CryptoCurrency Mining with GPUs *spawn*

[Gubbi]

It's necessary for the chain to function ... but you're putting the cart before the horse by saying more mining will blow up a coin. A coin which is blowing up in value will cause more mining, not the other way around.

There is a feedback mechanism here, it's not a simple causal dependence.

Miners are rewarded in the coin they mine, that means you get the currency in more hands. A miner can either cash out, spend or hold the coin they earned. The first option results in a negative pressure on the currency, the latter two in a positive pressure.

Pool owners and hardware vendors' revenue scale with the number of miners, so they have a vested interest in propping up a currency. You went full crypto to not live under the tyranny of the FED or ECB? Well, welcome your new central bank: Bitmain.

Cheers

 

[entity279]

No, but performing a transaction on the Ethereum network costs.

Cheers

I think this answer might be misleadling (while technically correct) - when mining in a pool the only transaction that happens is when you get payed by the pool into your account.
Some pools (at least used to) pay it themselves for you or others allow you to accumulate a significant ammount of coin befor they make the transaction, so that the tx cost becomes negligible by comparison

 

[Arwin]

I haven't followed this thread closely, but mining is a considerable energy waster. What would be the alternative here that stops making cryptocurrency currently such a lousy deal for the environment?

 

[BRiT]

I haven't followed this thread closely, but mining is a considerable energy waster. What would be the alternative here that stops making cryptocurrency currently such a lousy deal for the environment?

Proof of Stake.

 

[MfA]

A miner can either cash out, spend or hold the coin they earned. The first option results in a negative pressure on the currency, the latter two in a positive pressure.

Spending is cashing, and more miners does not result in more coins being mined, it just results in reduced mining rewards per miner. The new group of miners will have the exact same amount of coins to play around with as the old group of miners and they will do the exact same thing with it too, immediately cash.

If more than a couple percent of Ethereum GPU miners jump into mining other coins, all the miners in those coins will start losing money ... and none of them want to lose money, so it's not going to happen.

Shelving or selling, those are the options. Only the latter creates profit.

 

[Rootax]

I haven't followed this thread closely, but mining is a considerable energy waster. What would be the alternative here that stops making cryptocurrency currently such a lousy deal for the environment?

Time ? Mining for eth will kind of stop soon. For BTC&co, most countries are moving to cleaner energy anyway. Asics are more and more efficient, algo can change to help that too...
At the end of the day yes it uses energy, but it's not considered a waste by everyone, especialy if you see some crypto networks as replacement for other existing solutions in finances and other domains. Now it's kind of a mess, but it's not the final state of this field. PCs use more power than typewriters. Luckily we know how to produce more energy as time pass too.

 

[orangpelupa]

My gpu was hotter and hotter when mining, turns out the fan is problematic. It now rattles heavily above 50% speed. For gaming it's not noticeable as the fan speed is lower but runs hotter. I set it to 72c max for mining

I wonder how long the rma process will take...

 

[entity279]

I haven't followed this thread closely, but mining is a considerable energy waster. What would be the alternative here that stops making cryptocurrency currently such a lousy deal for the environment?

I will leave out Proof os Stake as it's been already mentioned. Further, I don't think Proof of Stake is coming to most of the coins, not any time soon. The teoretical & engineering foundations for PoS are still being develped, and when it will come for ETH it will be an achievent, and it will make ethereum a pioneer of PoS.

Fundamentally I think it's up to the market (i.e. all of us!) to minimise mining energy consumption. Transfering assets without need of intermediaries, without being able to be censored by anyone certainly has intrinsic value. However, it's not concievable that this is worth say 10% of the planet's power. The market should instead lead the price to the correct value, given time (in fact, that's the job of the market).
Say the price of Ethereum drops to $200 and Bitcoin to $2000. Over night, none of the miners will be profitable now. 90% of them will just have to quit. So with these prices, mining will suddenly just use 10% of the power it consumed previously.
The coins themselves can also (more subtely) influence this, and they are in the case of Ethereum. If they feel miners are too incentivized, reducing block rewards and mining fees are tweeks they can attempt, without waiting for the market.

There are further tweaks possible for proof of work coins. A better control of the mining hardware is something that can have an impact. I'm looking at SIA for this, they create their own ASIC to mine the coin, and they can sell limited quantities of it to interested parties. They are in the position also to favor the distribution of hardware evenly to miners.
So the mining being migrated further towards ASICs would help as well. Being able to switch at will between coins is only helping GPUs and CPUs to mine continously, drawing power continously.
With ASICs there should be a much limited choice of coins, so one would think twice before buying a single - purpose piece of hardware, which depends on unstable prices. Also not being a consumer mass market product, it should be easier to control who purchases it and in what quantities

 

[MfA]

If Ethereum 2.0 succeeds its mere existence will be an existential danger to Bitcoin, it will accentuate Bitcoin's flagrant wastefulness. A black cloud hanging over Bitcoin ... and in a business entirely concerned with appearance, that's bad for business.

Hydro has limited availability, every hydro joule Bitcoin consumes is a joule not replacing fossil fuel somewhere else in the economy ... all the other renewables don't have 24/7 availability and Bitcoin mining hardware does run 24/7. Pretending Bitcoin can run on clean energy or drive clean energy adoption is either (self-)deluding, idiotic or exceptionally naive and just swallowing propaganda without thinking.

I suspect major Bitcoin miners and mining ASIC developers will fund exploit discovery for Ethereum 2.0 to try to sink it.

 

[Gubbi]

I haven't followed this thread closely, but mining is a considerable energy waster. What would be the alternative here that stops making cryptocurrency currently such a lousy deal for the environment?

Ethereum and Bitcoin (and others) uses proof of work, where all miners compete in creating a valid block. To ensure blocks are mined at roughly the right frequency a difficulty parameter is used to increase the amount of work before a block is found. With thousands or millions of miners it becomes incredible wasteful (criminally so, IMO).

Ethereum intends to change to proof of stake, where a miner commits to being available to the network by putting forward a stake (I believe it is suggested to be 3 eth, ~$20.000 at current prices). A small set of miners are then chosen at random by the network to mine a block. A different set of miners are chosen at random to validate the work. If a miner cannot fulfill their commitment to the network they lose (part of) their stake. This has two advantages:

1.) The number of miners doing actual work on a block is cut from all of them to a few ten to hundreds. The number needs to be high enough to ensure against fraud (when all miners/validators of a block belongs to the same organization), but this is fairly trivial
2.) Since the network picks who and when to mine a block, they can lower the difficulty parameter. Remember the only function the difficulty parameter has is to stabilize the frequency at which valid blocks are generated. When a Raspberry Pi can mine a block in milliseconds, the need for ASICs and GPUs disappears.

If Ethereum succeeds in doing this, the average energy consumption per transaction will drop from the current 80kWh to a few tens of joules, ~ six or seven decimal orders of magnitude less.

Cheers

 

[Gubbi]

If Ethereum 2.0 succeeds its mere existence will be an existential danger to Bitcoin, it will accentuate Bitcoin's flagrant wastefulness. A black cloud hanging over Bitcoin ... and in a business entirely concerned with appearance, that's bad for business.

Bitcoin is the digital equivalent of gold.

Almost all gold ever mined is still in existence in the form of jewelry, bars and coins (roughly a cube 20mx20mx20m). The industrial use for gold is miniscule, so the amount is fairly constant. 18.5Million of the maximum 21M bitcoins are already mined, hence the amount is virtually constant.

Like gold, I'd expect Bitcoin to become a store of value. Like gold, it is going to (continue to) be crazy volatile.

Cheers

 

[entity279]

1.) The number of miners doing actual work on a block is cut from all of them to a few ten to hundreds. The number needs to be high enough to ensure against fraud (when all miners/validators of a block belongs to the same organization), but this is fairly trivial
2.) Since the network picks who and when to mine a block, they can lower the difficulty parameter. Remember the only function the difficulty parameter has is to stabilize the frequency at which valid blocks are generated. When a Raspberry Pi can mine a block in milliseconds, the need for ASICs and GPUs disappears.

I'm not sure you're doing PoS justice with that explanation.
While I'm not familiar with the entire maths of this, the number of miners is not truly relevant.

PoS is much more of a paradigm shift, actually.
In PoW the computational power (hashrate) you own, as a percentage of to the total hashrate of all the miners in the network is (basically) proportional to the revenue you'll receive. Buy more mining hardware => get more coin as a reward.
For PoS, it's the percentange of the coins you stake (locked for a given time period) compared to the total coins staked by everyone instead. That's what determines the revenue. Computational power required for this is overwhelmingly negligible now.
(And no matter how many Rasberry Pis I add to the network, my revenue still won't increase by an iota if I stake the very same ammount of ETH)

 

[Gubbi]

I'm not sure you're doing PoS justice with that explanation.
While I'm not familiar with the entire maths of this, the number of miners is not truly relevant.

The number of miners are relevant for the security of the network. Public block chain systems crowd source monetary/transactional authority, to crowd source something you need a crowd.

PoS is much more of a paradigm shift, actually.
In PoW the computational power (hashrate) you own, as a percentage of to the total hashrate of all the miners in the network is (basically) proportional to the revenue you'll receive. Buy more mining hardware => get more coin as a reward.
For PoS, it's the percentange of the coins you stake (locked for a given time period) compared to the total coins staked by everyone instead. That's what determines the revenue. Computational power required for this is overwhelmingly negligible now.
(And no matter how many Rasberry Pis I add to the network, my revenue still won't increase by an iota if I stake the very same ammount of ETH)

Isn't that s exactly what I wrote? To participate in the network of miners/validators you need to stake a fixed quantity of eth (3 eth has been suggested). Nothing stops you from staking this number 1000 times over and run 1000 mining instances.

Cheers

 

[pcchen]

The number of miners are relevant for the security of the network. Public block chain systems crowd source monetary/transactional authority, to crowd source something you need a crowd.

While this is generally true, most miners join a mining pool to have rewards in a reasonable time. These days the mining pools are quite concentrated with one has more than a quarter of all hash power. So more miners do not necessarily mean better security in this case.

To put it another way, the crowd is already large enough.

Isn't that s exactly what I wrote? To participate in the network of miners/validators you need to stake a fixed quantity of eth (3 eth has been suggested). Nothing stops you from staking this number 1000 times over and run 1000 mining instances.

Cheers

The current ETH 2.0 beacon chain requires a 32 ETH deposit to become a validator. It’s not that much when it started last year (less than $20k IIRC) but now it worth more than $100k due to huge increase of ETH price.

More importantly is that the number of participants is huge now, with more than 4.3 million ETH staked. While there are also some staking pools but they probably don’t have something like a quarter of all staked ETH. So, in a sense, ETH 2.0 PoS is probably more secure than ETH 1.0 PoW.

 

[BRiT]

There is also Proof of Coverage. Look at Helium Miner.


The Proof of Space of ChiaCoin, while power consumption is lower than Proof Of Work with GPUs, it still consumes quite a bit of energy and bandwidth.

 

[Putas]

Next up after PoWH: Proof of Power Supply.

 

[dskneo]

Ethereum intends to change to proof of stake, where a miner commits to being available to the network by putting forward a stake (I believe it is suggested to be 3 eth, ~$20.000 at current prices)

32 Eth, 100.000$. For less than this you will have to join a staking pool

 

[MfA]

Bitcoin is the digital equivalent of gold.

That's not a ringing endorsement.

Like gold, it is going to (continue to) be crazy volatile.

Gold value much like Bitcoin is almost entirely psychologically driven and that psychology isn't even reliably countercyclical (ie. gold is a piss poor inflation hedge). For gold as Warren Buffet said, it's mostly about fear ... but at least the aesthetics provide some stabilization. The success of Ethereum 2.0 would attack the psychological supports of Bitcoin and there's no aesthetics to buffer that. Bitcoin can retain value and remain volatile ... but still crash and wipe you out.

PoS is an existential threat even to Bitcoin miners. If the Bitcoin value crashes, most of them will need to stop mining. A lot of propaganda and perhaps hacking is going to be coming out of China the closer PoS comes to try to disrupt it.

 

[Man from Atlantis]

I was expecting nvidia to limit the new cards to a fixed hashrate around 30MH/s so that all new cards performs on par with lowest CMP card. You can still get 50-52MH/s with a LHR 3080 which is not too shabby.

The hash rate to LHR models appears to be half of the current RTX 30 series offer. Do note that those numbers do not account for typical mining optimizations, which can easily increase those numbers though power limiting or memory overclocking.

https://videocardz.com/newz/galax-l...eries-with-nerfed-ethereum-mining-performance

 

[orangpelupa]

I was expecting nvidia to limit the new cards to a fixed hashrate around 30MH/s so that all new cards performs on par with lowest CMP card. You can still get 50-52MH/s with a LHR 3080 which is not too shabby.



https://videocardz.com/newz/galax-l...eries-with-nerfed-ethereum-mining-performance

From WD precedence, of Nvidia didn't force partners to clearly label it, won't they got sued just like WD?

Or because Nvidia didn't directly sell to customers, Nvidia is immune from this?