Bitcoin just ended its worst-performing month in seven years in terms of month-over-month price declines. While this is comparing rate of fall and not absolute values, the world of economics is run on rate.
The world’s largest cryptocurrency began November at an average price across exchanges of $6,341, but as of 0:00 UTC on December 1 is trading at just $3,964, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index.
As it stands, the near $2,400 drop in bitcoin’s price has created a -37.4 percent monthly performance, which is its worst on record since August 2011, when it fell from roughly $8 to $4.80 to print a -40 percent monthly loss.
This may have some good impact for PC gamers:
Bitcoin miners hit hard by the cryptocurrency’s crash may be throwing in the towel.
The Bitcoin network’s hash rate, one way of gauging the computing power dedicated to mining the digital currency, dropped about 24 percent from an all-time high at the end of August through Nov. 24, according to Blockchain.com. While the decline may have partially resulted from miners switching to other cryptocurrencies, JPMorgan Chase & Co. says some in the industry are losing money after Bitcoin’s price tumbled.
A big miner shakeout could be bad news for chipmakers including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Nvidia Corp. who supply the industry, along with mining-rig designers like Bitmain Technologies Ltd. that are pursuing initial public offerings.
Related Stories
Digital preservationist, David Rosenthal, has a blog post discussing his recent Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) talk about distributed ledger technology. CNI is a joint initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE to promote the use of digital information technologies to advance scholarship and education. The discrepancy between the available capacity in transactions per second and what is actually needed, plus the excessive power consumption, suggests that many attempted uses for distributed ledgers are inappropriate and counterproductive.
I gave a talk at the Fall CNI meeting entitled Blockchain: What's Not To Like? The abstract was:
We're in a period when blockchain or "Distributed Ledger Technology" is the Solution to Everything™, so it is inevitable that it will be proposed as the solution to the problems of academic communication and digital preservation. These proposals typically assume, despite the evidence, that real-world blockchain implementations actually deliver the theoretical attributes of decentralization, immutability, anonymity, security, scalability, sustainability, lack of trust, etc. The proposers appear to believe that Satoshi Nakamoto revealed the infallible Bitcoin protocol to the world on golden tablets; they typically don't appreciate or cite the nearly three decades of research and implementation that led up to it. This talk will discuss the mis-match between theory and practice in blockchain technology, and how it applies to various proposed applications of interest to the CNI audience.
Below the fold, an edited text of the talk with links to the sources, and much additional material. The colored boxes contain quotations that were on the slides but weren't spoken.
Earlier on SN:
BitCoin's Record Drop may have Started Scaring Miners Away
Cryptocurrency Miners Are Building Their Own Electricity Infrastructure
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday December 03 2018, @01:43AM (19 children)
Bitcoin's value shows all the signs of being a bubble. And unlike the classic bubble, you can't even look at pretty flowers when you're done mining a Bitcoin.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @01:52AM
A deflationary thing which is getting exponentially harder to get with no monetary controls had a bubble?! That is just crazy talk.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @03:30AM (13 children)
How many bitcoin bubbles have you said this about now? Did you also say it during the 32 -> 2 crash, the 250 -> 50 crash, how about the 1000 -> 300 crash?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @04:31AM (12 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @04:52AM (11 children)
Well, I didnt see those values in your link but its probably some sort of average. Id use this:
https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zczsg2010-01-01zeg2012-12-03ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv [bitcoincharts.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @04:32PM (10 children)
You can see it by looking at graphs over the year before January 2018, in the run up to the peak in December 2017 with price listed as a log scale rather than linear scale. Exponential changes then become linear changes. And superexponential growth is then a curve upwards (faster than linear growth). Each of the minor peaks leading up to the big one has a few weeks of superexponential surging as well.
Since that peak, the behavior of the market has completely changed with a significant and consistent exponential decay to present day. This is consistent with a bubble burst.
I think further superexponential surges are unlikely due to the strong capping of the cost of Bitcoin creation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @05:54PM (6 children)
It isn't going to go from zero to infinity vs the USD in a straight line. Instead its a series of ever larger bubble-crash cycles. Each cycle picks up more and more people with new skills and experiences.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @06:16PM (5 children)
There hasn't been a bubble crash cycle since the last one popped last December. Before that, they usually lasted only a few weeks to few months for the full cycle. This "cycle" is a year old, far longer than any that came before. Behavior has fundamentally changed. On the plus side, the exponential decay is promising (though rate is large). A spurt of superexponential decay (that is, falling faster than exponential decay) would indicate very little support for Bitcoin at all, which happens with the end of the worst speculative bubbles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @06:23PM (4 children)
The cycle ends with capitulation, we are close but I haven't really seen it yet. I think tether (and possibly bitfinex) goes down, then the SEC starts looking more favorably on an ETF and youll see it go to ~$130k.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @09:05PM (3 children)
Maybe. Or maybe it'll have dropped another factor of four by December of next year. We'll just have to see what happens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @09:13PM (2 children)
Why not both? Ive had buys at ~$1k waiting to be filled from proceeds of selling at $10-20k. That would seem too good to be true, but I am mostly hoping for a flash crash to those levels which is a bit more likely.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @10:15PM (1 child)
Has that sort of reactive trading been an issue before? I didn't see anything like that on the candlestick graphs and I don't know the state of stop orders and such in Bitcoin markets. Sounds like a good bet to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @10:36PM
Last one was at $5k where (iirc) "china banned bitcoin", so it dropped nearly 40% in a couple days, thus triggering the bull run to $20k.
https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg60zig6-hourzczsg2017-09-05zeg2017-10-04ztgSzm1g10zm2g25 [bitcoincharts.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @07:03PM (2 children)
That chart was the record of trades of btc for usd at the mt gox exchange. That was the main exchange at the time. By variant do you mean the different exchanges?
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @10:10PM (1 child)
That exchange vanished some time ago. At least my link showed Bitcoin from its birth to present. Having said that, my link does show a similar bubble burst to the present one in December 2013, which lasted almost two years till October, 2015. So I agree with whoever was claiming that this sort of behavior has happened before.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @10:41PM
Yes, mt gox is gone. But whatever data you are using must be utilizing the mt. gox data from that era, because that is where 90% of the trades took place.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @11:36AM
They should rename it to tulipcoin or bittulip, to give it a second air.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @03:58PM (2 children)
>you can't even look at pretty flowers when you're done mining a Bitcoin.
You can if you convert the bitcoin to weed. There are exchange services for this sort of thing.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 03 2018, @06:30PM (1 child)
But the thing is, I know multiple people who would be perfectly happy to give me weed in exchange for US currency, with probably a much better weed-per-dollar ratio than mining Bitcoin and then getting somebody in Central America to ship me weed. Acting like dope is something hard to come by doesn't make much sense.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @10:27PM
It gets harder when you have something to lose. For example, any property used in the act of buying weed is at risk in many places (such as Indiana [theusconstitution.org]). Bitcoin plus foreign source probably looks more secure to enough people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @01:44AM (11 children)
You put your life savings into virtual currency, you end up virtually penniless.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @02:13AM (4 children)
...but at least I'm only virtually fiat penniless!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 03 2018, @03:13AM (3 children)
Unless you mined your coins by pedaling on your exercise bicycle, you still have to pay with hard fiat cash for the energy.
The good news is, in case you mined some bitcoins** by using your exercise bike, you should be the winner for the next Tour de France.
** currently, at 556 kWh/transaction [digiconomist.net]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @11:40AM
Perfection Mekanik
Aero Dynamik
Materiel et Technik
Aero Dynamik
Condition et Physik
Aero Dynamik
Position et Taktik
Aero Dynamik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @04:06PM
Not if you hid your miner at work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @05:50PM
So your expended power costs was rolled into your heating bill and costing you nill over running a big resistive load to keep you warm.
Having said that, it hasn't been enjoyable to do that since 2013 which was the last time Bitcoin could be mined with a GPU and earn anything by the end of winter. And many of the alternative coins either are dead ends, or require gpu resources that are not cost effective, since you needed either VRAM, a newer OpenCL standard, or other features to mine. Fine if you upgrade GPUs every 1-2 years, but if you got the right gpus between 2009 and 2011 and don't follow the bleeding edge of games, none of the newer GPUs offered a major GFLOP or TFLOP advantage for mining compared to their cost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @03:22AM (5 children)
Now where will you get your pensions from?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @03:30AM (4 children)
From his parents, may they live forever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @03:46AM (3 children)
It was actually a joke about the younger generations being unable to pay for their parents' pensions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @04:24AM (2 children)
This is what the govt is for, isn't it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @05:14PM (1 child)
And where does the gov get money? Taxing the people. Old people are getting money, young are paying in.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @09:07PM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by stormreaver on Monday December 03 2018, @02:41AM (6 children)
Only about $4,000 more to drop before it comes a bit closer to its real value.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday December 03 2018, @02:59AM (5 children)
As with anything, it is worth exactly what you can get someone to pay for it.
Technically, bitcoin has no value at all
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday December 03 2018, @03:09AM (4 children)
Technically nothing has any "value" at all. "Value" is personal.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @07:57AM (3 children)
If I knew where you live, I would come kick you out of your basement right now. it doesn't really have any value to you, so it's fine if I do it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @03:59PM
Now we don't know that for sure. First sentence states that nothing have value, but then the next sentence says everyone can put any value on whatever they want.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @04:55PM
But the effort of finding out where the grandparent poster lives, the effort of kicking them out, and getting put into jail for assault, kidnapping, theft, etc might have negative value for you. But where you happen to live has no value to me while reading about it in the newspapers has positive value for me. So sure, you go do that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @10:11PM
I modded you Funny because *Your a moran*. You have time, read the entire post... you dumbass :-)
I mean that in the nicest possible way. If you take it otherwise, fuck you! You should take that as a compliment also. If you don't, fuck you twice!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @02:50AM (18 children)
When the federal reserve raises interest rates (ie increases the reserve requirements) banks need to hold more dollars, so the dollar becomes more valuable. The interest rates were kept ridiculously low from 2008-2016 which pumped everything into bubbles, only recently are they finally being raised again: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds [stlouisfed.org]
That is why everything is dropping in price, gas is down 30%, S&P500 down 7%, AAPL down 20%, etc. The money gets sucked out of riskier, more speculative investments first.
This is a good thing for working class people since they have to spend less on stuff like rent and fuel and wages always lag inflation. Groceries should eventually drop too due to cheaper shipping, etc. Is this not obvious?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @03:07AM (2 children)
Is this not obvious?
For anyone who has taken a few macro econ classes, yes. Most people do not think of everything as a market (which is one of the lessons of macro economics). Money has a market, food, housing, employers, employees, etc etc etc. You name it there is a 'market' for that thing. But until you have 'run the graphs' and see how changing interest rates changes the way money is spent. Many people take 1 class of econ and think they 'got it'. So no, unfortunately it is not obvious.
Part of that bauble was access to 'cheap money'. Companies were literally borrowing money at 0% interest rates to pay out dividends and other things. This has made long term market investing 'interesting' as you can not tell which companies borrowed money to build things and which ones just borrowed to keep the dividend high. So expect a shakeout in the next few months of companies that were borrowing to stay afloat (the other I mentioned). I did not expect GM. But here we are.
Think of money as water sloshing around in a big bowl. As the bowl moves around it kind of sticks around something for a bit. Those we call bubbles. but eventually that money sloshes off the sides and comes back into something else. There will be another bubble. Should be interesting to see what it will be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @03:25AM (1 child)
My guess is education, but it will be in a long long time.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @04:38AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @11:43AM (1 child)
Not rents, since they're mostly linked to the mortgage rate, which in turn rises with the base rate.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday December 04 2018, @02:12AM
Yeah, but that's countered by rising mortgage rates usually causing a drop in real estate prices. Man, it's almost like economics is complicated or something.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @12:10PM (1 child)
Why are you confusing overnight interest rates with reserve requirements?? They are completely different things. Might as well start dropping other random words that make no sense together,
"The HIV infection rates is slowing down as the lactic acid production is lowered in the healthy tissue of African snails. Together with the global IQ dimness, the philosophy schema marches on."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @01:31PM
Its not confused, the fed does not directly declare interest rates. Instead they mess with the reserves available or reserve requirements to get banks to change the rates they use.
https://www.thebalance.com/how-does-the-fed-raise-or-lower-interest-rates-3306127 [thebalance.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 03 2018, @06:36PM (8 children)
Even if you use official inflation rates, which folks like ShadowStats think you shouldn't, working-class and middle-class people haven't gotten a real raise since approximately 1978, and the minimum wage peaked in 1968 at just under $10/hr in today's money. The fact of the matter is that the capitalist economy will find a way to ensure that working people's assets remain at or below $0, either by raising costs of basic survival or cutting back on pay.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @06:58PM (7 children)
Ok, but the various government meddling you just mentioned (fed reserve, min wage, 'official' inflation rates) has nothing to do with capitalism.
Like there is nothing really wrong about your description except your need to randomly blame bad stuff the government has done on capitalism. You would be more effective if you kept that one to yourself.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 03 2018, @07:49PM (6 children)
During slavery, the net worth of a slave was nearly always zero. After slavery, but before the institution of the Federal Reserve, the net worth of a working-class person was often below zero and dropping. If they had any wealth, it was in land they'd succeeding in taking from the Natives.
Don't take that from me: Read up on what politicians like William Jennings Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt were saying in that era. Or if you're looking for something a bit more radical, read up on the early union activists, Emma Goldman, or Upton Sinclair.
The idea that it ever didn't suck to be on the bottom of the economic pile is basically a myth. The closest the US came to having real upward mobility was 1945-1965, and even then upward mobility was mostly limited to straight white guys.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @08:28PM (2 children)
Not sure why you care so much about net worth. I know people living very comfortable lifestyles with negative net worth. I live more frugally (in general) but have positive net worth.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 03 2018, @08:53PM (1 child)
Why I focus on net worth:
1. Net worth is an indication of whether people are earning more or less money than they need to stay afloat. If net worth is going up, that means people's standards of living are going up too - for instance, if you have a few months' salary in the bank you can weather a crisis much more easily than someone who doesn't have that.
2. It's an indication of whether personal debts are "good debt" where they get a durable physical asset out of the extra cost of the debt (e.g. a house or car, which counts towards your net worth) or "bad debt" where the debt is spent on stupid stuff or on just paying bills.
3. If you have substantial positive net worth, it can be used to earn more without working for it. If you have substantial negative net worth, then you're losing money with absolutely nothing to show for it. In short, it determines whether capitalism is working for you or against you.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @09:19PM
The 'bad debt' I see around is mostly in the form of student loans. I also wouldnt consider a mortgage or car loan to be a good thing but whatever. Anyway, at least amongst my peers, I see very little effect on quality of life by net worth. That metric is definately missing something.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @09:25PM (2 children)
That's obviously false. A slave had considerable net worth [measuringworth.com]. It was just owned by the slave's owner.
As for the "working-class person" of the Gilded Age, what exactly was supposed to make their value negative to themselves or others? Debt? That has to be borrowed against something and used for something.
It's worth noting that "net worth" which ignores future income is a silly notion for comparing peoples' wealth. There's too many people out who aren't interested in and/or competent in building up net wealth. When one chooses to be poor, that's a terrible reason to call them a slave.
Nor did the Federal Reserve have anything to do with making people's net worth turn out positive. It was never their job.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 03 2018, @10:30PM (1 child)
You are obviously using a different definition of net worth than I am. Net worth is assets you own minus debts you owe, and by your own admission slaves had no assets at all to their name. That would be like saying "I have no money in the bank, no home, and no car, and a payday loan, but my company's CEO has a big house so I'm really rich!"
Post-slavery, a lot of former slaves ended up as sharecroppers, and still owned very little if anything, and were constantly in debt to their landlords who were in many cases their former masters.
Yes, debt. Most farmers were in debt up to and beyond their eyeballs, borrowed against the future value of their crops, to pay for land, seeds, equipment, etc in addition to bare survival. Miners were in debt up to and beyond their eyeballs borrowing against their future work for the company to pay for housing, food, and other basics. Urban factory workers often owed money to landlords and retailers beyond their ability to pay for it, again borrowed against their future earnings and the fact that the landlords couldn't find a new more reliable tenant and/or kick them out just yet.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 04 2018, @02:31AM
Slaves aren't the only people in the world. I already mentioned the slave owner.
Notice that "future" shows up after "borrowed/borrowing". Remember my talk about "future income"?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @09:03PM (1 child)
Gasoline is down massively because of overproduction, particularly by OPEC. Sure, the increase in interest rates will, via the sort of mechanisms you describe, cause some modest decline in gasoline prices, but it doesn't explain a 30% drop. I suspect the same is true of AAPL. Seems too large a drop to explain away with interest rates alone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @09:43PM
The answer is in the next sentence. The things dropping a lot are 'high beta', they also got pumped more than other investments during the 8 years of zirp.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Shire on Monday December 03 2018, @05:39AM (10 children)
> This may have some good impact for PC gamers
If you start seeing a lot of temptingly cheap used 1080ti graphics cards just remember that these things have been driven at 100% capacity (sometimes even harder with OC) nonstop for many months. The VRM's alone are nearing the end of their service life.
That $200 card may seem like a smoking deal but the only smoking will be of the magic blue variety as those chips fail. And don't look to the manufacturer to honor the warranty on a card that has been used for mining.
https://www.pcgamer.com/cryptocurrency-mining-may-void-warranty-on-inno3d-gpus/ [pcgamer.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by MuadDib on Monday December 03 2018, @07:48AM (1 child)
Mining with GPUs hasn't been profitable for several years. Maybe for other crypto but not Bitcoin.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Monday December 03 2018, @03:24PM
In January of this year at the top of the market an Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti was generating $174.82/mo. Hardcore miners had of course moved to ASICs but it's a bit misleading to say that GPU mining hasn't been profitable, just a much slower ROI.
Now that the market has crashed, that's down to under $50/mo so you'll start seeing people jumping ship and trying to cash out on the used cards. That's where my warning comes from.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday December 03 2018, @04:44PM (3 children)
It means,"don't buy used." But if demand falls off and the suppliers don't curtail production (an assumption) then in theory the price of new cards should go down. But the if, don't, and should in that prior sentence much more likely means the graphics card makers keep a very close eye on how much they produce and could cut back production to keep prices up.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Shire on Monday December 03 2018, @04:58PM (2 children)
Nvidia has taken a different tact - the new 2080 gpu's are mostly useless to miners since the RTX side can't be used for crypto. I think they hope to supply the gamers with cards that miners don't want and at the same time making the 1080 cards that are getting dumped onto the market by exiting miners less attractive. One thing is for sure, Nvidia is well aware that the huge boon in chip sales they saw due to mining is over and they've planning for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @06:33PM (1 child)
Apologies in advance for being a grammar nazi as I know unasked for advice is usually not wanted. One takes a different "tack" (nautical term in sailing related to shifting one's sails to alter course when sailing upwind as a metaphor for a change in direction), not a different "tact" (discretion in communication).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @02:17AM
That was rather tactless.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @05:54PM (2 children)
Electronics isn't like a used car. Cooling fans are the only moving parts on a GPU. Running full out is wearing (especially if the fan kicks on and off), but these things can still have a lot of life left in them (after all, they survived so far which is a strong demonstration of fitness). And they are scrapping these because they're no longer profitable, not because the cooling fans sound like a belt sander.
And consider that last paragraph:
There's a lot of financial and ideological incentive to exaggerate the risk of used mining GPUs.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Monday December 03 2018, @06:05PM (1 child)
Mining is hard on the cards VRM's. Heat is the enemy of silicon circuits and when running full bore those regulators get VERY hot. The cards just aren't designed to be driven that hard continuously. If you have ever been around a mining rack you can literally hear the chips whining under load. So no, it's not about the moving parts - fans on these cards are designed to be in motion all time and are actually easy to repair/replace if they do fail. The onboard circuitry however can't sustain that load indefinitely. It's like having a car you drive at 80mph 24 hours a day every day, eventually the engine wear will make itself known. It's not the age - it's the miles that'll kill ya.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @08:38PM
And? They still work. There's electronic Darwinism here. The stuff that survived this long is going to have a higher MTBF (mean time before failure) than the stuff that didn't make it. Sure it'll probably still have a shorter lifespan than a new product which survives warranty, but it's cheap. Cheap covers a lot of ills.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @08:00PM
Gamers tend to run their cards hotter than cryptominers do, but amateurs running NiceHash can fry their cards. It partially-fried my 1080, causing green sparkles in video.
If a used card fully works when you buy it, the part likely to fail after a lot of use is the fans, which can be replaced.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday December 03 2018, @06:15AM
So diminishing profit in mining cryptocurrencies, possibly even below the profitability limit depend on your energy prices etc, I guess that means more cryptojackers installing on other peoples machines that pay for the expensive electricity. After all in the end they never seem to care where the "coins" come from.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday December 03 2018, @04:59PM
... wasn't actually an investment. Just for the fun of it I bought some Bitcoin and then some Bitcoin Cash right around last Christmas and then transferred chunks of the balance to paper wallets that I gave away as Christmas presents. (Congrats! You now own BTC or BCH - Merry Christmas! along with an explanation of them). Not large amounts (though I learned the ultra-hard way about Bitcoin fees because it was when they were peaking), just enough for fun - it was actually cheap Christmas presents. When I was done I had a pittance amount left over in both wallets (under $10 altogether) and just let them ride on Coinbase instead of transferring them to paper. I didn't quite buy at the peak, but within days of it.
I just went back today to look at it. My Bitcoin "investment" is now worth 17% of what I paid for it, and my Bitcoin Cash "investment" is now worth 20% of what I paid for it.
In related news, I have been told that I should in fact hold on to my Continental currency because the U.S. may actually be successful and also to buy on Confederate money for the South shall rise again, also!
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @05:29PM
i'm glad it's dropping. this culls the shameless and clueless windows users with their nvidia cards and drops the difficulty for miners that are in it for the right reasons. the advancement of privacy coins like monero. all the bankster slaves who love to talk shit about cryptocurrency are pitiful bitches.