
LiteCoin is Causing Shortages of AMD Radeon GPUs - mrb
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/12/9/cryptocurrencies-are-causing-shortages-of-amd-radeon-gpus.aspx
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RankingMember
That's no joke. I was trying like crazy to get in on one of the deals over
"Cyber Week", and the deals that would pop up would literally be sold out
within 2 minutes of appearing. I read a few threads in FatWallet and
Slickdeals in which people said things to the effect of "Damn Litecoin miners!
Some of us want to play games with these!"

Shortly thereafter I came to the realization that, if this many people are
jumping into the Litecoin pool, mining Litecoins is going to get a lot harder
very quickly, so I stopped bothering to look.

~~~
acangiano
Smart cryptominers don't mine Litecoins. They mine the most profitable coin at
the moment, then sell it and convert it to LTC (assuming they believe in LTC).

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smtddr
Truth! I have a co-worker who had to jump on getting 2 of them from Newegg.
They're nearly impossible to buy now unless you catch a 40% markup on ebay or
something. I'm very sorry for all the gamers out there. This isn't fair to
them. :( . I just purchased my LTC with good ol' USD. Besides Bitcoin, we both
are betting that Litecoin will "go up to da moon!". Specifically, I expect LTC
to reach $900 by end of 2014. I have no data whatsoever to back that up with
other than the Litecoin-related announcements I sometimes see on various
forums of small businesses accepting LTC along with BTC. I'm already holding
some[1] and will probably buy a few more if I see another price drop.

1\. [http://ltc.block-
explorer.com/address/LYmsP841obKKt9jkapj8iK...](http://ltc.block-
explorer.com/address/LYmsP841obKKt9jkapj8iK4ohQyEXrk6AG)

~~~
knodi
What can you use LTC for?

Thats right, nothing but hope.

~~~
whyenot
You can sell them for bitcoins ;)

There are even mining pools such as middlecoin that shift from one scrypt-
based alt coin to another depending on what is easiest to mine and sell on
exchanges for BTC. As a miner, you don't have to lift a finger, just point
cgminer at the pool's address and supply a BTC address for payouts, the pool
operator takes care of the rest.

Some smaller altcoins (such as stablecoin) have had to make changes to their
difficulty calculations because these pools, with relatively massive amounts
of hashing power, come in, push up a coin's difficulty and then leave again
once it's no longer profitable. Sitting on the sidelines, it's been really
interesting to watch.

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pat2man
This is a cool side effect of GPU mining, this is all commodity hardware. In a
year or less miners will need to upgrade their GPUs and will be selling their
old GPUs. Gamers can then buy them up for cheap. With ASIC Bitcoin miners the
hardware is useless once it becomes inefficient to mine on it.

~~~
dllthomas
It's going to be an interesting hiccup in bitcoin when we eventually have to
migrate off of SHA256 and suddenly existing ASICs become irrelevant.

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woah
Hopefully nobody figures out how to ASIC Litecoin. If it stays on general
purpose hardware for a few years, we will have a huge network of processing
power ready to be harnessed.

If someone makes Litecoin ASICs, we will have a huge network of space heaters.

~~~
salient
GPU mining is still not as decentralized, as basically only high-end PC gamers
(with their own default cards) and the people specifically buying GPUs for
mining will have a shot at it.

CPU-only mining would be a lot more decentralized, if such a thing is even
possible.

~~~
lukifer
ProtoShares (and a few other coins, I believe) focus as much on being memory-
hard as CPU-hard. While CPU/GPU can be "cheated" by designing ASICs, there's
no such thing as application-specific memory, making it a better candidate for
an honest signal. [1]

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory)

~~~
erikpukinskis
Won't that just lead to people making machines with giant racks of RAM,
causing the exact same difficulty race as we're seeing with the giant racks of
ASCIs in Bitcoin?

And even if that's not the optimization (I'm not an expert on ProtoShares or
memory-constrained algorithms), I am highly skeptical of anyone claiming a
computation problem is optimally solved by a laptop, and cannot be optimized
with custom engineering.

~~~
woah
Giant racks of RAM could be useful. Once someone's rig is no longer profitable
for mining, they could turn around and open a MongoDB hosting service.

------
kaonashi
Thus demonstrating the sheer idiocy of crypto-currencies -- they burn real
resources on what is essentially bookkeeping.

~~~
smtddr
Keep in mind that the mining won't last forever. Bitcoin mining has already
become all but unreachable[1] for normal household resources. Litecoin's
blockchain is still new enough that it hasn't reached that point yet. Just
like BTC, LTC was first just CPU, now it's GPU, then ASIC will show up then
finally it'll just be pools for 0.00003 LTC a week or you'll need a freakin'
Pixar+Dreamworks+ILM SuperPowered-RenderFarm or something that no ordinary
person can reasonably afford access to.

1\. [http://www.ibtimes.com/secret-bitcoin-mine-chinese-
facility-...](http://www.ibtimes.com/secret-bitcoin-mine-chinese-facility-
uses-boiling-liquid-cool-massive-computers-generate-bitcoins)

~~~
galactus
Doesnt the bitcoin network need mining to work? As far as I understand it,
mining needs to be done forever, even if its impossible to collect new coins.

~~~
smtddr
I don't think it does. Bitcoin can be split to the eighth decimal place, IIRC.
If bitcoins become hard to get, the price should go up, then needing one whole
btc to buy something should get less common. Or maybe you're right and years
from now it'll all collapse and some other improved crypto-coin will have to
take its place. I guess we'll find out, because there is a hard-limit on how
many btcs can be obtained(21 million to be exact) by mining, so when that runs
out...

~~~
maxerickson
Mining is fundamental to the operation of bitcoin. "Mining" just means finding
a satisfactory hash for the next block of transactions.

People pursue mining because of the rewards built into bitcoin, transaction
fees are supposed to eventually replace that reward.

------
nerfhammer
could an alt-coin be based on socially useful computation, e.g. folding@home?

~~~
TillE
As long as the work is hard to compute but quick to verify, sure. But you're
probably going to run into the problem of having one central entity providing
work units.

~~~
nwh
That's not right. It must be hard to produce, easy to verify, and be
deterministically linked to the previous POW. That last feature is critical.

~~~
tedunangst
Hash the folded protein with the previous POW. Problem solved, no?

(I think the important thing is that you have to prove you didn't start the
current pow until the previous work unit is done, right? Fortunately, there
are lots of proteins to be folded. You can use the previous pow to select the
parameters for the next pow. The hashes are uniformly distributed, so that
will eventually range over the set of proteins.)

~~~
nwh
Not at all. What's stopping me from hashing the result with something else?
The base of the work must be in changeable. That's the whole point of POW in
this case. If you want to rewrite history you need to do the POW again, in
your system that doesn't need to happen.

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nisa
Fascinating. Slighty related: I've stumbled over Primecoin¹ while researching
Litcoin mining. Primecoin uses prime chains as proof of work. Existing GPU
implementations are slower than modern processors and I'm not sure about the
feasability of FPGAs and ASICS. It's an interesting idea.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin)

~~~
Aldo_MX
Apparently it didn't gain much traction here.
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6011094](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6011094)

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polskibus
That's the same in EU - amazon.co.uk shows 1-3 months delivery for R9 280X and
in Poland the arrival date of new batch was already moved twice in the last 3
weeks. 3 weeks ago I placed an order fo R9 280X, the LTC difficulty is now 2x
of what it was then. I think I will soon be cancelling the order as LTC price
falls and the break even point is ca. 2 months instead of 1 month.

------
daddykotex
Why is AMD Radeon GPUs more efficient to mine LiteCoins than Nvidia GPUs?

~~~
winslow
It has to do with the amount of power usage and the return rate or mine rate
of LTC/BTC. AMD seems to have a better ratio of coin per wattage. So basically
just better bang for the buck.

~~~
defective
Bang for the buck = efficiency, so you just answered the question "Why is it
more efficient?" with, "Because it is more efficient."

The reason, more or less, is that AMD GPUs tend to have way more cores than
Nvidia GPUs, and their cores can, in hardware, do the integer operation
necessary for the hashing algorithm. Nvidia can only emulate the integer
operation, so it takes three instructions on Nvidia vs one on AMD.

~~~
winslow
You're right. I wasn't aware of the specific technical reasons only knew the
power wattage difference.

------
corin_
Can confirm, working in hardware marketing in Europe, many retailers and AIB
manufacturers are talking about Litecoin causing stock issues (and/or sales
peaks, depending on which side they're looking at it from). Have even seen a
major systems manufacturer I work with change up the GPUs in their SKUs based
on availability issues.

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bsamuels
This AMD GPU shortage isn't quite so terrible. I have a pair of AMD 5850s that
I've been offered $250 each for. Never imagined those kinds of returns on 4
years old graphics hardware.

I wonder if the demand for altcoin mining cards will end up becoming so great
that Nvidia will modify their architecture to better facilitate it.

~~~
EdJiang
Alternatively, you could try mining yourself if you're curious and want to
learn about cryptocurrencies. I wrote a guide on how to get started with
mining in <10 minutes (mostly for friends with gaming PCs), for some of my
friends who were interested.

[http://edjiang.com/post/69758178501/mining-altcoins-for-
fun-...](http://edjiang.com/post/69758178501/mining-altcoins-for-fun-and-
profit)

------
bede
From selling my 7950s earlier in the week on eBay UK, the going rate appears
to be around 35% more than normal (Amazon) retail price. It's quite amusing,
although I do feel for those caught in the CrossFire™ (sorry), who simply want
a card to play video games.

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ac29
Clearly, this is in no way related to the busiest shopping period of the year.

I'm sure there is some increased demand from cryptocoin mining, but really its
pretty myopic if you think even half of the Nov/Dec demand for GPUs is going
that way.

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MatthewB
Took me about a week to find 2 of them on newegg. If you check newegg daily,
you can probably find a couple here and there. You can possibly even find a
name brand one.

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bluedino
Could AMD be using a significant amount of capacity for the new Mac Pro GPU's?

~~~
udev
Mac Pros probably don't sell in the numbers that the Apple laptops, iPads, or
iPhones sell.

But it is entirely possible that Apple feels the shortage of AMD GPUs right
now, which could be one of the causes for the Mac Pro not being available.

------
Ihmahr
Meanwhile,

I still can't mine ltc on my mac.

EDIT: Both Asteroid and MacMiner don't work for me.

~~~
lukifer
It takes a little effort to compile yourself, but you absolutely can.
[https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer](https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer)

------
aet
I see R9 290x on Amazon Prime...

