CryptoCurrency Mining with GPUs *spawn*

The biggest risk to ETH miner is "money laundering", a lot of debit cards had been asset freezing in China .

 

I guess one could take eth hashrate increase and then estimate how many gpu's are being added daily/monthly/weekly. It seems hash rate keeps going up. If one would assume all newly added hashing comes from new gpu's that would give estimate on how many new gpu's miners are buying. Likely this is not quite true but would give "worst case" for how many new gpu's miners are hording.



https://etherscan.io/chart/hashrate

 

Dont forget asics for ethereum are a thing now.

 

Bitmain can't scale their reserved fab time quickly, but GPUs are always available and good enough ... that's the problem.

At least the Ethereum developers seem to have been scheming a bit and planned to release PoS much sooner than planned but kept it under their hats to make it harder for miners to organize revolt (or hire hitmen for that matter, these kinds of markets don't attract the nicest of people). GPUs are likely to become very cheap indeed sometime this year if the Ethereum mining market crashes with no survivors.

 

With Bitmain it's never that simple. They seem to have surprising leverage on the Chinese-based manufacturing plants at least.
But they benefit from selling a limited number of ASICs to their customers. If they've sold more, they would need to reduce the sale price as the profit one unit brings will diminish. And again, Bitmain being Bitmain, it's very likely they keep part of the hardware for themselves

 

The idea that POS is coming soon in 2021 is not from Ethereum developers but from Ethereum Financial Investors.

 

Proof of stake sounds pretty interesting as a concept. Crypto mining never made much sense to me in terms of scaling and energy efficiency.

 

The investors might embellish the odds of it happening, but there's been some major rumblings among devs recently ... including mentioning a 2021 merge.

Not making it dependent on sharding is a huge change which will have spooked the miners.

 

That's true, but to be fair it has to start somewhere. At the very beginning of the Bitcoin idea, people wouldn't trust a PoS system. It probably has to start as a PoW system.
Even today with some large semi-PoS system such as Tron or BSC, there are many people claiming that "Tron is completely controlled by Justin Sun (its founder)" or "BSC is completely controlled by Binance" etc. This shows that it can be hard to won some people's trust.
The ETH 2.0 PoS system is, of course, likely to be much more decentralized than both Tron or BSC. How well it'll work remains to be seen, of course, but I hope it goes well so we can all have a very decentralized yet cheap to use system.

 

@pcchen people building 1500W mining rigs at home because energy is cheap (if you ignore climate change) just was always a non starter for me in terms of supporting crypto. I’m definitely going to follow eth2 and see how it goes. I have a small fraction of ETH just from figuring out how mining works (not that interesting to set up). It’s really more the financial side that’s complex and interesting. I was able to get around 96 gash rate on my 3080 at 70% power limit keeping memory junction temp at 92-94. I’m still sceptical about the life of my gpu doing that long term, so on top of my bias against proof of work in general I didn’t find mining interesting enough to keep going.

 

PoS has a lower barrier of entry, but it's also relatively simple to own a large part of the of the stake - just buy more coin

With PoW otoh it becomes increasingly difficult to increase one's share because it would always need to be backed by physical footprint (land, buildings, infrastructure, personnel)

 

yah I’m guessing the worry is people buying up large stakes and lowering decentralization.

 

https://kotaku.com/smuggled-nvidia-cards-found-after-high-speed-boat-chase-1846639727

 

That's a very miami vice like scene. crypto gpu's are the new snow.

 

The amount of energy I use at home for mining is just a fart in the wind to climate change. In fact some of my mining is powered by our solar setup. Your video card wont die quicker with your memory junction temps at 92-94. At default settings while gaming my MJT will hit 108 on my 3080. So me getting my MJT down to 90ish will be fine.

For me I mine on a 3080/ vega 56 rig and since I restarted at the beginning of February have pulled in $750 to my wallet and have another 167.85 pending a payout (hive os pays out when you get to .1 eth and I'm at .08131 right now) My vega 56 was purchased launch day what 3 or 4 years ago now ? I forget when they released for $375. I got my money's worth and my wife has been using it since i upgraded as it was better than the 2300g intergrated gpu. My 3080 cost me $800 after shipping back in Nov so I've already paid for the card if something was to go wrong. We actually just bought a 3070 from microcenter for $800 yesterday. I expect with the 3 cards mining that it will be paid off by some point in June. I think I will have roughly 200MH/s of power. Should be good for roughly $15 after power a day. Or $450 every 30 day span. I still game on my 3080 and my wife will game on the 3070 (she games a lot less) so It may be a little less than that depending on how much i am able to game. But to us thats fine and if it goes up it will be even better.

I think your leaving a lot of money on the table that the gpu could be making you

 

@eastman Each individual's share of the power is not really the problem to me, it's the aggregate, and the fact that most crpto doesn't scale well. The bigger the blockchain, the harder it is to mine, so you have to throw more and more power at the problem. I'm not an expert on the subject, but I know global power consumption for crypto is immense. I believe i read something that said Bitcoin was equal to the power consumption of Austria. My individual gpu is not going to be the straw that broke the camel's back, but I just didn't have interest in something that didn't seem to have interested in scaling efficiently. It's true that not all energy is equal though. If you're on renewable energy or nuclear, it's a different story than if you're energy comes from coal or natural gas.

 

If you apply that logic across everything in your life you will live in a small log cabin with no power or heat and no electronic devices of any kind. Good luck

 

I'm relatively certain a zero sum investment bubble, increased power consumption, diversion of GPUs and a massive increase in malware has not had a positive impact on median standards of living.

At least with PoS the malinvestment in electrical power and GPUs goes away.

 

Can I run it in a vm? Does the performance hit a lot?

 

Yah, if I were ever to start again I'd want to do some more research on best practices. Either a bootable linux usb (could I undervolt) or a secured VM would be nice. For windows 10 mining I'm thinking even a separate account without admin privileges might be a good idea, but probably couldn't undervolt with afterburner in that case. Just not sure how safe mining software is if you're using the PC as a multi-purpose machine.