I've never built a PC. I expect the crytpocurency bubble to collapse because my tech ignorant accountant friend asked what I know about building a crypto mining rig.
What should I read to prepare myself to take advantage of the cheap used high end hardware that will hit the market do build a Windows or Linux system for my own pleasure.
Coinbase had IPO, meaning serious business bought their shares, hedge and pension funds - I would be careful expecting any kind of normalcy in the next 2-3 years.
Coinbase had a direct listing. There was no roadshow to line up institutional investors. I'm sure some big-time investors bought shares, but I'm sure some retail ones did, too. You know who sold? Early Coinbase investors and employees.
>I wouldn't count on it collapsing any time soon. Not with everyone from Visa to Time magazine jumping on the bandwagon
"Jump on the bandwagon"
Meaning: to support a cause only because it is popular to do so.
Sounds like a bubble. I encourage more people to jump on the bandwagon. I'm not in a hurry to get my new computer and the bigger the bubble gets the more cheap hardware will be available when it pops.
Cryptocurrency is a logical response to central banks around the world trying to print their way out of their bad decisions instead of putting the ultra wealthy in their place.
That's why crypto isn't going anywhere and this will only get worse.
>Cryptocurrency is a logical response to central banks around the world trying to print their way out of their bad decisions instead of putting the ultra wealthy in their place.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. To me this sounds like political rhetoric not an argument.
Are you saying that cryptocurrency can replace central banks?
Are you saying that cryptocurrency is some kind of revenge or punishment against central banks and wealthy?
Are you saying something else??
I mined bitcoin, litecoin and later dogecoin on a bunch of workstations in a hot humid garage in Houston, Texas for years straight. I gave one of the workstations to a friend when I retired from mining in 2013 or so. It was still running fine when he retired it last year.
Consumer electronics are much more durable than you would imagine.
Miners usually undervolt the GPUs to mine at peak efficiency, not peak performance and power consumption. Since chip wear correlates with power usage and heat production, GPU usage for mining is actually much less taxing for the hardware than typical gaming use with its frequent overclocking and rapid alterations between low and maximum power use.
It is also important to realize the wear on the chips is relevant on the order of 100 years. What fails on the order of 1-5 years are capacitors and insulation on the power supply coil windings and fan motor windings, but the latter only sometimes.
Capacitors notably derate exponentially with increasing temperature as do many other things.
To echo the other commenters, mining is pretty gentle on GPUs insofar as constant use goes. ETH is memory bandwidth limited, so cards can be heavily undervolted and underclocked (while overclocking memory) saving power without negatively affecting hashrate. More power is wasteful. Typical ETH mining GPU temps are around 60C. I'd feel ok about buying a used card off someone who knows what they're doing mining.
The 3080 and 3090 are the singular exception. The GDDR6X runs extremely hot and frankly I think it's going to cause a bunch of early failures for even non-mining cards.
What should I read to prepare myself to take advantage of the cheap used high end hardware that will hit the market do build a Windows or Linux system for my own pleasure.