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AMD Radeon RX 500 series graphics cards, particularly the RX 580 and 570, have been out of stock for weeks now owing to the cryptocurrency mining craze. The market had shifted away from GPU mining a couple of years back after several China based companies launched specialized ASICs that were much faster and more power efficient at resolving the block chain equations necessary to mine Bitcoin and Litecoin, the Gold and Silver of cryptocurrencies.
However GPU mining has seen a massive resurgence over the past little while due to the rising popularity of ASIC resistent coins. Chief among which is Etherium which has seen its price more than triple in a matter of months. AMD's Add-In-Board partners have caught on to this and have already started directly advertising to miners.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @12:43PM (15 children)
The idea is to prevent large, deep-pocketed organizations from being the only ones who can afford to providing mining services; that is, the idea is to prevent the centralization of mining.
However, the deeper your pockets, the more GPUs you can buy—the supply of GPUs is exhausted probably because large organizations are buying them up in order to run their mining operations.
Moreover, there is no such thing as "resistance" to ASICs; sure, the algorithm used by Ethereum means that the dedicated ASIC hardware is more expensive to make than similar hardware for Bitcoin, but guess what? That just means that only the large, deep-pocketed organizations will be able to afford such hardware—and such hardware is generally orders of magnitude more performant than GPU-based systems.
There's my 2 satoshis on the matter. (Don't know what that means? Time to start reading!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @01:08PM (8 children)
I still think the whole idea of making computers work in order to "make value" is stupid and wasteful.
you want safe and secure transactions? go work for a bank and fix their stupid systems, and the job is done.
the electricity wasted on these "currencies" would have been so much more useful if it had been used for BOINC or some similar distributed computing thing...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @01:40PM (4 children)
The computers are making value because they are doing the work necessary to secure these payment networks; that is valuable.
Put another way: Before Bitcoin, there was no way that you could have run a 100-million-dollar drug market through a website. Clearly, Bitcoin provides some kind of value that your traditional banks cannot provide.
In short, it doesn't matter whether you personally think it's worthwhile; clearly, a whole bunch of people do think it's worthwhile, and you can either participate profitably in their activities, or you can sit on the side line and become increasingly agitated with their success.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @01:51PM (2 children)
I beg to differ : https://www.cia.gov/careers/opportunities [cia.gov]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @01:57PM (1 child)
Put another way: Before Bitcoin, there was no way that some 20-something, starry-eyed man-child could have even set up a 100-million-dollar illegal-drug market through normal, consumer-grade website infrastructure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @06:14PM
That's true. He'd have to start his own implementation of MySpace at an ivy league school instead.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Wednesday June 07 2017, @05:35PM
Another option is to participate unprofitably.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:56PM (1 child)
crypto currencies and block chain are being used for research, etc. there are coins for that. why are you running your mouth when you can't even be bothered to look through coinmarketcap to see what people are doing with these coins?
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:51AM
Since I was running Folding @ Home anyway I decided to try Curecoin. It looks decent so far, getting a small payout for something I was doing for free anyway.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:14PM
go work for a bank and fix their systems? are you trolling? they're lucky they aren't being bombed and shot! fuck the banks and their systems of usury!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday June 06 2017, @01:39PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:56PM
if it buys time until better ways are developed then it's good enough for me. i'm profitably mining because asics resistant coins exist and it's important to me financially.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:01PM (2 children)
the point is that an asics machine costs thousands and once a coin can be mined with an asics it pushes out the smaller miners. what is so hard to understand about that. yes, with gpus big players can still buy cards but so can the poor bastard with only $250 to spend. with an asics resistant coin, that person can still mine $50 a month with one card until they can buy more cards. if they got a motherboard that can support many cards they can build it out over time until they are making a decent amount of money. with an asics friendly coin they just can't mine that coin at all. and if all coins were asics minable then they can't mine at all. it's really that simple.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:23PM
actually, right now mine are doing like $125 each card a month after the elec bill. $50 was from initial estimates but the price of the coin has gone up a lot since then.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:28PM
Processing power will accumulate around the most successful operations. Decentralization will never result from the fact that Joe Miner can afford to run mining hardware, but rather from the fact that geopolitical considerations will always result in multiple successful operations dotting the planet.
Decentralization results from mutually hateful world powers having to compete with each other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @11:00PM
Well, not exactly. It is not necessarily the case that you can throw money at an ASIC designer to get something that gives orders of magnitude more performance than, say, an off-the-shelf programmable component. Getting good performance with an ASIC requires good utilization of the physical resources on your chip, but also you need to keep your signal paths short otherwise you can't run it very fast. This normally means pipelining and not all problems are amenable to this.
Depending on the problem your super-optimized custom ASIC might just end up looking a lot like a bunch of microcontrollers thrown on a chip with some memory attached. Which starts to look a lot like a GPU. At which point you will probably lose to the guy who decided not to spend any money on ASIC development and instead used that money to buy more off-the-shelf GPUs.