and those like him, have better access to a gaming card who are suffering a shortage and driven up resale prices by cryptocurrency? Who at AMD or Nvidia cares who is buying the cards? What matters to them is that there won't be excess capacity when crypto mining eventually crosses the threshold of break even. With the way things have been they may not even have time to amortize those costs before the market dips below that threshold which would really put them in a bind.
I understand game developers frustration (maybe sort of but I feel like AAA game development is way out of control already) but it isn't THAT hard to get an upper end card if you set a price alert.
First world problems at their finest. (I has a sad that I can't buy a card capable of playing World of Warships @ 100fps and in 4k right now and it's going to last FOREVER!1!111!!! /s)
The shortages only affect the very top-of-the-line video cards, it's as irrelevant to me as Ferrari parts prices 
(I guess I'm the PC equivalent of a Superlite Coupe guy?)
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I'm the same way. Hardly anything I play would utilize those upper end cards and the realistic gains of stepping into the highest tier of cards is basically like an audiophile attempting to explain to me why a set of Sennheiser Orpheus's are better than my Sennheiser 6XX's. Yea I'm sure there's charts, graphs and metrics but you eventually reach a point where you're splitting hairs.
I still primarily utilize a several year old ATI card that returns more than enough performance to meet my needs (primarily a love of JRPG's)
There's also that minor detail about foundries having enough capacity to produce the chips for this expanded theoretical expanded production. I know for a fact that there already isn't enough capacity to go around. I suspect that's the difference between being a news outlet "subject matter expert" and actually dealing with it while living in the real world.
I just read an "ELI5" (explain like I'm 5) article about crypto mining, and I failed to understand how and why it works like I was 2.
Is anyone here actively trading, or are we just speculating from the sidelines?
I've found this entire phenomenon to be massively entertaining on many levels.
Have you seen the fascinating social experiment that is powhcoin.com (Power of Weak Hands)? Love it.
In reply to Duke :
The short version: It's a distributed ledger and you get a payout in the form of "coins" for contributing processing power. It's a system where no one trusts anyone so, in theory, everyone keeps a record of any data, transactions, or records that alter the current state of the blockchain in an attempt to keep everyone honest. For Bitcoin the coins are doled out in a time phased schedule based on your contribution.
There's a few uses for it like identity management and possibly banking applications but, again, if you control 50% of the processing power the blockchain is whatever you say it is. So you are really relying on a whole mess of people to contribute processing power. 3 or 4 entity private blockchains for maintaining bank ledgers have trouble written all over them.
I can appreciate the uses for it but I'm still not convinced it's the next technological frontier.
The0retical said:There's a few uses for it like identity management and possibly banking applications but, again, if you control 50% of the processing power the blockchain is whatever you say it is. So you are really relying on a whole mess of people to contribute processing power. 3 or 4 entity private blockchains for maintaining bank ledgers have trouble written all over them.
I can appreciate the uses for it but I'm still not convinced it's the next technological frontier.
Even those other uses for blockchain technology might not pan out. First, it only makes sense to use it where there is a trust problem:
https://www.multichain.com/blog/2016/03/blockchains-vs-centralized-databases/
And then there's the incredible inefficiency of it. Energy use could render an otherwise great application for it impractical (and IMO, immoral).
There are two really good non-cryptocurrency uses for blockchain technology that I can think of, one is notary services and the other has to do with computer security but I won't say exactly what because it would make me too interesting to the TLAs (there's no money in that though).
Thanks for the info. So, basically, it's like SETI, except you get paid in micro-bits of cryptocurrency? Is it really worthwhile? I guess that depends on the market.
Duke said:Thanks for the info. So, basically, it's like SETI, except you get paid in micro-bits of cryptocurrency?
It is sort of like SETI@Home that pays you in cryptocurrency, but instead of searching for alien signals, the work your computer is doing is trying to build the next cryptographically secure chunk of the distributed ledger, which basically amounts to a lot of brute-forcing (repeated guessing).
In updates on the regulatory crackdowns, South Korea will require the same identifying information for cryptocurrency trading as that used on a bank account, and in a sudden localized outbreak of normalcy, India has decided to ban the trading of cryptocurrencies entirely.
Edit: Looks like India's not going for a complete ban, but rather requiring identifying information, like SK:
So perhaps not an outbreak of normalcy, but at least an outbreak of common sense.
Duke said:Thanks for the info. So, basically, it's like SETI, except you get paid in micro-bits of cryptocurrency? Is it really worthwhile? I guess that depends on the market.
Honestly, BOINC projects like SETI@Home or Folding@Home are a much better use of idle resources IMO as they provide a potential path forward for science and humanity as a whole. Blockchain techs right now are a neat experiment cryptographic experiment at best and a way to legitimize dark money at worst.
I know that sounds vicious but my views on the libertarian ideal decentralized currencies clad themselves in and the regulations on capitalism they seek to avoid have evolved a bit over the last 10 years.
^On that note, yesterday I started my computer with "free" power on BOINC WCG. It's powered by a hydroelectric dam and power is included in a fixed annual fee. Here's where I got so far:
Edit: Also there's no such thing as "idle resources" anymore due to the efficiency advances of modern CPUs. It was true in the Pentium 3 and earlier days - in those days, an idle CPU drew exactly the same amount of power as a CPU running flat-out. It was the equivalent of having your engine running with the throttle wide open at all times and slipping the clutch to regulate power. These days, power usage scales just about perfectly with resource usage.
The big energy usage you see with Bitcoin comes from the "proof of work" approach used when building the next block. There's nothing inherent in blockchain technology that requires proof of work as there are other ways to handle the distribured block generation in a reasonably secure way with less energy usage.
I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the idea of how having a computer do complex computations is supposed to generate some sort of value. What are the calculations? What is the reason for doing them?
This article generally explains it, but it still seems a bit like smoke and mirrors to me...
Ian F said:I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the idea of how having a computer do complex computations is supposed to generate some sort of value. What are the calculations? What is the reason for doing them?
This article generally explains it, but it still seems a bit like smoke and mirrors to me...
The calculations are something like brute-forcing a hash value that's predicted for the next block. The value is that it confirms cryptocurrency transactions and keeps that blockchain going. The reason for doing them is that you couldn't do cryptocurrency transactions without them.
Ian F said:I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the idea of how having a computer do complex computations is supposed to generate some sort of value. What are the calculations? What is the reason for doing them?
This article generally explains it, but it still seems a bit like smoke and mirrors to me...
Yeah, the more I learn, the stupider I feel.
GameboyRMH said:Ian F said:I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the idea of how having a computer do complex computations is supposed to generate some sort of value. What are the calculations? What is the reason for doing them?
This article generally explains it, but it still seems a bit like smoke and mirrors to me...
The calculations are something like brute-forcing a hash value that's predicted for the next block. The value is that it confirms cryptocurrency transactions and keeps that blockchain going. The reason for doing them is that you couldn't do cryptocurrency transactions without them.
And when all 21 million Bitcoin have been mined, then what?
There seems to be some debate as to whether transaction fees will be enough to cover the costs of the calculations. Right now, they seem to be counting on the costs of the calculations coming down, but the question of who does the calculations is still something of an unknown. Crypto for dummies Pt 2.
How value is established and stabilized for the real world is still a bit of a wildcard.
Once all bitcoins are mined, there will be no more reward for mining, which will still be necessary for performing cryptocurrency transactions. At that point, you'll have to pay someone for mining - the reward structure will have to be replaced by something artificial outside of the system to keep it from grinding to a halt. What this would probably mean in the real world is that cryptocurrency exchanges would pay commissions to some of the big mining companies in return for their continued operation.
But I don't think that's how bitcoin will end. Even without the threat of a regulatory crackdown hanging over all cryptocurrencies, ever-increasing transaction fees caused by the ever-dimininshing mining reward mathematically guarantee that bitcoin will be slowly choked to death by its own transaction fees, a process that we're already seeing the beginnings of. Realistically, if the last coin is ever mined, it will be by some bored hacker taking on a retrocomputing project sometime in the future with a vastly more powerful computer. Maybe some old folks will be around to say "Hey I remember the hype around that stuff when I was a kid!"
Its intrinsic value is zero and there is nothing stabilizing it. A bitcoin has no potential use other than storing or transferring value, and it's worth whatever people think it's worth.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
The current prediction of when the last coin will be mined is somewhere in 2140 based on the current computational power in play and the expected growth rate of that power. It'll probably require the equivalent of the energy death of the universe to mine the last coin but there will be some HODL shiny happy person insisting it's worth it 
GameboyRMH said:Its intrinsic value is zero and there is nothing stabilizing it. A bitcoin has no potential use other than storing or transferring value, and it's worth whatever people think it's worth.
Gee does that sound familiar
The0retical said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
The current prediction of when the last coin will be mined is somewhere in 2140 based on the current computational power in play and the expected growth rate of that power. It'll probably require the equivalent of the energy death of the universe to mine the last coin but there will be some HODL shiny happy person insisting it's worth it
Oh I don't think it'll be that long:
Whoa the market didn't take the India news well:
http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/01/investing/bitcoin-price-drop-february/index.html
The thing I always wonder with Bitcoin and similar....
If I had 100,000,000 US dollars worth of bitcoin on Dec 20, 2017, would someone have actually stroked me a check for a cool hundred mill? How about today? Is anyone confident enough to hold a lot of it bought at market price? Or is everyone who holds large volumes of bitcoin people who got in cheap and now can't dump it because no one will cash them out?
In reply to 93gsxturbo :
Would have to dump them at below market value.
You'll need to log in to post.
