Prices have stalled for about a month for the midrange at least… might be vendors watching where eth goes (it’s been stuck between 2700and 3k) and the Hong Kong shutdown…
Ugh... the 3070 has been mia in the US and the only thing you can get are those dreadful (imo) 3070ti's that use something like 50 more watts than the vanilla 3070 for only 7% more performance.
Can forget about only fans cooling your rig though, if ambient temperatures will be around 50 C there won't be enough cold air to cool your GPU I'm affraid :-)
The next generation of graphics cards is around the corner, with a pretty substantial performance improvement expected. Only buy a card now if you really, really have to - everyone else should just wait until Ada etc. Intel's new lineup that is launching right now might also relieve some pressure from the market, at least in the low-end.
If history's any record, this will be another paper launch, meaning unless you are extremely good at snatching up the limited stock, you won't get your hands on a next-gen GPU for a good while.
This implies that Ampère was a paper launch, which it wasn't. Compared to the previous generation, they delivered more units. It all got snatched up by the crypto miners directly at the factory. Since crypto prices are falling and ETH moves to POS, the situation might reverse substantially.
According to Jon Peddie Research, the combined number of desktop GPUs sold by AMD & NVidia:
Q3/2019 ~10,5 M
Q4/2019 ~11,8 M
Q1/2020 ~9,5 M
Q2/2020 ~10,1 M
Q3/2020 11,5 M
Q4/2020 11,0 M
Q1/2021 11,8 M
Q2/2021 11,47 M
Q3/2021 12,72 M
Afaik the best predictor for ETH hashrate is memory bandwidth. AMD's latest generation of GPUs actually employs a large on-die cache combined with slower memory compared to the 5000 series (and the NVIDIA 30 series), resulting in a naturally lower hashrate.
When you think about it : a company selling computing power deliberately restrain its product’s computing power just to avoid running out-of-stock because somehow people discovered they can sell some database entry created by wasting the most precious and vital resource we can gather in limited supply (energy) from sources that are changing our only planet to a cooking oven.
What a time to be alive.
I’m really amazed at how we as a species are so impressively intelligent but also so mindblowingly dumb at the same time.
But I’m not surprised : if you look at our species history : we were and are always just fighting our own stupidity.
Crypto miners are not even a drop in the ocean when it comes to the fucked-up things that humanity does.
The average person causes far more harm and literally millions of times more pain and suffering through their dietary choices alone than crypto miners ever could [1]. And we don't even get a trustless financial system out of it.
Crypto miners are just easy to hate because it's an excellent opportunity for people to point the finger at someone else without introspecting on the fact that they are no better.
Ah yeah sure, people running warehouses full of GPUs and reviving local coal power plants for their energy supply are doing less harm than than someone eating too much beef.
Unlike meat consumption, mining doesn't map neatly onto the entire population. It's a rich few that can even buy this much compute power.
How does crypto mining come even close? Sorry, which beings am I immersing in extreme pain and suffering by running hashes on my GPU?
Environmentally, Bitcoin and Ethereum's combined production of greenhouse gasses - ~50M tons CO2 - does not come anywhere close to the over 6 billion tons of CO2 of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by meat production.
Again, orders of magnitude more environmental damage, alongside the greatest cycle of sheer pain and suffering this planet has ever seen, and we don't even get something out of it. How can people point fingers at crypto miners while engaging in this far more harmful behavior?
It's a really terrible comparison and nothing but a cheap tu quoque.
Crypto contributes nothing but a speculative asset to society.
Meat production, while derailed into unsustainability, has a lot more utility and is also a lot harder to unwind from current culture. Try running a survey on which of the two people would rather forego, and your 100M to 6B ratio will look rather stupid.
I've used bitcoin as a currency in 2011, and now people keep telling me I shouldn't have because all I got for 2-million USD equivalent BTC then was a video game.
What's the point of a currency that doesn't scale and that everyone is too afraid to spend because of volatility.
Speculative asset, that's all you'll ever have there.
That comment belays a misunderstanding of the crypto sphere as a whole. If you don't want to partake in the speculative nature of the asset, you can simply transact with a stablecoin.
The one system is providing sustenance for billions of people, the other is used by tens of thousands of people. As is always forgotten to mention when this argument is made.
But this is an even worse argument than usual - the people speculating with crypto constructs are very often also part of the groups who consume a whole lot of meat...
You are off by 3 orders of magnitude. Bitcoin alone validates 7 million transactions monthly. If there were only 50k users, an average user would be sending 140 transactions per month.
What about trading and wash sales? Would not that make the average very high?
I have no numbers so I can't say more, but 140 transactions per month per user doesn't sound that high considering the above.
Much of that trading will happen off-chain using local accounts on some exchange and thus not contribute to the transaction count. Only the deposits and withdrawals require on-chain transactions.
Oh for the love of Christ. Unless you go fully Jainist, and eat only what you grow, after painstakingly removing insect pests and placing them elsewhere gently, nothing you eat is pain/suffering free.
Modern agricultural harvesting and processing always has a bykill of small mammals and ground nesting birds.
Organic farming often uses companion planting to attract natural predators of insect pests, so that insecticides don't need to be used (as much anyway, there's plenty of rather toxic compounds that are perfectly natural and organic yet kill things well, like derris dust).
How, though, do you distinguish between the suffering of cows, and the suffering of a dormouse, or the suffering of caterpillars that are being eaten from inside by the larvae of a parasitic wasp?
Are you basing your morality on "there's an arbitrary level of suffering I'll accept" or "I'm only opposed to the suffering of life that has at least N neurons?"
Or are you sweeping the path as you walk lest an ant be harmed?
In your country. In my country, we don't advertise beef as "grass fed" as a market segmentation tactic, because all our beef is grass fed, that's the only way we feed stock raised for beef.
Once again, it's not just a simple case of "all animal husbandry is unsustainable", but we need to pick apart why the unsustainable practices have been developed into what they are now.
My gut feeling is that Government subsidies of corn in the US create an oversupply of it, so sure, why not feed it to cattle?
It's not like the American beef industry was predicated on grain feeding, it started with ranchers grazing them on prairies.
It is not a average, it is the total global use of farming. Just because a few countries does better does not mean that it is okay. And that does not also change the fact that the 1 cow vs. 30 mice sounds like nonsense. And that if everyone ate less meat we would need less space for farming.
It's been vaporware forever, I'll believe it when I see it.
And I still wouldn't like it. Proof of Stake is even more directly aimed at making the rich richer, whereas Proof of Work only did it with a few extra steps. But at least they'd no longer be burning the planet.
Some of the most dedicated software engineers I’ve ever met have been working on it (transition to PoS) intensely for 2 years now and I heard from their own mouths (physically, in person) week before last just how excited they are it’s wrapping up.
None of this work has happened in the dark. The regular cross-team meetings, constant stream of commits on GitHub, etc. are in the open for all to see.
Next phase will be sharding and splitting out data availability from consensus strictly speaking, exciting times!
At best it will be another hard fork. The miners need to vote on the change to PoS, and why would they? It would render their mining equipment worthless.
It's the other way around. The miners can't do anything to prevent the switch since most major Ethereum users (aka Infrastructure providers) are clearly in favour and are already participating in the POS chain (which is currently running in parallel and without transactions).
When they update they miners are simply cut off.
Furthermore, Ethereum contains a self destruct mechanism that requires a hard fork. Unless miners can coordinate a competing POW fork (and convince rich people that the bad PR and profits for them are worth it) they won't be able to do anything.
It obviously wouldn't be as large and probably suffer from everyone on real ETH selling off their duplicated assets, but it'll surely be a thing, a last ditch effort to keep mining rigs profitable before everyone moves on to the next best coin?
It's not unreasonable to think of POS as vaporware since it was first announced as coming in 2017.
However this time around they have working implementations in all relevant clients which are being stress tested and debugged since a few months.
So far there have been quite a few bugs but nothing fundamental.
I'd say it's not unrealistic to expect the switch happening this summer according to the unofficial time line. There are a few billion dollars staked already and those funds as are locked until it happens.
The technology isn't the difficult part though. Will miners replace PoW with PoS? What will they do with all the GPUs and cheap access to electricity they've invested millions or billions in? The social aspects transition will be immensely more difficult than the technological aspects.
But I do hope that, somehow, all those miners will just... accept the move to PoS and turn off their mining farms. I just don't see it as extremely likely.
As I wrote in another comment, the miners are not really in control once there is an alternative solution.
They can continue using POW (if they manage to coordinate an independent self-destruct mechanism override) however they cannot force the actual users (private individuals and infrastructure providers) to do so.
If miners don't manage to capture a significant fraction of ETH value in their hypothetical ETHPOW chain it won't be worth their effort. Buying a GPU for mining now caries a significant business risk and prices are already declining.
PS: There are billions of dollars already staked in the (currently empty) POS chain.
Well, we'll see I guess. I certainly hope you're right. But PoS has been "right around the corner" for the last half decade at least, so I'll believe it when I see it.
I do wonder what miners would do with all their hardware and infrastructure tho. Presumably they'll all just move to another cryptocurrency and nothing really changed, etherium got a little cleaner while bitcoin or whatever got a little dirtier.
> The average person causes far more harm and literally millions of times more pain and suffering through their dietary choices alone than crypto miners ever could. And we don't even get a trustless financial system out of it.
Yes, the feeding habits of 7 billions people produces more CO2 than a virtual casino that benefits... millions? How is that surprising, and how can you try to paint that as worse?
And even though we should do more to change dietary habits of people who can, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything else where we can until this is done. This is classic useless whataboutism.
Also, we don't get a trustless financial system out of cryptos. We get the utopia of one.
> Crypto miners are not even a drop in the ocean when it comes to the fucked-up things that humanity does.
Crypto miners use as much energy as Norway. It's responsible for 78 million tons of CO2 per year, as much as 15M cars. [1]
Yearly emissions for all of humanity is at around 36B tons of CO2. So mining is 1/500th of all our emissions.
Since one drop is 0.05mL, your "ocean" is about half of a shot glass, or 5 teaspoons.
Or, the other way around, if our emissions are all of our oceans, then mining emissions are 70% of the mediterranean. So much for "not even a drop".
Second paragraph: “One estimate found that the energy required to process transactions on the Bitcoin network could power a home for more than 70 days”
Any interpretation of this doesn’t make any sense. I’m really not sure we can easily make energy per transaction calculations.
I don’t have a hard opinion on the energy implications of pow chains yet. part of me sees it pushing clean infrastructure into production. using produced, but previously unused, energy.
now there’s the e-waste issue… which I am NOT a happy camper about.
> Yes, the feeding habits of 7 billions people produces
Let's be clear, the "feeding habits" are completely unnecessary for 6 out of those 7 billion people and create the largest cycle of suffering this planet has ever seen by several orders of magnitude. People eat meat for their taste buds to go brr - a plant based diet is fine otherwise.
It's not "whataboutism" when the sheer scales of suffering involved are so different. Crypto barely harms anyone. The meat industry causes over 60 billion beings a year to undergo extreme suffering.
Crypto is not even on the map as an issue in comparison. Complaining about crypto as someone that is fine with meat consumption - or indeed, consumes meat - is simply absurd. But what can I say? People love to throw stones from glass houses.
> It's not "whataboutism" when the sheer scales of suffering involved are so different.
It is 100% whataboutism because those 2 issues have 0 correlations. People that benefits from crypto eat meat as much as people that don't. We can stop mining crypto and stop eating meat at the same time. One has absolutely no bearing on the other.
By your logic, then it's ok to do any fucked up thing, since we can always find something worse to complain about, which I'm sure you can see why, is a completely stupid logic.
Food chains are a natural occurrence. It's the default way and if your disagreement with that is a biological maladaptation. But if you're only vegan for health reasons, that's respectable.
There is no sufferosphere, the supposed suffering is intangible. These farm animals were born to eat, reproduce, and be eaten - they had no higher purpose, and without humans wouldn't exist in the first place.
Millions of years of evolution proved that it's a good way for different animals. It's only recently that Big Carb tries to paint our ancestors as unhealthy goons. Granted that was tongue in cheek but we can see how easy it is to push experimental food on the market with margarine, spam, and other crap.
Okay, and you can argue we were naturally never supposed to be in the billions. You can argue if global warming wipes out our farms, we can only blame ourselves, and demographic crashes are a given, not a crysis.
I'm not particularly religious, so I don't know about "supposed to be", but I see no ethical way of significantly reducing human population quickly enough for it to matter for climate change. It is much easier to change our behavior to reduce environmental impact. Switching everyone to a carnivore diet to spite "Big Carb" is certainly not the right direction.
There were two billion humans on the planet before "big carb". People used to eat things like butter without fear of cholesterol and they didn't even suffer the heart attacks that avoiding cholesterol was supposed to prevent.
Humans have been getting most of their calories from grains essentially since we invented agriculture, thousands of years before the population reached even one billion.
I gave an example of experimental foods being pushed as cheap substitutes for the real thing, and how quickly society accepted them. I'm postulating that's what's happening with the trend of veganism.
Definitely agree. There's sustainable animal husbandry, and unsustainable. But eating meat doesn't inexorably lead to cutting down rainforests, Brazilian farmers will also happily cut them down to plant GM-free soya, which attracts a premium in the US and European markets over the bulk of soya farmed in the US.
The problem is far vaguer and harder to solve than "eat less meat."
I can't even properly frame it beyond "something something globalisation, something something no easy route to monetise leaving the Amazon standing as a carbon sink".
I used to think that. But if you look closer at the life of current industry-farmed livestock, that is _not_ a life to be enjoyed. Sure, you can get proper happy beef. Say [1]. But then, you're looking at about $35 per pound.
You realize that a large fraction of the land that we farm produces fodder for livestock? Everyone being vegan would greatly reduce the amount of land we need to farm. Sure, some meat can be produced from agricultural waste or from grazing on pastures, but the reality of industrialized meat production is so far away from that that you might as well disregard it. Almost nobody would be able to afford meat anymore.
No, pretty much none of the land that we farm only produces fodder for livestock. When it does, it's because the land has been turned over to grass for a year. This is important, because if you don't do that the soil rapidly becomes useless for growing anything. We then cut and bale up the grass to feed to cattle and sheep over the winter.
If you don't do this, you end up with nothing to eat, either from livestock or arable farming.
We don't have enough arable land for everyone to be vegan.
So is it safe to assume you are a vegan who grows all their own food to minimise your impact on CO2 emissions, while you participate in the "trustless financial system"?
Otherwise you are a hypocrite.
Personally I will not participate in the "trustless financial system" AND try to eat less meat.
It is not just about what you alone can "mine", your participation is only made possible by ALL the miners burning electricity to keep the global state of the network. Without that combined wasted energy and CO2 generation there is no system for you to "benefit" from.
Anyway, you didn't tell us if you have stopped eating meat.
>The average person causes far more harm and literally millions of times more pain and suffering through their dietary choices alone than crypto miners ever could [1]. And we don't even get a trustless financial system out of it.
I'm pretty sure the humans that developed those trustless financial systems made dietary choices that you would disapprove of. What am I even talking about? They are probably gods in your eyes and therefore allowed to break your arbitrary rules.
I have reached the same conclusion by walking around.
On the one hand, our species has invented and built e-scooters which have GPS and an internet connection, a digital screen and 50km of range, which is an impressive energy and technology density for what used to be a children's toy.
On the other hand, the insight that parking them on the bicycle lane is dangerous has evaded most of our species so far.
And the companies renting them out as a business claims it's a green movement while they are replacing the whole fleet every two months because they break down.
I'm pretty sure the lifetime of the scooters has increased significantly since those reports. Low lifetime was an artifact of rapid VC fueld expansions where the companies threw whatever hardware they could get on the streets. Subsequent iterations on the design improved durability.
They look like tanks nowadays. It's pretty interesting to see how the design has improved to reduce repair time. The battery is no longer locked underneath the scooter, now you can just lift it out if you have the right tools. Which makes sense, the scooters probably got more expensive and to compensate they need to focus on ease of repairability.
It hasn't evaded anyone. People just don't care. Parking e-scooters on bike lanes is dangerous for you, but convenient for me.
The general lack of regulations and the total of $0 spent on enforcing them, leads to e-scooters drivers acting simultaneously like car, bikes, and pedestrian depending on what's most convenient.
I completely agree, seeing bad behavior happening frequently on the streets, I just realized that governments just chose to ignore those and not enforce law. There are some extreme, like SF of course. But I feel like this is a tendency among many places around Europe. And this saddens me, when did society decide that laws are not to be applied?
>most precious and vital resource we can gather in limited supply (energy)
???
What leads one to this opinion? The problem with energy isn't that there isn't enough of it but we're not exploiting enough of it. I want a personal fusion reactor, not a tax on existing.
Why does viscerally hating cryptobros lead people to wanting to kneecap humanity forever, huddling around solar-powered heaters in winter, eating impossible soy products?
I think the issue here is not how we could gather energy, but how it is done currently. A lot of crypto mining runs on limited resources such as gas or oil. If we had limitless power this would not be an issue of course, but that is a dream scenario
Because often it is cheaper to exploit the limited resources because that is what we have done for decades and already have a good infrastructure around it. There have been a lot of innovation in the area of renewables and "unlimited" resources such as solar. But it is not being driven by people needing more energy but by various regulations and now also price.
I don't think it's too interesting to talk about how oil, gas and coal are "limited resources", since we've clearly shown to be good at innovating in methods of extraction. The most interesting aspect to me isn't that we'll run out of oil/gas/coal, but that we'll have destroyed the environment through greenhouse gases long before we run out of those resources.
With this analysis, it makes total sense why it would be cheap. Extracting fossil fuels is cheap and will continue to be so for a long time. The true cost of energy from oil, gas and coal is in the emissions, but those are externalities which aren't paid for by the people who use the energy. The only way increased energy demand would lead to innovation in renewables would be if those externalities were somehow made part of the cost of the energy, such as by a heavy carbon tax. But cryptobros are usually the right-libertarian types who wouldn't be in favor of that.
"He used also to say that when he saw physicians, philosophers and pilots at their work, he deemed man the most intelligent of all animals ; but when again he saw interpreters of dreams and diviners and those who attended to them, or those who were puffed up with conceit of wealth, he thought no animal more silly."
It's not to avoid running out of stock; it's so that crypto miners have to buy a more expensive card. Same reason they don't allow gaming GPUs to be used in AI datacentres.
I've given up all hope that more GPU is the answer to more fun.
These days I spend my free time at a cabin in the woods, hand crafting a software rasterizer in protest of all of this bullshit.
Developers still don't realize how powerful that CPU is. Especially now in 2022... We were playing quake on a single thread with clock rates measured in hundreds of megahertz. How much faster is an AMD Rome system compared to the best you could buy in the mid 90s? Just do some linear extrapolation with those figures.
I still marvel at how powerful pure JavaScript in the browser is. I'm not even talking EMCAScript with its classes and other syntactic junk, just pure JS free of any bells and whistles or bloated frameworks or opinionated design strategies.
Its ability to manipulate the DOM, including SVGs, in real-time, fully-introspectable, just blows my mind away.
You can also get a canvas to draw like butter these days. Gaming monitor refresh rate territory. With proper use of requestAnimationFrame I see 144 fps on my PC.
> We were playing quake on a single thread with clock rates measured in hundreds of megahertz. How much faster is an AMD Rome system compared to the best you could buy in the mid 90s?
Modern games are also have much more detail in their textures, many more particles, and much higher screen resolution; not to mention physics and visual effects. No. of transistors may have risen exponentially, but aspects of games have increased exponentially and quadratically as well.
Agreed - but again, fun certainly has not increased by these same rates.
Let's try this a different way:
Is it possible there is some gameplay concept that is so engaging that even technical caveats like a 640x480 resolution would not severely impact the enjoyment of most players?
What is the actual limit of this stuff if you flip the equation around? How much janky bullshit can a substantial portion of your target market put up with for the sake of fun in 2022?
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadhttps://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/uke679/latest_niceh...
But apparently does not apply to the 3080 12gb and 3050 as they have a different LHR lock.
It could be a win-win for both of the actors and for gamers (not for humanity’s future but at least we could have some games)
According to Jon Peddie Research, the combined number of desktop GPUs sold by AMD & NVidia:
https://www.3dcenter.org/dateien/abbildungen/AMD-nVidia-Reta...
Correlation with ETH price (in yellow) was high previously but now it's low
What a time to be alive.
I’m really amazed at how we as a species are so impressively intelligent but also so mindblowingly dumb at the same time.
But I’m not surprised : if you look at our species history : we were and are always just fighting our own stupidity.
The average person causes far more harm and literally millions of times more pain and suffering through their dietary choices alone than crypto miners ever could [1]. And we don't even get a trustless financial system out of it.
Crypto miners are just easy to hate because it's an excellent opportunity for people to point the finger at someone else without introspecting on the fact that they are no better.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
Unlike meat consumption, mining doesn't map neatly onto the entire population. It's a rich few that can even buy this much compute power.
Bitcoin is 137 TW/h/yr
Etherium is 112 TW/h/yr
(thanks for pointing out me messing up units)
Those are both mid sized countries by now.
Environmentally, Bitcoin and Ethereum's combined production of greenhouse gasses - ~50M tons CO2 - does not come anywhere close to the over 6 billion tons of CO2 of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by meat production.
Again, orders of magnitude more environmental damage, alongside the greatest cycle of sheer pain and suffering this planet has ever seen, and we don't even get something out of it. How can people point fingers at crypto miners while engaging in this far more harmful behavior?
Crypto contributes nothing but a speculative asset to society.
Meat production, while derailed into unsustainability, has a lot more utility and is also a lot harder to unwind from current culture. Try running a survey on which of the two people would rather forego, and your 100M to 6B ratio will look rather stupid.
One shitty behavior doesn't excuse another.
We will have to agree to disagree that stimulating the taste buds has more utility than providing a trustless financial system.
What's the point of a currency that doesn't scale and that everyone is too afraid to spend because of volatility.
Speculative asset, that's all you'll ever have there.
Didn't have that one on my bingo card...
But this is an even worse argument than usual - the people speculating with crypto constructs are very often also part of the groups who consume a whole lot of meat...
You are off by 3 orders of magnitude. Bitcoin alone validates 7 million transactions monthly. If there were only 50k users, an average user would be sending 140 transactions per month.
You are not making a great case here.
Patently false. For example an "average" processor like Western Union processes only 25 million transactions monthly.
"with the option of reversal"
Which is the whole problem. Bitcoin is irreversible, by design. That's crucial.
Modern agricultural harvesting and processing always has a bykill of small mammals and ground nesting birds.
Organic farming often uses companion planting to attract natural predators of insect pests, so that insecticides don't need to be used (as much anyway, there's plenty of rather toxic compounds that are perfectly natural and organic yet kill things well, like derris dust).
How, though, do you distinguish between the suffering of cows, and the suffering of a dormouse, or the suffering of caterpillars that are being eaten from inside by the larvae of a parasitic wasp?
Are you basing your morality on "there's an arbitrary level of suffering I'll accept" or "I'm only opposed to the suffering of life that has at least N neurons?"
Or are you sweeping the path as you walk lest an ant be harmed?
Once again, it's not just a simple case of "all animal husbandry is unsustainable", but we need to pick apart why the unsustainable practices have been developed into what they are now.
My gut feeling is that Government subsidies of corn in the US create an oversupply of it, so sure, why not feed it to cattle?
It's not like the American beef industry was predicated on grain feeding, it started with ranchers grazing them on prairies.
So what changed?
And I still wouldn't like it. Proof of Stake is even more directly aimed at making the rich richer, whereas Proof of Work only did it with a few extra steps. But at least they'd no longer be burning the planet.
None of this work has happened in the dark. The regular cross-team meetings, constant stream of commits on GitHub, etc. are in the open for all to see.
Next phase will be sharding and splitting out data availability from consensus strictly speaking, exciting times!
When they update they miners are simply cut off.
Furthermore, Ethereum contains a self destruct mechanism that requires a hard fork. Unless miners can coordinate a competing POW fork (and convince rich people that the bad PR and profits for them are worth it) they won't be able to do anything.
It obviously wouldn't be as large and probably suffer from everyone on real ETH selling off their duplicated assets, but it'll surely be a thing, a last ditch effort to keep mining rigs profitable before everyone moves on to the next best coin?
However unless it captures a siginficant fraction of ETH value it won't be worth much and in turn won't be attractive to miners.
Right now ETH makes up 95+ percent of all GPU miner revenue and there aren't a lot of (successful) new POW coins these days.
I think the (GPU mining) market simply collapsing has a high likelihood.
However this time around they have working implementations in all relevant clients which are being stress tested and debugged since a few months.
So far there have been quite a few bugs but nothing fundamental.
I'd say it's not unrealistic to expect the switch happening this summer according to the unofficial time line. There are a few billion dollars staked already and those funds as are locked until it happens.
I fully agree with your other point.
But I do hope that, somehow, all those miners will just... accept the move to PoS and turn off their mining farms. I just don't see it as extremely likely.
They can continue using POW (if they manage to coordinate an independent self-destruct mechanism override) however they cannot force the actual users (private individuals and infrastructure providers) to do so.
If miners don't manage to capture a significant fraction of ETH value in their hypothetical ETHPOW chain it won't be worth their effort. Buying a GPU for mining now caries a significant business risk and prices are already declining.
PS: There are billions of dollars already staked in the (currently empty) POS chain.
I do wonder what miners would do with all their hardware and infrastructure tho. Presumably they'll all just move to another cryptocurrency and nothing really changed, etherium got a little cleaner while bitcoin or whatever got a little dirtier.
Let's hope that POW turns out to be a very brief (in the great scheme of things) peak of human creativity / stupidity.
For reference, 120 TWh/yr is only twice the production of the Baihetan dam https://web.archive.org/web/20160302215312/http://english.cw...
Most people don't picture that an entire "mid sized" country could run off only 2 hydro dams.
And tasty.
Yes, the feeding habits of 7 billions people produces more CO2 than a virtual casino that benefits... millions? How is that surprising, and how can you try to paint that as worse?
And even though we should do more to change dietary habits of people who can, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything else where we can until this is done. This is classic useless whataboutism.
Also, we don't get a trustless financial system out of cryptos. We get the utopia of one.
> Crypto miners are not even a drop in the ocean when it comes to the fucked-up things that humanity does.
Crypto miners use as much energy as Norway. It's responsible for 78 million tons of CO2 per year, as much as 15M cars. [1]
Yearly emissions for all of humanity is at around 36B tons of CO2. So mining is 1/500th of all our emissions.
Since one drop is 0.05mL, your "ocean" is about half of a shot glass, or 5 teaspoons.
Or, the other way around, if our emissions are all of our oceans, then mining emissions are 70% of the mediterranean. So much for "not even a drop".
[1] https://energycommerce.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/pal...
Any interpretation of this doesn’t make any sense. I’m really not sure we can easily make energy per transaction calculations.
I don’t have a hard opinion on the energy implications of pow chains yet. part of me sees it pushing clean infrastructure into production. using produced, but previously unused, energy.
now there’s the e-waste issue… which I am NOT a happy camper about.
Let's be clear, the "feeding habits" are completely unnecessary for 6 out of those 7 billion people and create the largest cycle of suffering this planet has ever seen by several orders of magnitude. People eat meat for their taste buds to go brr - a plant based diet is fine otherwise.
It's not "whataboutism" when the sheer scales of suffering involved are so different. Crypto barely harms anyone. The meat industry causes over 60 billion beings a year to undergo extreme suffering.
Crypto is not even on the map as an issue in comparison. Complaining about crypto as someone that is fine with meat consumption - or indeed, consumes meat - is simply absurd. But what can I say? People love to throw stones from glass houses.
It is 100% whataboutism because those 2 issues have 0 correlations. People that benefits from crypto eat meat as much as people that don't. We can stop mining crypto and stop eating meat at the same time. One has absolutely no bearing on the other.
By your logic, then it's ok to do any fucked up thing, since we can always find something worse to complain about, which I'm sure you can see why, is a completely stupid logic.
There is no sufferosphere, the supposed suffering is intangible. These farm animals were born to eat, reproduce, and be eaten - they had no higher purpose, and without humans wouldn't exist in the first place.
The problem is far vaguer and harder to solve than "eat less meat."
I can't even properly frame it beyond "something something globalisation, something something no easy route to monetise leaving the Amazon standing as a carbon sink".
[1]: https://www.coop.ch/en/food/meat-fish/packaged-fresh-meat/be...
If you don't do this, you end up with nothing to eat, either from livestock or arable farming.
We don't have enough arable land for everyone to be vegan.
Otherwise you are a hypocrite.
Personally I will not participate in the "trustless financial system" AND try to eat less meat.
I am comfortable with my emissions. Those that eat meat are certainly hypocrites if they judge them.
Anyway, you didn't tell us if you have stopped eating meat.
I'm pretty sure the humans that developed those trustless financial systems made dietary choices that you would disapprove of. What am I even talking about? They are probably gods in your eyes and therefore allowed to break your arbitrary rules.
instead of policy being decided by elected representatives it's now decided by a few rando developers on github and mining pool cabals
hardly an improvement
On the one hand, our species has invented and built e-scooters which have GPS and an internet connection, a digital screen and 50km of range, which is an impressive energy and technology density for what used to be a children's toy.
On the other hand, the insight that parking them on the bicycle lane is dangerous has evaded most of our species so far.
The general lack of regulations and the total of $0 spent on enforcing them, leads to e-scooters drivers acting simultaneously like car, bikes, and pedestrian depending on what's most convenient.
???
What leads one to this opinion? The problem with energy isn't that there isn't enough of it but we're not exploiting enough of it. I want a personal fusion reactor, not a tax on existing.
Why does viscerally hating cryptobros lead people to wanting to kneecap humanity forever, huddling around solar-powered heaters in winter, eating impossible soy products?
With this analysis, it makes total sense why it would be cheap. Extracting fossil fuels is cheap and will continue to be so for a long time. The true cost of energy from oil, gas and coal is in the emissions, but those are externalities which aren't paid for by the people who use the energy. The only way increased energy demand would lead to innovation in renewables would be if those externalities were somehow made part of the cost of the energy, such as by a heavy carbon tax. But cryptobros are usually the right-libertarian types who wouldn't be in favor of that.
Good, now enjoy the rest of your life fully aware that you will always be paying that tax every single year through the process known as "aging".
The life of Diogenes in Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius*, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
It's called "price differentiation".
These days I spend my free time at a cabin in the woods, hand crafting a software rasterizer in protest of all of this bullshit.
Developers still don't realize how powerful that CPU is. Especially now in 2022... We were playing quake on a single thread with clock rates measured in hundreds of megahertz. How much faster is an AMD Rome system compared to the best you could buy in the mid 90s? Just do some linear extrapolation with those figures.
Its ability to manipulate the DOM, including SVGs, in real-time, fully-introspectable, just blows my mind away.
Modern games are also have much more detail in their textures, many more particles, and much higher screen resolution; not to mention physics and visual effects. No. of transistors may have risen exponentially, but aspects of games have increased exponentially and quadratically as well.
Let's try this a different way:
Is it possible there is some gameplay concept that is so engaging that even technical caveats like a 640x480 resolution would not severely impact the enjoyment of most players?
What is the actual limit of this stuff if you flip the equation around? How much janky bullshit can a substantial portion of your target market put up with for the sake of fun in 2022?