
AMD GPU Supply Exhausted by Crypto Miners, AIBs Now Directly Advertising to Them - mrb
http://wccftech.com/amd-gpu-supply-exhausted-by-cryptocurrency/
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ac29
The article doesn't really touch on it, but this seems to be related to the
"altcoin" boom of the past month or so, most of which are GPU mineable. The
rise in Bitcoin prices seems to have made altcoins rise in price in lockstep,
for reasons I don't quite understand. Many have even increased in value 10-20x
in a matter of a couple months. There are even 8 cryptocoin "unicorns" now,
according to [https://coinmarketcap.com/](https://coinmarketcap.com/).

If you are thinking about gambling in crypto-speculation, my advice would be:
dont do it with any money you cant afford to lose. There are way too many
stories of people losing substantial portions of their life savings buying in
at the top of these market booms.

~~~
jacquesm
> The rise in Bitcoin prices seems to have made altcoins rise in price in
> lockstep, for reasons I don't quite understand.

The Dutch Tulip Mania was not limited to Tulips of a single color.

~~~
dmichulke
Nor did tulips represent 0.025% of the global financial market cap already (~
80bn / 300 tn) ;)

[1] [http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/](http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/)

[2] [https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/global-stock-market-
cap...](https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/global-stock-market-cap-has-
doubled-since-qes-start-2015-02-12)

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hal9000xp
I remember the story of Samuel Brannan who made lots of money selling picks,
shovels and pans to gold miners during gold rush in 1848.

Quote from Wiki:

"Brannan moved to New Helvetia, where he opened a store at John Sutter's Fort.
When gold was discovered, Brannan owned the only store between San Francisco
and the gold fields -- a fact he capitalized on by buying up all the picks,
shovels and pans he could find, and then running up and down the streets of
San Francisco, shouting "Gold! Gold on the American River!" He paid 20 cents
each for the pans, then sold them for $15 apiece. In nine weeks, he made
$36,000."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan#California_Gold...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan#California_Gold_Rush)

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6d6b73
Oh great. In a time when we struggle with environmental issues on this planet
let's create virtual currencies, that require shitload of electricity to run.
And let's use all these advanced gpus and cpus that require tremendous amount
of time, energy and money to "mine" these currencies so we can make few bucks.
Let's advertise them as decentralized and private when they are neither.

It's not like we could have people dedicate all these resources to develop
better medicines to save lives, or better materials to create greener and
healthier society.

No, let's just spend money and time to fuel our ponzi scheme.

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ComodoHacker
So is it possible for Nvidia to covertly launch and promote an altcoin
designed so it's more profitable to mine it on Nvidia GPUs?

~~~
floatboth
Of course it's possible. (In fact, you can mine Ethereum on Nvidia and it's
not too bad. GTX 1070 has the same performance as RX 480/580\. The 1070 is
more expensive but it also consumes less power. So you can achieve the same
profit, just with a bit more time.)

But that wouldn't make any sense for Nvidia. They're enjoying their dominance
over the gaming market. They have a lot of fanboy^Wmindshare and now even
gamers who wanted an RX 580 can't even buy it because of miners.

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SinOverCos
LTC is not the silver of crypto, and Ethereum is not spelled "Etherium"

~~~
kristianp
I've definitely seen LTC referred to as the "silver" to BTCs "gold".

Don't know what an AIB is though.

~~~
kristofferR
AMD Add-In-Board partners

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amitprayal
Criminal waste of energy

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daxorid
When did this new trend of referring to cryptocurrencies as "crypto" begin?
This is very irritating, as it is a major namespace collision with actual
cryptography.

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97s
How long is mining actual viable by the masses at the moment? I assume this
can't continue to happen unless other altcoins also use GPUs for mining. Won't
the difficulty of mining eventually become unprofitable? I assume this is like
bitcoin. However I don't know much about all this.

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sorenjan
All these altcoins seems to be speculation, does anybody actually use them as
currency?

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zurn
What does the author mean by ASIC resistence here?

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wtallis
Some hash functions (eg. scrypt) are designed to make ASIC implementations
cost-prohibitive, such as by requiring enough memory that off-chip DRAM
working memory is needed. When the memory interface is the bottleneck, an ASIC
is not going to offer substantial advantages over GPUs.

~~~
idonotknowwhy
But in the end, we got scrypt ASIC miners anyway. And then a coin called
Vertcoin (VTC) came along and replaced scrypt with X11, to fight ASICs

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egeozcan
Does anyone know why they fight ASICs?

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idonotknowwhy
Yeah. Officially it's to avoid centralization. The idea is that anyone can
mine the coins, not just rich people with ASIC mining farms.

They also wanted to avoid GPUs originally, and some new altcoins (also known
as shitcoins) try to do this as well from time to time. I've been known to
either cloud-mine or what I call "Indian-data-center" mine such coins.

I personally like it when a new CPU-only or GPU-only coin comes out because I
can mine with my own hardware. My ASIC miner never made ROI before the Bitcoin
difficulty got to high that it would never pay back the power bill costs.

~~~
zurn
It would be cool if such "GPU resistant" coins became popular, because it
would encourage people to figure out new ways to program GPUs.

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pawadu
Does mining shorten the life of a GPU? If I am in the market for a second hand
GPU for gaming, should I avoid those?

~~~
alimbada
I read a comment on reddit the other day the gist of which was (sorry, I don't
remember the specifics and doubt I'll be able to find the comment again):

Generally, yes, as miners tend to tweak GPU settings to maximise their
hashrate and it can cause issues when they are run like that long term.

~~~
floatboth
Miners tweak settings to minimize power usage, i.e. undervolt and maybe even
underclock the card.

That's much better for the GPU than, say, pushing the card to the limit for
benchmark scores :D

But generally, GPUs become obsolete before they die.

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idonotknowwhy
What do you guys thing, this will make AMD shares rise after the next
profitability report?

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_rav
So what am I supposed to buy instead of rx570? For, like, gaming?

nvidia 1060 or what?

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ex3ndr
GTX 1050 ti now is more performant than RX 5xx series.

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DeepYogurt
Oh god, not this again.

