CryptoCurrency Mining with GPUs *spawn*

[BRiT]

To continue on with the story, with no surprises to anyone ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47454528

The wallets have been found to be empty.

The discovery was made by a firm appointed to oversee QuadrigaCX after the death of founder Gerald Cotten.

It expected to find the wallets full of C$180m ($137m; £105m) in crypto-cash deposited by the coin exchange's customers.

...

Its investigation has secured access to Mr Cotten's laptop but also revealed that the digital wallets had been cleaned out months before he died.

...

However, the company said, it found evidence that Mr Cotten had 14 other user accounts "created outside the normal process" that may have been used to trade on the QuadrigaCX exchange.

 

[Bludd]

So it was a bitcoin ponzi scheme? A ponzi inside a pyramid? As we all know the pyramid is inside the God of Wasted Energy.

 

[BRiT]

So is bitcoin mining with GPUs now passe or are new products still fit for use?

 

[entity279]

slowly recovering . Probably @ around 50% of the peak capacity of mid 2018

(I asume youd don't literaly mean mining Bitcoin with gpus, which is no longer a thing since 5 years or more)

(and btw, Radeon VII with its great bandwith is two times as good in mining ethereum as a Vega 64 -80+ mhs. But probably not worth it with all the second hand inventory for the cheap available )

 

[BRiT]

I did mean Crypto Mining with GPUs. I was under the (mistaken) impression that the GPU market was still impacted as recently as 15-18 months ago from Crypto-consumers. It could just as easily have been longer since the PC GPU market was impacted as I haven't been tracking the timeline with Sam and Ziggy.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Appreciate the info, thought it was a good question and good answer. I wondered if bitcoin mining was still a thing at all let alone with GPUs. I figure they're using dedicated stuff by now, or are they using a ton of older hardware?

 

[entity279]

The issue with the dedicated stuff (ASICs) is that is harder to justify going through design - manufacturing - marketing cycles as there's likely less turnover for the Bitmains of this world. At most, if they have chips in the pipeline they'd use it to mine themselves. They had released newer Bitcoin & Litecoin ASICs lately thogh. Prolly not in massive volumes. The Ethereum ASIC that Bitmain made (the E3, iirc ) was discontinued. They gave that up and apparently there were reliability issues with the units they sold as well.

I presume old hardware GPUs and ASICs can be had for very little now. As the overall mining capacity is down by a lot (50% of 2018, or even more) , clearly no one is using a ton of miners anymore. I think the miners that are still active simply have very cheap or free electricity .
Anectodatlly, I've sold one of my rigs to a person which had excess solar power. With the laws in my country, it's very hard to sell that power directly . So mining with it is a good solution

 

[digitalwanderer]

Thanks Entity279, appreciate the update on the state of the scene.

 

[green.pixel]

I did mean Crypto Mining with GPUs. I was under the (mistaken) impression that the GPU market was still impacted as recently as 15-18 months ago from Crypto-consumers. It could just as easily have been longer since the PC GPU market was impacted as I haven't been tracking the timeline with Sam and Ziggy.

But it is, only this time positively for the gamer on a budget, since there is a glut of cards on the used market.

Btw, who are Sam and Ziggy? From Quantum Leap series?

 

[BRiT]

Yes, from Quantum Leap.

 

[BRiT]

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2019/12/16/technology/16reuters-crypto-currencies-quadriga.html

Investors Seek Exhumation of Canadian Crypto Currency Firm Founder to Ensure It's Him

Lawyers representing users of the Canadian digital platform QuadrigaCX have asked police to exhume the body of its founder, whose sudden death last year trapped millions of dollars in digital currencies in its accounts, to make sure it's him.

Gerald Cotton died in December 2018 while traveling to India due to complications from Crohn's disease. The 30-year-old was the only person with access to passwords for the digital wallets holding some C$180 million ($135 million).

In the wake of his death, QuadrigaCX, which had about 115,000 users, was unable to locate or secure a significant amount of cryptocurrency reserves.

Cotten's widow, Jennifer Robertson, has said in her affidavit she has received online threats and "slanderous comments", including questions about the nature of Cotten's death, and whether he is really dead.

 

[BRiT]

I haven't been following or seeing anything in the tech news related to bitcoin outside of the hackers stole $X millions or the cryptoware extortion stories.

Is anything happening in this space?

 

[iroboto]

no major news I don't think, things pretty much followed what happened in local markets since COVID.

 

[entity279]

Is anything happening in this space?

Short answer : yes.

But depends on your definition of `anything happening` and `this space`

There are a few big technical changes reaching real-world (read : mainnets) experimentation phase

 

[BRiT]

Oh, what is this mainnets?

I saw something about the reward for bitcoin solving being cut in half upcoming. What is that about? Can they do that at any time or is it driven by compute power?

 

[pcchen]

Oh, what is this mainnets?

I saw something about the reward for bitcoin solving being cut in half upcoming. What is that about? Can they do that at any time or is it driven by compute power?

It's scheduled by block number, basically every 210,000 blocks. So the first halving event was at block 210,000 (in Nov 2012), and the second halving event was at block 420,000 (in July 2016).
The next event will be at block 630,000, which is expected to be around mid May 2020.

In theory, it's possible to change the schedule if most people mining bitcoin agrees to migrate to the new one. However, if even a non-significantly small number of people decided to keep on the original schedule (and refuse to change their mining software), it will create a "fork" (e.g. the Bitcoin Cash thing).

 

[entity279]

The main net is simply the respective blockchain's network as opposed to test networks which are used for development & tests. So features available in main net are usable by all of us (though that doesn't say much about the actual adoption rate )

Bitcoin halving is baked into the protocol as explained above. Periodic halving happens b.c. the 'goal' of Bitcoin is to have a finite ammount of coins so that (hopefully) this scarcity would prevent its value from decreasing (this would result in effectively negative inflation as some coins will keep getting lost).

But the actually interesting things hapening in the space are DeFi platforms, stablecoins that are not potential scams (*cought* Tether *cought*) and the realease of ETH 2.0 due this summer

Also personally as a real world application I've been using Siacoin for the last 2-3 years to back up terrabytes of data with redundancy & encryption at prices well bellow Amazon S3 and the likes

 

[pharma]

Bitcoin goes through third 'halving', falls vs U.S. dollar
May 11, 2020

Bitcoin slid on Monday in volatile trading, after it went through a technical adjustment that reduced the rate at which new coins are created, but the outlook remained upbeat as the increase in supply slows down.
...
Monday’s “halving” cuts the rewards given to those who “mine” bitcoin to 6.25 new coins from 12.5. The next halving will be in 2024.
...
“The incentive is less for miners now to mine bitcoin and they will probably switch to more profitable cryptocurrencies. So in the short term, there’s going to be pressure for bitcoin,” said Edward Moya, senior market analyst at OANDA in New York.

“But longer term, you’re probably going to see higher prices. With all the fiscal and monetary stimulus that’s being pumped into the global economy, there’s renewed interest from institutional traders looking for alternatives to modern government-backed currencies.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-bitcoin-halving/bitcoin-goes-through-third-halving-falls-vs-u-s-dollar-idUSKBN22N2X8?

 

[pharma]

Bitcoin Hits New Record, This Time With Less Talk of a Bubble

The crazy cousin of traditional currencies, which fell below $4,000 in March, passed $19,783. More investors now are buying it for the long term.

Nearly three years after it went on a hair-bending rise and hit a peak of $19,783, the price of a single Bitcoin rose above that for the first time on Monday, according to the data and news provider CoinDesk. The cryptocurrency has soared since March, after sinking below $4,000 at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic.

While those questions remain, Bitcoin is now being fueled by a less speculative fever. Buyers — led by American investors, including companies and other traditional investors — are treating Bitcoin as an alternative asset, somewhat like gold, according to an analysis from the data firm Chainalysis. Rather than quickly trading in and out of it, more investors are using Bitcoin as a place to park part of their investment portfolios outside the influence of governments and the traditional financial system, Chainalysis and other industry firms said.

“It’s a very different set of people who are buying Bitcoin recently,” said Philip Gradwell, the chief economist at Chainalysis, which analyzes the movement of cryptocurrencies. “They are doing it in steadier amounts over sustained periods of time, and they are taking it off exchanges and holding it as an investment.”

Bitcoin Climbs to Record High - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

 

[pharma]

This GeForce RTX 3080 Ethereum mining rig now makes $20K per month - VideoCardz.com
January 4, 2021

TechARP who posted a new photo of the mining system already in operation were quick to calculate how much virtual money could such a system actually generate. Assuming that the price of RTX 3080 is somewhere in the 699 to 1199 USD space, the cost of the whole rig is estimated 100K USD.

According to Minerstat, each RTX 3080 graphics card can generate between 6.35 USD and 9.15 USD a day (that’s including electricity cost and assuming today’s Ethereum pricing). This means that the whole system can generate between 15K to 21K USD a month. What this means is that the cost of all 78 RTX 3080 cards will be covered in 6.6 months in the worst-case scenario but assuming that ETH price won’t change and that seems hard to predict.

The pricing of cryptocurrency has changed so rapidly in the past few weeks that the article at TechArp calculates a return of investment at 9.7 months. This is now much more as GPU mining profitability has increased.