I'm only tangentially familiar with it so someone else please correct me if I'm wrong.
Etherium requires a significant memory footprint to compute, whereas BTC and LTC do not. As such, an ASIC was able to have a heap of compute power but very little memory and it'd crunch through as much hashing as a GPU with far less upfront cost.
Etherium on the other hand requires lots of memory, so to add on the memory to the ASIC you essentially kill its competitiveness against a mass-produced GPU from a capital investment point of view.
LTC had a high memory use compared to bitcoin, but ASICs caught up to it. Ethereum is designed to have high and increasing memory use, to make it a moving target that is hard to hit with anything more cost-efficient than a GPU.
Mining algorithms that have aspects that are thought to be harder/more expensive to implement as ASIC chips.
For example, Ethereum implements a number of tactics to achieve that:
- relatively large memory size and bandwidth requirements.
- linearly growing memory requirements over time.
- announced plans to deprecate mining altogether and switch to proof-of-stake, turning all specialized hardware into pumpkins when it happens.
I don't know that it's necessarily enough to make ASIC miners impossible, but it seems to have had some success at keeping the bulk of the mining on GPUs, longer than some of its peers.
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.
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.
Bitcoin uses a hashing algorithm called SHA256. This algorithm is easily implemented in hardware and is very parallelizeable. It's a simple pipeline with some adds, rotations, bit shifts, xors, etc. Once people started to build ASICs to mine Bitcoin, GPU mining simply wasn't competetive.
There are many other types of hashing algorithms, many of which aren't as easily pipeline-able. For instance, if a hashing algorithm requires a few megabytes of memory, than making a custom ASIC isn't going to have such a slam-dunk advantage over a GPU.
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/.
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.
I think this is what's going on in the 10-20x altcoin price growth - people are taking portfolio diversification ideas into the crypto space and "investing" in complete cack. When most coins have no substance or inherent utility value or chance of success aside from maybe the top 2, this seems to me like a bad idea.
We're seeing billions of new capital pouring into altcoins for reasons that don't seem well founded or sustainable. I am hopeful some sort of mechanisms will evolve to guide the capital flows towards more useful things within the crypto space, right now it feels like a blend of kickstarter/pyramid selling/lottery on a global scale.
While the going is good though, I wonder if AMD themselves could boost their balance sheet with a mining side operation :D
Can confirm: have friend of a friend who just invested about 2000 euros (or maybe more) in a machine that he installed at home in order to mine for ethereum. His decision was based on the price of ethereum doubling or so in the last month. He's not an IT guy, he paid "consultancy" services to a friend of his who set up the machine for him. We'll see how this will go. From the outside it sounds like a bubble.
> His decision was based on the price of ethereum doubling or so in the last month.
Wouldn't it be a lot less time and effort just to buy the crypto currency and hold it?
I mean it seems a bit foolhardy to get into currency speculation (because that's what this is) by investing a large amount of money on hardware they don't have an alternate use for...
You can always have an alternate use for GPUs. Password recovery, Folding@Home, machine learning stuff (nvidia is more supported for ML, but there are OpenCL packages), extreme overclocking for HWBot points, of course you can sell GPUs to gamers, build gaming PCs with them and sell those to gamers, keep a couple to build a multi-GPU gaming setup for yourself :D
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.
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.
Yes. Running a GPU at 100% continuously will significantly shorten the lifespan of the chip, the chances of picking up something that's not got much life left is high.
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."
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.
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.
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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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadDon't know what an AIB is though.
Etherium requires a significant memory footprint to compute, whereas BTC and LTC do not. As such, an ASIC was able to have a heap of compute power but very little memory and it'd crunch through as much hashing as a GPU with far less upfront cost.
Etherium on the other hand requires lots of memory, so to add on the memory to the ASIC you essentially kill its competitiveness against a mass-produced GPU from a capital investment point of view.
For example, Ethereum implements a number of tactics to achieve that:
- relatively large memory size and bandwidth requirements.
- linearly growing memory requirements over time.
- announced plans to deprecate mining altogether and switch to proof-of-stake, turning all specialized hardware into pumpkins when it happens.
I don't know that it's necessarily enough to make ASIC miners impossible, but it seems to have had some success at keeping the bulk of the mining on GPUs, longer than some of its peers.
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.
There are many other types of hashing algorithms, many of which aren't as easily pipeline-able. For instance, if a hashing algorithm requires a few megabytes of memory, than making a custom ASIC isn't going to have such a slam-dunk advantage over a GPU.
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.
The Dutch Tulip Mania was not limited to Tulips of a single color.
[1] http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/
[2] https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/global-stock-market-cap...
I don't why anyone would want to pay bitcoin for an unknown altcoin but I guess some people are gambling on an altcoin to become successful.
We're seeing billions of new capital pouring into altcoins for reasons that don't seem well founded or sustainable. I am hopeful some sort of mechanisms will evolve to guide the capital flows towards more useful things within the crypto space, right now it feels like a blend of kickstarter/pyramid selling/lottery on a global scale.
While the going is good though, I wonder if AMD themselves could boost their balance sheet with a mining side operation :D
Wouldn't it be a lot less time and effort just to buy the crypto currency and hold it?
I mean it seems a bit foolhardy to get into currency speculation (because that's what this is) by investing a large amount of money on hardware they don't have an alternate use for...
You can always have an alternate use for GPUs. Password recovery, Folding@Home, machine learning stuff (nvidia is more supported for ML, but there are OpenCL packages), extreme overclocking for HWBot points, of course you can sell GPUs to gamers, build gaming PCs with them and sell those to gamers, keep a couple to build a multi-GPU gaming setup for yourself :D
Same thing happened when I was mining in 2013. Sold my hardware for a profit after I'd mined profitably.
ETH was 8$ in Jan now it's almost 250$.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
nvidia 1060 or what?