The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness
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Facing problems keeping their graphics cards in stock due to the popularity of cryptocurrency mining, AMD and NVIDIA are both rumored to be making video cards specifically for mining. The cards would lack display connectors, most likely not support any gaming at all and only have 90 days warranty (due to the expected heavy 24/7 use).
AMD and NVIDIA preparing graphics cards for cryptocurrency mining | VideoCardz.com
GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, Rumor A new rumor has just started to spread in the industry, a rumor we heard from few sources. AMD & NVIDIA to release graphics cards for 'Bitcoin' mining
A motherboard manufacturer has announced a motherboard with 13 PCI slots for those video cards:
CRAAAAAAZZZEEEE
http://i.imgur.com/2RYAd.png
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Doesn't it cost significantly more to pay for the electricity than you get in bitcoin value?
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@ben_lubar said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
Doesn't it cost significantly more to pay for the electricity than you get in bitcoin value?
If bitcoin farmers were fiscally smart, these video cards wouldn't exist.
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@Lorne-Kates said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
@ben_lubar said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
Doesn't it cost significantly more to pay for the electricity than you get in bitcoin value?
If bitcoin farmers were fiscally smart, these video cards wouldn't exist.
Well, it's just a rumor, so they might not exist.
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@ben_lubar said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
Doesn't it cost significantly more to pay for the electricity than you get in bitcoin value?
Until recently the cost of the hardware plus electricity was more than you could get from the Bitcoins you "mined".
At the current price, however, you should be able to make some money, if (and this is a BIG IF) you can find a Bitcoin exchange that will actually give you real money for your Bitcoin and not just steal them from you (or claim that they "lost" them because they were "hacked").
So far, the track record in that area is not good.
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@El_Heffe said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
Until recently the cost of the hardware plus electricity was more than you could get from the Bitcoins you "mined".
At the current price, however, you should be able to make some money, if (and this is a BIG IF) you can find a Bitcoin exchange that will actually give you real money for your Bitcoin and not just steal them from you (or claim that they "lost" them because they were "hacked").
So far, the track record in that area is not good.Wait, isn't there an element of luck with this?
"Most other people are just gonna waste electricity, but MY super-rig will hit paydirt!"
Kind of like buying a lottery ticket?
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@cartman82 said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
@El_Heffe said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
Until recently the cost of the hardware plus electricity was more than you could get from the Bitcoins you "mined".
At the current price, however, you should be able to make some money, if (and this is a BIG IF) you can find a Bitcoin exchange that will actually give you real money for your Bitcoin and not just steal them from you (or claim that they "lost" them because they were "hacked").
So far, the track record in that area is not good.Wait, isn't there an element of luck with this?
"Most other people are just gonna waste electricity, but MY super-rig will hit paydirt!"
Kind of like buying a lottery ticket?
When I was playing around with that, no one really mined Bitcoin per se - as that uses an algorithm that has low memory requirements and is trivial to implement on FPGAs and ASICs, making graphics cards very inefficient space heaters by comparison. Instead people mined one of the gajillion "alt-coins" that popped up, then tried to flip them on an exchange before they inevitably got forgotten and lost all value.
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@Maciejasjmj said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
people mined one of the gajillion "alt-coins" that popped up, then tried to flip them on an exchange before they inevitably got forgotten and lost all value.
Is dogecoin still a thing? That was the only other one I ever heard enough about to remember the name
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What's that phrase about gold rushes?
You make more money selling shovels than mining?
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@cartman82 said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
Wait, isn't there an element of luck with this?
"Most other people are just gonna waste electricity, but MY super-rig will hit paydirt!"
Kind of like buying a lottery ticket?
No, there really isn't any "luck" involved. You can calculate (sort of)
X amount of computing power = 0.0001 bitcoin per hour
or something like that.But, I'm skeptical that you can actually make any significant amount of profit, even at the current price which hit a record high last month.
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@Jaloopa said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
@Maciejasjmj said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
people mined one of the gajillion "alt-coins" that popped up, then tried to flip them on an exchange before they inevitably got forgotten and lost all value.
Is dogecoin still a thing? That was the only other one I ever heard enough about to remember the name
I always assumed dogecoin was just a joke based on the doge meme.
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@El_Heffe said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
At the current price, however, you should be able to make some money, if (and this is a BIG IF) you can find a Bitcoin exchange that will actually give you real money for your Bitcoin and not just steal them from you (or claim that they "lost" them because they were "hacked").
You do know that the exchanges today are actually legally licensed "money services businesses", and follow a ton of regulations and insurance and all that right? The last big "hack" was MtGox in 2014.
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@El_Heffe said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
No, there really isn't any "luck" involved. You can calculate (sort of)
X amount of computing power = 0.0001 bitcoin per hour
or something like that.It's really "X amount of computing power = 0.01% chance to get 12.5 BTC, plus whatever transaction fees people have paid", so there is technically luck. However, this "luck" is negated by people pooling lots of processing power and paying back a fixed amount per computing power.
You could, theoretically, just mine for 10 seconds on your Raspberri Pi and make thousands of dollars (but the chances are much smaller than actually winning the lottery).
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@anonymous234 said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
You do know that the exchanges today are actually legally licensed "money services businesses", and follow a ton of regulations and insurance and all that right? The last big "hack" was MtGox in 2014.
It's not just "hacked". A quick search turns up a list of 36 bitcoin exchanges that have come and gone, for various reasons, and several that have closed this year.
As I said earlier, the track record is not good.
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@El_Heffe said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
No, there really isn't any "luck" involved. You can calculate (sort of)
X amount of computing power = 0.0001 bitcoin per hour
or something like that.I thought that was only if you join one of those miner networks, which distributes workload to many people and everyone shares in the drips of "profit".
Can't you just strike out on your own and hope you get lucky? I would imagine that was the main attraction in bitcoin mining. This slow drip of microcoins thing sounds boring.
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@anonymous234 said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
It's really "X amount of computing power = 0.01% chance to get 12.5 BTC, plus whatever transaction fees people have paid", so there is technically luck. However, this "luck" is negated by people pooling lots of processing power and paying back a fixed amount per computing power.
You could, theoretically, just mine for 10 seconds on your Raspberri Pi and make thousands of dollars (but the chances are much smaller than actually winning the lottery).Right, that's what I thought.
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@El_Heffe said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
only have 90 days warranty
Good luck selling that in the EU. I call BS.
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@asdf You might be able to get away with that if that was very explicitly the expectation, given that this is very much not a standard consumer product.
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@dkf said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
You might be able to get away with that if that was very explicitly the expectation, given that this is very much not a standard consumer product.
The manufacturer might and probably will get away with that, but no retailer will sell it, since the retailer is bound by the EU warranty requirements. And I don't know about the UK, but I'm pretty sure the German law applies to all electronic devices, no exceptions.
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@asdf said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
EU warranty requirements
Yes, for things sold to end consumers. (B2B is different.) But there's a separate thing to consider at the EU level: what is the actual reasonable expected lifetime of the product in normal use? Just being made of electronics doesn't automatically give it a 2 year lifespan, and we're definitely not talking a standard consumer product here. The cost of purchase would on one hand indicate a longish lifespan would be reasonable, but the fact that in normal expected use it earns money for its owner would be taken as being something that discounts the price. I've not worked out what the discount would be, but that's the sort of thing that counts.
At EU level anyway. German courts might decide to be weird. Again.
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@dkf said in The high price of Bitcoin leads to hardware craziness:
At EU level anyway. German courts might decide to be weird. Again.
This has nothing to do with the courts. Local laws implementing the corresponding EU directive differ considerably.
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People who think they can get something out of nothing, smart? Please. Bitcoin was a scam when it came out. The only thing that has changed is that nobody thinks cryptocurrency is cool anymore so it won't be getting any more media attention.
They may only sell these cards where the regulatory framework is not going to be a burden.
