Why gamers dont start to mine to destroy miners?

[Patrik_]

Hi, as we know gpus shortage is horrible and its not gonna get better any time soon. When covid crisis came, we all used our gpus for Folding&Home and produced computing power never seen before. 

Why dont we use our power again? Do you think If we were able to pull off the same computing power, mining would be so difficult that miners would have to sell their gpus just to cut loses? 

[WhitetailAni]

Just now, Patrik_ said:

Hi, as we know gpus shortage is horrible and its not gonna get better any time soon. When covid crisis came, we all used our gpus for Folding&Home and produced computing power never seen before. 

Why dont we use our power again?

What do you mean, again?
The COVID-19 pandemic isn't over.

And yes, I know we have a vaccine.

[Alex Atkin UK]

10 minutes ago, ragnarok0273 said:

What do you mean, again?
The COVID-19 pandemic isn't over.

And yes, I know we have a vaccine.

By again I presume they mean compared to at the start of pandemic where there was a competition to see how much we could do.  Naturally after so long we had to move on.  I myself stopped as the heatpads on my GPU started to sweat and summer months came in, so it was no longer practical to do.  Plus I wanted to game.

 

Ultimately though no, I don't see how we can compete with miners who might have 7 GPUs per PC, and more than one of them.  I really wish mining would just go away as its terrible for the environment and gamers.

[Levent]

Yeah chief, that aint gonna work.

[Sauron]

13 minutes ago, Patrik_ said:

we all used our gpus for Folding&Home and produced computing power never seen before. 

never seen before for folding at home, which is specifically mostly contributed to by home users for free. mining has a money incentive so you better believe the numbers are a lot higher.

 

don't worry though, eventually miners always sell their cards. it's just a matter of whether anyone will still want them when they do...

[Patrik_]

18 minutes ago, ragnarok0273 said:

What do you mean, again?
The COVID-19 pandemic isn't over.

And yes, I know we have a vaccine.

That again, I mean it in way that we would use our gpus in higher numbers. Im sure that there is not that many using F@H right now than it were after Linuses video. 

[Vishera]

3 minutes ago, Sauron said:

don't worry though, eventually miners always sell their cards. it's just a matter of whether anyone will still want them when they do...

With a big spike comes an equally big crash - Economics

[Patrik_]

14 minutes ago, Levent said:

Yeah chief, that aint gonna work.

Thats why Im asking but ok its just silly dream on my side  

[Patrik_]

6 minutes ago, Sauron said:

never seen before for folding at home, which is specifically mostly contributed to by home users for free. mining has a money incentive so you better believe the numbers are a lot higher.

 

don't worry though, eventually miners always sell their cards. it's just a matter of whether anyone will still want them when they do...

Im just asking, only thing worried is so my GTX 1080 doesnt die on me. For me its plenty of power right now. Im was curious about this. 

[Middcore]

Would you say you're calling for gamers to rise up? 

[harryk]

Fair warning: I am not a crypto expert so some of my understanding could be erroneous.

 

To be profitable, a GPU must produce more value than it costs electricity to run. The profit ratio is the profit divided by the cost to run. If the difficulty to mine were to double, the profit ratio would halve due to the time to mine doubling and the cost to run effectively doubling. 

 

To make the crypto miners abandon GPUs, they need to become no longer profitable, i.e a profit ratio of 1 or less. More realistically, the profit ratio doesn't need to be that low as the general business strategy will likely become undesirable at a higher profit ratio; maybe at a ratio of 5. In theory, adding enough new computing power to the network will drive the difficulty up making GPUs no longer effective.

 

So how much do the 'gamers' need to add to the network? 

 

Ethereum is the most popular coin for GPU mining. As of today, the global total network to mine Ethereum is at an all time high of ~370 TH/s. For Ethereum, GPUs from the last few years all have a profit ratio of 15 to 20. The mining difficulty generally tracks the total hash rate directly. So to drive down the profit ratio of GPUs the total network hash rate would need to quadruple. That is adding over 1100 TH/s of computing power. 

 

1100 TH/s corresponds to ~9 million RTX 3090s. I don't think the 'gamer' community has that lying around. 

 

tldr; Because the way crypto works it's essentially impossible to artificially drive up the difficulty and make GPUs not profitable for mining.

 

N.B. Even if 'gamers' did pull this off, if they didn't commit to mining forever the total hash rate and corresponding difficulty would just go down again and everything would return to the status quo.

[Mark Kaine]

Because we game. I mean iGame. 

. 

1 hour ago, harryk said:

~9 million RTX 3090s

that's the problem of "maths on the internet" 

 

how much 1080's/ ti's/ 2060s/570/580/590/5700/980/ti's/1060/2070/2080/ti's/etc do have gamers laying around though? Still not enough to beat the measly 9 million 3090's? 

 

 

idk, I just know you took the thing you knew there wouldn't be enough to make your 'calculations', or not? 

[AngryBeaver]

5 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Because we game. I mean iGame. 

. 

that's the problem of "maths on the internet" 

 

how much 1080's/ ti's/ 2060s/570/580/590/5700/980/ti's/1060/2070/2080/ti's/etc do have gamers laying around though? Still not enough to beat the measly 9 million 3090's? 

 

 

idk, I just know you took the thing you knew there wouldn't be enough to make your 'calculations', or not? 

He was just giving the 3090 as a form of measurement. For etherium for example any card under about 5gb of vram (probably 6 in a day when difficulty increases) will be unable to mine it. So then you have the fact that eth mining is more memory speed dependent. So for example a 2070s would only get about 37mh/s where my 3080 can pull 100-105 mh/s. Then you have to look at how much power is consumed for that hash rate. For a 2070s I would guess it is in the ballpark of 150watts, vs my 3080 using 207w.

Anyways the point is that of the gpus you gave as examples some of them cannot even mine Etherium. The others will do so, but the cost effectiveness would be much lower as well as the actual hash rates. Then you will just give people a taste of mining which will just lead to more miners lol. When I can pay for a 3080 in about 2 months worth of mining it becomes very tempting to just keep adding cards.

[WereCatf]

3 hours ago, Patrik_ said:

Why dont we use our power again? Do you think If we were able to pull off the same computing power, mining would be so difficult that miners would have to sell their gpus just to cut loses?

That's not how it works. First of all, you'd be raising a coin's value by doing that, because you'd be trumpeting interest in it. Secondly, once the GPUs became unprofitable for one coin, they'd switch to another coin!

[PlayStation 2]

Because electricity doesn't come for free.

[Jeppes]

3 minutes ago, PlayStation 2 said:

Because electricity doesn't come for free.

But if you need heating its fine even for the pennies you make from mining.

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Folding@home, Boinc, and Coin Mining

[harryk]

2 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Because we game. I mean iGame. 

. 

that's the problem of "maths on the internet" 

 

how much 1080's/ ti's/ 2060s/570/580/590/5700/980/ti's/1060/2070/2080/ti's/etc do have gamers laying around though? Still not enough to beat the measly 9 million 3090's? 

 

 

idk, I just know you took the thing you knew there wouldn't be enough to make your 'calculations', or not? 

As @AngryBeaver surmised, I just used the 3090 as an example. Doing the same math with 1080s yields ~30.5 million of them. I predict it'd be hard to find that many GPUs in the hands of the general public.

[Mark Kaine]

37 minutes ago, harryk said:

Doing the same math with 1080s yields ~30.5 million of them. I predict it'd be hard to find that many GPUs in the hands of the general public.

yeah, but I think it would probably be possible theoretically... which this whole topic is obviously... but then I think the idea is just hilarious and would probably not work - not long term at least... it would be better to just disallow mining all together, humanity is in no position to literally waste energy for the profit of a few on the back of everyone else. It's not only extremely selfish, it's also highly destructive. 

 

ps: and I'm obviously talking about "mining farms" what some people do with one or two cards at their home is of no concern for me and essentially irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. 

[alyen]

I was just thinking of this topic 2 days ago when I was researching how much money I could make with one of my better video cards after counting the electricity bill. On nicehash.com it was $5.50 CAD a day 3 days ago, $4.8 yesterday but today its a negative number that looks like the calculator is broken. I don't know how accurate the calculator is to begin with, but I am thinking about doing it since I do leave my computer on overnight sometimes, because there is a MMO game I play.

[tikker]

2 hours ago, alyen said:

On nicehash.com it was $5.50 CAD a day 3 days ago, $4.8 yesterday but today its a negative number that looks like the calculator is broken.

That's not a broken calculator, that's just the behaviour of the volatile market that crypto is. It shows you the profitability at that moment. If the market tanks, so will your profitability.

[Mick Naughty]

Most people are don’t know what mining is ante are to ignorant to actually do it. So I don’t see “gamers” effecting anything. The news already made a huge influx of people mining every time bitcoin price goes up. 
Most people invested into it before that and have held on and are way past the point of roi. They aren’t gonna cut any loses, as they don’t have any now because of some more people. Payouts are better then they have ever been.