
Used GPUs flood the market as Ethereum's price drops below $150 - striking
https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/used_gpus_flood_the_market_as_ethereum_s_price_crashes_below_150/1
======
DanBlake
Just took a quick look at this. If you are located in the 'mining valley' of
Washington where power is ~2c/kwh you are still getting healthy profits.

A computer with 7 GTX 1070 graphics cards should produce ~230 mh/s and draw 1
kw. This would cost approximately $30/month in power factoring in kw demand +
cooling.

The above setup will currently generate $385/month in ETH.

So basically for miners who are in the right spot with the right facility,
this is still profitable. The question is of course for how long. You also
need to factor in the cost of equipment, datacenter, employees and
difficulty/price.

But even if you dont have a facility in washington and just mine from your
apartment, your power cost would probably be $100 a month. So its still
'profitable', just not nearly as much as it was in the run up.

Cliffnotes: 'professional' miners dont care. Even with the 'crash' today, they
are making more per day than they were before the entire run up. For instance
the 'worst' time for mining was December 2016 where you would only make $7.50
a day gross in ETH.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
Call me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst
inventions for consuming energy possible?

Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs
in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines,
vehicles products they can create.

Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the
70s) and boom by sudden drops in cost of energy.

So we've created an "industry" where you are essentially paid by comverting
energy to waste. Paid to perform extremely intense difficult (ie wasteful)
operations to back a useful technology (digital currency).

Assuming it catches on, energy will never be cheap, there will always be a
higher floor now due to options for "mining". As we get better at it and it
becomes less wasteful, the digital system will simply raise the reward so
people are incentivised to once again waste it.

Ignore the short term for the moment, and which ever currency you're backing.
We've created a long term societal motivation/reward to harvest every joule
produce by the sun and use it to calculate hashes. I'm not talking about the
next decade obviously, but we have incentivised that behavior.

If there is anything technologists should understand is that whatever your
beautiful perfect technology is, it will instead be used based on whatever has
been incentivised.

Regardless of the technology it powers, this is a terrible societal incentive
- and one that will be around a lot longer than people are considering.

~~~
nodamage
A cryptocurrency enthusiast would tell you that the energy consumed is not
"wasted" because it is necessary to secure the block chain.

Personally I find this argument unconvincing and somewhat tautological. 1)
Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this and 2) why should
we assume that securing the block chain is a actually good use for the energy
spent?

Especially if you consider that the process of "mining" is literally computing
hashes over and over again until you find the right nonce that meets some
arbitrary criteria, it's hard to see this process as anything except wasting
massive amounts of energy.

~~~
mrb
1) No there is no other way. (An alternative, proof-of-stake, is still an
active research area. Even Ethereum abandoned the idea of completely switching
away from proof-of-work because they realized PoS isn't completely workable.)

2) Because a permission-less censorship-resistant decentralized financial
system has the potential to truly improve society, hence worth spending energy
on it.

I have presented multiple arguments why (Bitcoin) mining is not wasteful here:
[http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-
wasteful/](http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/)

~~~
Jabanga
>Even Ethereum abandoned the idea of completely switching away from proof-of-
work because they realized PoS isn't completely workable

No it didn't. I follow Ethereum development closely and I know for a fact
that's absolutely untrue. I'm not sure why you're misleading people about
this.

~~~
mrb
You are right, I should have said "temporarily" not "completely". They
abandoned the idea of switching to 100% PoS right away, and instead are trying
to work on a hybrid PoS/PoW. Source:
[https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/851503370250661889](https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/851503370250661889)
(100% PoS remains the ideal goal, but they have been unable to work it out
yet)

------
abalone
All I can think of is the careless environmental impact of all that dirty
electricity consumption. For, let's be honest, a mostly speculative activity.

One cryptocurrency crashes, another gets hyped up, and the computational cycle
repeats. When will it end.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Is the energy expended in crypto currency mining less valuable than that
expended by the traditional financial sector?

~~~
hueving
Of course it's much less valuable. The crypto currencies are intentionally
difficult to mine, wasting vast amounts of energy. A small mining company
could probably process all of Visa's transactions which outnumber transactions
on bitcoin by at least an order of magnitude.

~~~
notgood
That doesn't make sense; you are comparing the creation of a currency against
the usage of other. The finance sector includes the creation of cash (its
paper, price of counterfeit measures); the transportation of cash (think
ATMs), the materials needed for creating debit and credit cards, including
their chips, the equipment to protect banks from being robbed (think big steel
security safes) along many other resources to make such industry work.

~~~
rspeer
This is a common knee-jerk response that doesn't make any sense. None of that
stops Bitcoin from being wasteful, and most of it is still necessary if
Bitcoin is used more.

Are you claiming that Bitcoin replaces physical security? How would it do
that? Why doesn't someone just walk in and take your computer?

And if you're concerned about the creation of small computer chips (why would
you be concerned about this), I assure you that Bitcoin is using more of them.

~~~
notgood
>None of that stops Bitcoin from being wasteful, and most of it is still
necessary if Bitcoin is used more

What? If used more we wouldn't even need to transform it to any other
currency, its because is _not_ used more that it is usually needed to convert
it to something else.

>"How would it do that? Why doesn't someone just walk in and take your
computer?"

No, someone cannot walk in because he doesn't even know where to walk in, its
the same reason Satoshi is extremely rich despite the curiosity of millions to
know about him, but no-one even knows his real name or anything at all; we
don't even know which country he lives in; so yeah it does replace physical
security; at least to a significant extent.

>And if you're concerned about the creation of small computer chips (why would
you be concerned about this), I assure you that Bitcoin is using more of them.

It was just an example of the millions of resources that are wasted by the
finance industry, a lot that include transportation (gasoline/ fossil fuels
which is way way worse than most sources of electricity gpus are using)

~~~
rspeer
Without physical security, someone can walk into the data center next to the
hydro plant and take _all the equipment they want_.

They can also install rootkits using their physical access to their computers,
so they don't even have to move the equipment.

No, you cannot replace physical security with cryptocurrency. Nor will you
replace the use of gasoline or computer chips.

~~~
notgood
Data centers need security regardless of cryptocurrency, you can't say the
same about money and banks; so your point is moot.

To install rootkits you need to know where the computers are or some way to
get to them, and that's 100% impossible with bitcoins unless you reveal your
own info some other way (e.g. a security mistake)

~~~
rspeer
I certainly can say the same about money and banks. I _am_ saying it. You want
money and banks to run on cryptocurrency, right? Then you need security for
it.

"Haha, you don't know which computer to steal" is the worst security-by-
obscurity idea I've ever heard of.

~~~
notgood
That's like saying passwords are security-by-obscurity.

I never said I wanted banks to run on crypto.

Overall it is a bit sad your arguments reached this low quality; I was
expecting some interesting counter-arguments instead of these slippery slopes,
not to mention all the downvotes you poured onto me.

------
zanny
On the bright side, this has been a great test of etheriums scalability. Which
isn't _great_ , but when this mining craze dies down I won't hesitate to run
ethminer when I'm not home for a little extra dough.

What I would really expect is an overreaction to the price crash, which means
the difficulty rate might drop a _lot_. At this point, doing what a lot of
people do with bitcoin - mining small amounts for a long period of time and
just holding it until it reaches all time highs to cash out - is probably
really easy money.

Probably most relevantly is how crypto valuations are bound together. Bitcoin
is also down about 20% from its ATH, and will certainly drop more as long as
eth pulls it down. The entire market will rise and fall on the hype of just
one blockchain. Coins nobody even cared about like peercoin saw 5x returns on
miners during this eth bubble.

~~~
pdog
Proof-of-stake is coming to Ethereum later this year, so there isn't much
point investing in a few more months of mining. Casper is the real reason
everyone is selling their mining hardware.

~~~
johnohara
Agree, to a point. Using proof of stake is an important objective for the
Ethereum blockchain model. Vitalik has said as much in conferences worldwide
since January of this year.

The drop in price helps potential stakeholders too.

But the real concern, and IMHO, the reason for the drop, may lie in the next
big hurdle, which is creating applications based on blockchain contracts. It
is a very different way of thinking about application development, and as
such, may need more time for consideration.

More like hypertext and the world-wide web was in 1993 than it was in 1996 and
'97.

------
crypt1d
Its mostly RX series that are being sold off and the reason for that is the
ever-increasing Ethereum DAG size. I dont know the specifics, but due to the
DAG size the ETH hash rate on AMD RX400/500s is starting to slowly drop, and
will be behind the performance of their Nvidia counter-parts in a few months
time.

(Source: I run a mining operation.)

~~~
milkey_mouse
Isn't it only the 4GB RX cards that will get worse for mining? Or is it that
the GPU memory bandwidth is less on AMD cards?

~~~
Tom1971
The theory out there is that the 480 has lower performance due to TLB
trashing. So it's not DRAM size specific but GPU architecture specific.

------
geff82
And then they'll buy back at horrendous prices when the Price goes up again?
Seems like shortsighted people do this. At least they could play some
tremendous video games in the mean time ;)

~~~
iak8god
It's not just the price, but the rising difficulty[1]. Since last month the
price of ETH dropped by more than 50% (from a record high bubble). In the same
time span, difficulty - how much ETH you can expect to get per whatever your
GPU's hashrate is - has nearly doubled.

A whole bunch of people bought in last month when mining profitability
calculators were saying you could make $X per month per card, where X is a
significant percentage of the card's retail price. Now it's $X/4, the
difficulty continues its steady rise, and the fiat price of ETH is totally
unpredictable but appears to be on a downward trend.

Unless the price of ETH returns to record highs, the cards people bought last
month will never pay for themselves. That's why they're flooding eBay.

[1] [https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-
difficul...](https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficulty-
chart)

------
strictnein
I sold my hardware last week. GTX 1060s, a 1080, an AMD R9 290X, some other
stuff.

Unless I'm missing something, there's no huge flood of video cards on ebay.
There's maybe ~20% more than there was a week ago. All told, for the in demand
mining hardware, you're only talking about a couple thousand cards.

~~~
bdcravens
Bitcoin is down 20% over past 7 days; Ethereum, 30-40%.

That said, I don't think people sell that fast. Back when I GPU mined Bitcoin
(2011), when the price fell from $35 to $2, I turned my miners off and waited
a few months before selling. (If only I had kept them going, but that's a sad
and off-topic story ....)

~~~
alok99
The 2011 mining wave was great. I sold a couple 7950s I had for double the
price of what I bought them for only about a month prior. Sadly I missed the
Ethereum wave

------
Thriptic
A quick search of eBay shows no good deals on gtx 1070s. Used cards are
selling for what I bought my cards new for a month ago or more (380).

~~~
lasc4r
Yeah I was just checking this myself, nothing great there. I did look to see
what my 1070 was selling for recently at various online sites. Looks like they
did spike in value starting in June, going from $380 to $500 and being sold at
fewer places.

[https://pcpartpicker.com/product/fKp323/msi-geforce-
gtx-1070...](https://pcpartpicker.com/product/fKp323/msi-geforce-gtx-1070-8gb-
video-card-gtx-1070-gaming-x-8g?history_days=365)

In a couple weeks maybe prices will be back to normal or even drop lower.

------
zo7
Interesting, looking at the price graph Ethereum's price seems to correlate
with Bitcoin's, which lost about %20 of value ($500) recently. In case
anyone's wondering, the crash seems mainly driven by anxiety of an upcoming
blockchain fork splitting the currency in two next month.

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-15/bitcoin-battered-
be...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-15/bitcoin-battered-
below-2000-ether-tumbles-august-1st-scaling-deadline-looms)

~~~
j_s
HN discussion: _Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st_ |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758587)

An interesting comment there mentioned the need to control private keys (as
opposed to leaving them with an exchange) to take advantage of a split by
selling coins on both sides of the split.

------
schiffern
Off topic, but the "ETH/USD" label on the price graph bothers me. Shouldn't it
be USD/ETH?

[https://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2017/07/16083553143...](https://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2017/07/16083553143l.jpg)

150 ETH/USD would mean that you can get 150 coins per 1 USD. On the other
hand, 150 USD/ETH correctly captures the mathematical relationship.

~~~
coolguy4
150 ETH/USD is normal forex notation.

The graph shows a currency pair. So one currency is being sold in exchange for
the other.

When you see currency pairs like this, ETH/USD, the first currency (ETH) is
the one being bought, the second currency (USD) is the one being sold. If the
chart is going up, the first currency is becoming stronger against the second.
If the chart is going down, the first currency is becoming weaker against the
second.

In that light it does make sense mathematically. The currency being sold is
the denominator and the currency being bought is the numerator. The value of
the currency being bought, the numerator is directly proportional to the
exchange value of the pair. The value of the currency being sold, the
denominator, is inversely proportional to the exchange value of the pair

~~~
jsmthrowaway
That it took you that much to explain kind of illustrates the point, I think.

------
corporateslave2
GPU trading? More profitable than buying the underlying currency since GPU's
in relatively good condition always hold a certain value?

High levels of correlation with BTC and ETH, along with other cryptocurrency,
but a floor on how low it can go.

Pays off while holding by mining coins. Much like a dividend.

~~~
WatchDog
Computer hardware depreciates rapidly, and is expensive to
trade(shipping/testing/labour).

~~~
zanny
It depreciates to a point. An i7 2600 depreciated about half its value when
the next generation came out, but 5 years later it still sells used for 40% of
its MSRP. The era of older chips being downright worthless passed circa
anything since ~2006.

The start of that era for GPUs was much more recent because they matured much
more into recent times, but I would easily say anything from the AMD 4000
series or the Nvidia 400 series and up has held value long term.

There is also some "classic" rebound for parts once they drop off the retail
market. If a specific component in a system from 2012 dies, be it the
motherboard; processor; or ram, the supply of replacement parts will gradually
dwindle over time as old hardware breaks down. It makes what you have all the
more valuable.

I still have a near-complete Nehalem desktop with the original i7 920, which
has a used retail price of around $30 (it depreciated a lot more than the
aforementioned i7 2600k because there were still substantial IPC improvements
between their generations) but my x58 deluxe motherboard can _still_ be sold
used for about $150-200. It has had a depreciation in 9 years of only about
30% from what I paid for it. Meanwhile the ram is almost worthless, mostly
because DDR3 is still available in retail.

This is also why its usually recommended to either buy new or buy the
immediate last generation hardware on the cheap. Anything older becomes a
scarce resource for repair purposes and can maintain value as such.

~~~
avh02
I miss my 920, it was such a beast

------
dawnerd
Good, maybe video cards will start to come back in stock at their MSRP.

~~~
mjevans
Or maybe people will actually develop things that //require// generic
algorithms, and multiple diversity of them so that it /forces/ generic
hardware proliferation.

~~~
jrockway
I think he just wants the video card to play games. Gamers have suffered from
low supply of graphics cards because of the mining fad. With that dying down,
they should be able to buy a card now.

~~~
dawnerd
Kinda, I needed a new card to power two 4k monitors for my office setup.
Needed it that day, so amazon was out of the question. All the local stores
had 1060s for basically what 1080s run at. Ended up just buying a 1080 for a
few bucks more, because why not. Apparently the 1060s are really good for
ethereum...

~~~
joshvm
The 1060s are quite efficient for mining, you can run them at a power target
of 60W and they'll still give you baseline performance (around 20MH/s).

------
vortico
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does a single party control the
difficulty level of Ethereum and Bitcoin? If so, it seems like they have
massive control over the market. If not, how does it work?

~~~
benchaney
The target amount of time per block was set as a global constant (1 block
every 10 minutes for bitcoin, 1 block every 15 seconds for ethereum). At fixed
intervals, the difficulty is adjusted based on the actual rate of mining. The
computation is deterministic, and agreed upon using the standard consensus
mechanism. No individual controls it.

~~~
dewhelmed
So does that mean the network is now demanding each ether be mined every 12
seconds (20% harder statistic mentioned in the linked article), or the
difficulty has increased naturally? E.g. there has been a large spike in the
number of ether miners lately, which has caused the network to naturally
readjust the difficulty to maintain the 15s/ether mining rate? If so, these
GPU miners leaving the field would readjust the difficulty back again towards
the original levels, or is this difficulty change a more permanent thing due
to some underlying change in the technology?

~~~
benchaney
> So does that mean the network is now demanding each ether be mined every 12
> seconds

You have it backwards. A 20% increase in difficulty would mean that a block
was only being mined once every 18s. The intuition is that if there are fewer
blocks, then it is harder to get one.

I think this change is due to the etherium difficulty bomb:

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/themerkle.com/what-is-the-
ether...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/themerkle.com/what-is-the-ethereum-
difficulty-bomb/amp/)

------
j_s
In case anyone is not aware, there are user-friendly tools (that take their
cut) which ensure maximum mining profitability for available hardware.

NiceHash, MinerGate, Awesome Miner and others - many have an affiliate program
and fight against botnets (and antivirus often block the actual mining
programs they download).

~~~
jameskegel
Minergate is not generally advisable. [1] [2]

[1] -
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0)

[2] - [https://forum.getmonero.org/3/merchants-and-
marketplace/2516...](https://forum.getmonero.org/3/merchants-and-
marketplace/2516/gingeropolous-s-list-of-trusted-monero-services)

~~~
j_s
Thanks for the heads-up! I saw NiceHash and MinerGate mentioned off-hand in a
random well-SEO'd article as easier alternatives instead of setting up
everything manually[1] (before that I didn't even realize this was a thing!),
and Awesome Miner came up recently as an option that appears to be freemium
with a one-time purchase instead of a percentage.

I chose NiceHash personally because it is open source. It was literally
download, click 'Benchmark', then after that finished, click 'Start'. They
even transferred the ~$3 I had earned when the Bitcoin transaction fees
dropped low enough to make it "worth it" even well below their normal minimum
payout threshold.

Do you have time to provide a bit of context for your links? The first one
doesn't even mention "MinerGate" on the first page of the 30 page discussion,
and the second is just a yes/no list with no explanation of why things are
where they are on the list or credentials for who made the list. There doesn't
seem to be any recent or ongoing massive backlash against MinerGate anywhere
online.

[1][https://www.bestvpn.com/ethereum-
mining/](https://www.bestvpn.com/ethereum-mining/)

\--

Maybe
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4bx1td/im_just_gonn...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4bx1td/im_just_gonna_come_out_and_say_it_minergate_is/)

    
    
      > "not as strong" connection between MinerGate + bytecoin scam
    

And the list is by an /r/Monero moderator; all about 1 year ago.

------
rdl
At least the NV cards, if they become non-viable for crypto mining, are useful
for a lot of other GPU computation (or just as graphics cards).

------
wunderg
I thought ethereum would move to Proof of State from Proof of Work which will
make mining as it's obsolete.

[https://www.ethnews.com/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-
expl...](https://www.ethnews.com/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-explained)

~~~
e79
Yes, although my understanding is that the transition will be gradual. PoW
rewards will gradually decrease while PoS rewards gradually increase,
facilitating the tranisitioon without all miners jumping ship. Miners who are
invested in Ethereum may choose to convert their mining profits into stake.

------
nsxwolf
I see an ebay buy it now for four 8GB RX 480s for $360. $90 a piece seems
pretty crazy low - does that mean there's a high likelyhood of hardware
failure after these things were used for mining?

~~~
rasz
no, it means you should read everything couple of times before clicking buy
now

------
horusthecat
Does anyone know where the money that initially went into the cryptocoins
during the run-up this year came from, or where it went?

~~~
rb808
It works like a Ponzi scheme. The people who are buying now give their money
to the people who got in earlier. As long as more and more people buy its
great but eventually you run out of buyers - optimistically the price will
level off but more realistically it'll crash.

~~~
billmalarky
This isn't correct and is downright misleading.

There are many possible scenarios. IE people will hold the Ether under the
assumption that it will be more valuable in the future. If the supply of
"sellers" goes down and the number of "buyers" stays constant, the price will
continue to go up (ignoring new ETH being created for simplicity).

As to how ETH could become valuable? Well if the network really does scale and
the possibility for decentralized apps really does come to pass, then this is
an incredibly transformative technology with a lot of potential, that runs on
ETH.

Ponzi schemes are scams because there is no value created, and it is known to
the scammers that there is no value being created. With crypto currencies the
value is big "unknown" which is why it's speculative, but it certainly isn't a
"scam" sense there is true potential there.

~~~
paulgb
It seems likely that more advanced currencies will continue to be developed.
Why would ETH continue to hold value when a more advanced currency comes
around, just as ETH has eaten into BTC mcap? It may not be an intentional
Ponzi scheme, but it seems like a bubble economy.

~~~
billmalarky
Same argument can be made for stocks in companies. Sure it could be a bubble.
No one knows the value of this stuff it's still 100% speculative (not
generating a known return). That's why there's so much potential for massive
returns at this stage.

That said, don't put money that you can't afford to lose into cryptocurrencies
or there's a good chance you could get hurt.

Also, it's a great way to get easy exposure to high risk investments as a part
of your risk adjusted portfolio.

~~~
paulgb
Stocks and crypto are both subject to speculation, but it's apples and
oranges. The actual value of a stock is its discounted future value. When
people speculate on stocks, they speculate on what its discounted future value
is.

With crypto, the discounted future value is by that definition zero. People
are instead speculating on what the consensus value will be, i.e. what they
will be able to sell it for. It seems that in time the consensus will favor
the currency with the best technology, not the one that was first.

(My personal bet is that all crypo will trend towards zero eventually, but
that's besides my point here)

------
kushankpoddar
There is a point of view out there that Europe's higher than average reliance
on renewables has bumped up electricity prices there and contributed in making
the place less competitive for industries. You can see that argument in action
when European miners are losing out to others due to high power costs.

~~~
leroman
If this is really the case (I am not informed enough), is that so bad in the
face of global warming?

~~~
dmichulke
Generally speaking, any slowdown in economic activity will lead to a slowdown
in global warming. The question is always: is the new equilibrium better or
worse for all involved? (Think of the unemployed)

I think a better metric would be $GDP / ton CO2 to see who's efficient and
who's not. Unfortunately, GDP numbers are not really standardized, at least
countrys' individual way of calculation GDP varies greatly.

~~~
pjc50
Wikipedia have a list of the numbers, with or without PPP compensation:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_GDP_to_carbon_dioxide_emissions)

It seems the keys to doing well on that scale are:

\- be a small African country without oil (low CO2/low GDP)

\- be a financial services exporter (Switzerland, Ireland, UK)

The countries which are doing badly seem to be central Asian former USSR
states, petro-states, China, and Zimbabwe.

------
Nursie
Excellent, my partner is looking for a card right now, a (lighly) used 1060,
1070 or 580 might be just the thing!

In the meantime, my machine which is a gaming rig that is mostly idle, may as
well do a bit of mining...

~~~
Ajedi32
> a (lighly) used 1060, 1070 or 580 might be just the thing

I'm not really sure I'd call a card that's been used for cryptocurrency mining
"lightly used".

------
tossandturn
Worst place to ask this, I know, but... If I wanted to upgrade my old machine
that currently has an HD 4770 (PCI Express 2.0 x16), where exactly could I
find a worthwhile upgrade for less than $20?

~~~
ryan-allen
And there's this place, too:
[http://www.logicalincrements.com/](http://www.logicalincrements.com/)

------
stOneskull
this 'flooding the market' claim seems to be made up.

------
justforFranz
Cryptocurrency noob here. Isn't the ability to "mine" a cryptocurrency a
design failure of the cryptocurrency?

------
Shinchy
Annoying as all hell, I am in the market for a 1080ti and the prices have
rocketed up in the past two weeks.

------
waspear
Ethereum's Casper protocol upgrade (Proof of Stake) might have a long term
affect on GPU market as well.

------
foota
Maybe I should have sold the R9 Fury I got for gaming a few months ago...

------
Temasik
Mining has no future

------
aussieguy123
Anyone doing deep learning?

~~~
joshvm
This is the primary reason I bought NVIDIA cards, rather than AMD. Mining is
still profitable now, but if it all went to nothing tomorrow I'd still have a
pretty competent CUDA box to develop on.

------
ryanSrich
Maybe this is an incredibly uneducated comment, but won't they have to buy
those GPUs back when the price of ETH inevitability goes up again? This is all
just FUD from August 1st, ICO instability, and lack of Ethereum use cases. All
of these issues have resolutions planned. So one would be stupid to think
Ethereum stays at $150 for even a year.

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bdcravens
> when the price of ETH inevitability goes up again

ETH has been around less than 2 years; it spent only 2 months over $150. I
don't see how any analysis that it will rise is better than a coin flip.

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kukabynd
It certainly will. With a number of participants in EEA and attention from
governments like Russia and Singapore. Plus, eventual Casper update that does
facilitate ETH staking as a decent form of position in the crypto market that
will only grow down the road. It’s a long term approach but one has to believe
in tech itself of course.

