China’s Inner Mongolia Declares War on Crypto Mining

[mwagen]

1 hour ago, Moonzy said:

do explain to me why i should understand why someone is angry when they cant afford to pay for something they want?

is it my fault that they can't pay $1500 for a 3090? should I not buy one because they can't afford one? I dont get the logic

We can all relate to you only being able to afford a 970 because we all learn to accept what we can and can't afford. At the end of the day I think we're all just proud to have built the best pc we can and don't care what somebody else has. However, that's all under normal market conditions. Current conditions seem to be a result of increased demand from ruthless miners so it should be obvious why that's drawing the spite of gamers. To be clear, nobody is asking for your compassion or to share nicely because we all accept the rules of supply and demand, but if you're that incapable of social nuance and can't put yourself in somebody else's shoes then you really are a complete robot brain. 

34 minutes ago, tikker said:

Well yes, but that's an issue unrelated to crypto.

Are not even allowed to share lament over not being able to get GPUs? What happened to your earlier statement:

By saying only one "passes the vibe check" you're already implying that you agree one is more entitled to GPUs than the other. Here's the thing: you don't need a new GPU, you want one for high-resolution textures and lighting effects. Games wil run fine with lower resolution textures and effects turned down. They don't need another GPU, they want one to have a larger profit. Maybe that profit allows them to do something else they love that passes your "vibe check". In a black and white world either party will see the other one as the "wrong" side. "Why waste your time gaming when you can earn money?" vs "Why waste time mining when you can enjoy a game?". It's two sides of the same coin that inherently will have a hard time finding common ground and will just blame the other for their problems.

Passing the vibe check implies somebody has a more socially conscientious, chill personality, somebody you could stand to hang out with. And yeah on a gut level I think a gamer is more entitled to a graphics processing unit but I won't deny the economic soundness of it all and won't bring it up as a valid argument against mining. Meanwhile you're just regurgitating the same condescending points over and over, lecturing us about needs versus wants, supply and demand, and so and so on like we're still in junior high. I've no intention of ever forgiving mining culture because the kind of personality it attracts doesn't even come close to passing the vibe check. Feeling like I've really said enough on this and I know moonzy will insist on having the last word so whatever.

[Kisai]

10 hours ago, RTX 3090 said:

imo they should still have the freedom to do whatever they want, but everyone should have a reasonable power limit like 20-30kwh per day, and they can't have anything beyond that. That is so that people sitting at home can still do whatever they want with their home PC, but others don't hog all the GPU's to them self and single handedly strain the countries power sources. 

A reasonable power limit is 8-10kwh per person exclusive of heating/cooking (which would be shared by everyone in the dwelling.) This includes the energy to run one PC, light up one room, and power one reasonably efficient refrigerator. I know if I unplugged my fridge, the power would probably drop to 2kw tops.

 

 

10 hours ago, Moonzy said:

I'm sorry but I can't stop laughing while imagining Timmy and his friends played too much minecraft so their electricity got cut, leaving his Granny that's on life support next door to die

There is no way timmy playing minecraft sucks up 30kwh per day. Assuming someone played for 12 hours/day while pulling 500watts, they would use 6kwh for a total of 180kwh per month.

 

Also people who need life support, are in the hospital unless they are paying for independent medical care, of which all that stuff has battery backups explicitly because utility power can not be relied on. Power utilities are not permitted to "cut off" power arbitrarily without notice.

 

10 hours ago, Moonzy said:

This could be a decent idea but who gets to decide how much and based on what?

Easy. That's what energy regulation is for.

 

Let's assume a worst-case conservative "save all the energy you can you nerds or you face blackouts" type of incompetence like Texas, or California under Enron, or typical "BC Hydro, save energy" marketing. Everyone not stealing power, gets allocated 8kwh, per person. If they have electric heat/air conditioning, and/or electric range (oven)/cooktop, it goes on a separate meter. The heating and cooking get charged a flat rate, but has a maximum power output sized to the heating system (a single baseboard heater in an apartment is 333.50kwh/day if run 24 hours.)

 

So if you exceed the maximum power output of the heating system, you are charged 50x the base rate. (eg $0.10 goes to $5.00/kwh)

The meter on the cooking system has no connection charge, and is zero-rated for the first 2kwh, and then goes to $5.00/kwh.

The meter for all the outlets and lighting has a base connection charge and is then rated at the base rate ($0.10) between 9pm and 9am, and $0.25 between 9am and 9pm, as soon as you tick past 8kwh per legal bedroom (eg den's, living rooms, closets, recreational rooms, are not eligible, you can't be in two places at once), rates double, and then double again for every 8kwh used until it hits $5.00/kwh

 

In a deregulated market, the utilities would just straight up charge you $5.00/kwh after the first 8kwh, no questions asked. You waste energy, you pay through the nose, and it won't even stop at $5.00, if the utility's generation and transmissions costs spike because 10 other people in your area are also mining, or running their electric baseboard heating full out, you all end up paying $50.00/kwh. Heck, if everyone was pulling the full 400A to mine, y'all get charged $1000/kwh, since they now have to run a new substation to your cul-de-sac.

 

Deregulated markets only work when there is incentive to maintain the services, it punishes over-supply, but also punishes over-consumption. In a regulated market, everyone is treated the same, regardless if they are mining or heating a pool, so your only lever there is to charge more past a certain amount that is considered reasonable. 

 

In BC a reasonable amount is considered:

https://energyrates.ca/british-columbia/explaining-your-british-columbia-electricity-natural-gas-rates/

Quote

• Residential: $0.0884 per kWh for the first 1,350 kWh in an average two-month billing cycle, and $0.1326 per kWh for any additional consumption.
• Small General Service: $0.1173 per kWh
• Medium General Service: $0.0906 per kWh
• Large General Service: $0.0567 per kWh

So they drew the line at 1350kwh/mo, so that's 45kwh/day. That's 5x what is necessary for a single person, but completely fair for a family of 4. After 1350, the usage cost increases by 50%. By all account these prices are too cheap and encourage wasteful building designs based on baseboard electric heating. So if you say, heated a room with a small mining rig during winter rather than the heating, you might not even see a change in your energy bill, but past that point, someone using their mining rig in their home would increase their cooling costs during the rest of the year.

 

10 hours ago, Moonzy said:

How often will the limit have to be revised? Because things don't really get revised that often from the government

They get revised every year. 

10 hours ago, Moonzy said:

Take speed limit for example, they were for cars from the 80s or something, with vastly less safety and what not, at least that's what I read somewhere

 

And technically we have a limit on how many kwh we can pull, it's based on how many amps your breaker is

You can get different levels of service from the power company. eg going from 100a to 200a service, you could still pull 200a without having 200a service, but the power company will notice when you cause a blackout to the neighborhood from the services lines catching fire. Smoke will actually start pouring off the service lines if you pull more than 100a on lines rated for only 100a. 

 

Businesses pay higher costs for the actual service installed, and then pay for the energy cost on top. Industries typically are charged less per KWH, but they have to commit to a level of usage to get that discount (eg an aluminum smelter isn't paying the $0.10/kwh residential service is paying, but they are committed to using a set amount, and should a failure in generation or transmission capacity happen, the smelter gets priority over the residents.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/31/australias-aluminium-sector-is-on-life-support-it-can-and-should-be-saved

Quote

The Portland smelter operates in a very narrow band below 470MW, occasionally dropping as much as 8%. This small amount of flexibility is a modest but valuable contributor to grid stability, but sometimes the smelter can play a much bigger role.

Late afternoon on 24 January, after a run of unexpected coal power outages, the fine balance between supply and demand became precarious. In order to shore up the grid, Alcoa Portland was directed to successively turn off each of its two potlines for an hour, helping avert blackouts. Alcoa participated in the scheme voluntarily and was paid handsomely for its service.

 

The next day, a steam leak forced the Loy Yang A coal power station to abruptly reduce power. This time, due to technical constraints, Portland couldn’t help and the “involuntary load shedding” was instead spread across thousands of households. With more flexibility, Portland could have kept the lights on.

So if you're operating a commercial scale operation, there are service levels that the power company has to meet, and the business has to meet, otherwise one or the other is paying fines to the other. Residents get the raw end of these deals, as the utility is not required to give them any level of service reliability other than best effort. The utility doesn't know who's service can be turned off arbitrarily to shed load, and the residents get blackouts. 

 

That is what we saw happen in Texas. The generation cost spiked from having generation sources go offline, and rather than pay the skyrocketing unregulated costs, they started rolling blackouts to avoid having weeks of outages. If it was a simple matter of having high-power loads on separate meters (Eg separating heat and cooking from everything else) the utilties could have shut down everyone's non-heating power to save themselves, but that's not how any residential service is ever setup unless there are multiple energy sources involved (eg EV's or PV generation capacity.) This is a large incentive to have an EV, since an EV could be used to store off-peak power and power a house during unususal high cost peaks. 

 

That's also oversimplying the solution in that situation, as even smart-meters don't allow the power company to arbitrarily shut down individual addresses. Rolling blackouts are more typically at the substation, and affects everyone on that substation at once.

[Moonzy]

10 minutes ago, mwagen said:

I know moonzy will insist on having the last word so whatever.

nah, I'm actually thankful that at least we can reach an agreement on something

namely:

10 minutes ago, mwagen said:

 To be clear, nobody is asking for your compassion or to share nicely because we all accept the rules of supply and demand, but if you're that incapable of social nuance and can't put yourself in somebody else's shoes then you really are a complete robot brain. 

this, i agree that I'm a robot brain because i put numbers before emotions/compassion, because emotions/compassion aren't facts.

and I'm glad that you understood supply and demand.

 

current condition happened for a reason, i observed and see if i can take advantage of the situation, and i did, in my eyes i did nothing wrong

[RTX 3090]

4 minutes ago, Kisai said:

I know if I unplugged my fridge, the power would probably drop to 2kw tops.

A fridge takes 8kwh per day?!

Wow, I though they were efficeint

[tikker]

18 minutes ago, mwagen said:

Passing the vibe check implies somebody has a more socially conscientious, chill personality, somebody you could stand to hang out with. And yeah on a gut level I think a gamer is more entitled to a graphics processing unit but I won't deny the economic soundness of it all and won't bring it up as a valid argument against mining. Meanwhile you're just regurgitating the same condescending points over and over, lecturing us about needs versus wants, supply and demand, and so and so on like we're still in junior high. I've no intention of ever forgiving mining culture because the kind of personality it attracts doesn't even come close to passing the vibe check. Feeling like I've really said enough on this and I know moonzy will insist on having the last word so whatever.

So that would then  mean you don't like mining and can't stand to associate yourself with people who do it. That's fine, but why is that reason to condemn crypto in its entirety then? Base on your response I could say I have no intention of ever forgiving gaming culture because of elitist personalities it attracts don't come close to passing the vibe check. I gues one bad apple can indeed spoil the bunch.

 

I'm not going for condescending. The needs vs wants keeps coming up because "gamers" are portrayed as the only ones having rights to GPUs. A simple example would be that people suggest they exclusively sell to gamers. This will bit them in the butt again once then AMD or Intel decide you are not allowed to buy a CPU with more than 12 cores unless you have proof you're a business for example.

 

Market keeps coming up because something (that they don't care about) has become valuable, only argueing that mining costs too much energy, which no one denies, or sticking with "it has no value", which obviously isn't true anymore.

 

2 minutes ago, RTX 3090 said:

A fridge takes 8kwh per day?!

Wow, I though they were efficeint

One of the bigger power draws for sure. Can't check my fridge atm, but I'm at about 10 kWh per day on average.

[Kisai]

3 minutes ago, RTX 3090 said:

A fridge takes 8kwh per day?!

Wow, I though they were efficeint

The Fridge energuide says 530kwh/yr , which is like 1.5kwh/day, but it's also the only thing running in my apartment when I'm not in it. When the neighboring unit was disconnected it dropped from $40/m to $27/mo, which tells me that neighboring unit was connected to mine. Now I suppose it's possible that my unit is also powering the hallway.

[tikker]

25 minutes ago, Kisai said:

In BC a reasonable amount is considered:

https://energyrates.ca/british-columbia/explaining-your-british-columbia-electricity-natural-gas-rates/

Quote

• Residential: $0.0884 per kWh for the first 1,350 kWh in an average two-month billing cycle, and $0.1326 per kWh for any additional consumption.
• Small General Service: $0.1173 per kWh
• Medium General Service: $0.0906 per kWh
• Large General Service: $0.0567 per kWh

So they drew the line at 1350kwh/mo, so that's 45kwh/day. That's 5x what is necessary for a single person, but completely fair for a family of 4. After 1350, the usage cost increases by 50%. By all account these prices are too cheap and encourage wasteful building designs based on baseboard electric heating. So if you say, heated a room with a small mining rig during winter rather than the heating, you might not even see a change in your energy bill, but past that point, someone using their mining rig in their home would increase their cooling costs during the rest of the year.

Damn those are some attractive power prices. Meanwhile I'm paying the equivalent of  0.35 CAD per kWh.

 

18 minutes ago, tikker said:

One of the bigger power draws for sure. Can't check my fridge atm, but I'm at about 10 kWh per day on average.

To put it in some perspective, on workdays the only thing running are basically the fridge and my PC with a 1080 Ti mining. There's heating water occasionally of course, but that's about it and runs on gas (so only the CV that draws a bit of power then). The GPU runs at 190 W and the CPU around 30 W and 30 W for my monitor according to internet. The latter isn't running 24/7 of course so that leaves something like 4 kWh for everything I do during the day that's not my PC.

[Brooksie359]

10 hours ago, Moonzy said:

so value is subjective? is that what you're saying?

 

not every gamer can earn money from gaming, there will never be a streaming based economy

they will always remain a small portion of the population.

 

meanwhile almost everyone with a GPU can mine.

 

what?

latest news about intel cpu says it's consuming way more power

latest nvidia and AMD gpu consumes up to 300-350W of power

plus the growth of the gaming segment

And? Still much less power consumption than mining. Also you are completely wrong if you think everyone can make money off of cryptocurrency. That would require you to have a new gpu that is efficient enough to mine it and live in an area where energy costs are low enough to make a profit. Also the gaming industry employs a ton of people if you go from the mouse and keyboard business to game developers not to mention esports players and streamers. If you are going to say that gaming doesn't make money then you would be mistaken. 

[Moonzy]

22 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

That would require you to have a new gpu that is efficient enough to mine it and live in an area where energy costs are low enough to make a profit.

Check steam hardware survey, and check mining calculator, and input avg electric rate of about $0.1 per kwh and you would see almost anything more modern than a 1060 6gb would be making some spare change, if not more

Whether it's worth the effort or not depends on you, but I personally think running a piece of software for a few days for a couple games is a pretty decent deal.

 

I said almost everyone based off of the steam hardware survey with the national average electric fee.

 

1050ti are also profitable the last time I checked, but not too sure in today's climate since that's few weeks ago(?)

 

900 series GPU though are barely breaking even so definitely not those. (Still green but 2/3 is electric fee the last time I checked a 970 with 0.1$kwh)

 

22 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Also the gaming industry employs a ton of people if you go from the mouse and keyboard business to game developers not to mention esports players and streamers.

I'm only talking about consumers using their hardwares

But even if you include game devs, it's still only a small portion of the gaming segment, majority of the people are consumers and don't earn money from games or gaming.

 

And... Even gamers or game devs can do mining when they aren't doing anything with their PC so... Yea

 

You have to read my words clearer, I said almost everyone can mine, not everyone

I said minority of gamers can earn money from gaming, not no one.

 

Edit: oh if you wanna include developers, mining ecosystem has those too btw, and exchanges and what not

[Jet_ski]

2 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

And? Still much less power consumption than mining. Also you are completely wrong if you think everyone can make money off of cryptocurrency. That would require you to have a new gpu that is efficient enough to mine it and live in an area where energy costs are low enough to make a profit. Also the gaming industry employs a ton of people if you go from the mouse and keyboard business to game developers not to mention esports players and streamers. If you are going to say that gaming doesn't make money then you would be mistaken. 

Honestly during the lock downs my mental health would suffer worse if it wasn’t for video games. Video games have definitely helped a lot of people through the pandemic and other stressful times.

 

And they are useful in other ways too; without them GPU manufacturing would not make financial sense in the current form. This would set back machine learning and all of its useful applications.

 

I’ve spoken with experts about why we have to use CUDA and they told me the reason nobody is making chips specifically for machine learning tasks is that the manufacturing and financial costs make it impossible to achieve a reasonable cost structure. That’s why GPU manufacturers are the only ones who could make them profitably.

 

Gaming actually funds the semiconductor industry, that’s why they pretend to care about gamers even when none of their products make it to gamers. Yes mining is now profitable but mining has already experienced several multi-year setbacks. So Nvidia couldn’t count on mining to provide the steady revenue that gaming does.

[Brooksie359]

6 hours ago, Moonzy said:

Check steam hardware survey, and check mining calculator, and input avg electric rate of about $0.1 per kwh and you would see almost anything more modern than a 1060 6gb would be making some spare change, if not more

Whether it's worth the effort or not depends on you, but I personally think running a piece of software for a few days for a couple games is a pretty decent deal.

 

I said almost everyone based off of the steam hardware survey with the national average electric fee.

 

1050ti are also profitable the last time I checked, but not too sure in today's climate since that's few weeks ago(?)

 

900 series GPU though are barely breaking even so definitely not those. (Still green but 2/3 is electric fee the last time I checked a 970 with 0.1$kwh)

 

I'm only talking about consumers using their hardwares

But even if you include game devs, it's still only a small portion of the gaming segment, majority of the people are consumers and don't earn money from games or gaming.

 

And... Even gamers or game devs can do mining when they aren't doing anything with their PC so... Yea

 

You have to read my words clearer, I said almost everyone can mine, not everyone

I said minority of gamers can earn money from gaming, not no one.

 

Edit: oh if you wanna include developers, mining ecosystem has those too btw, and exchanges and what not

Mining prices change all the time and average price of electricity doesn't mean much unless you know the distribution. If all the people are around the average then great most people can profit but of the range is huge then even if the average is doable doesn't mean most can make a profit especially if there are outliers that skew the average. And tbh not many people have the ability to just let their computers run a program for days at a time nor does it make sense if you live in hot areas where running a Mining rig could result in an increase in air conditioning power consumption making the whole profitability thing a bit harder to determine. So basically what you are basing your numbers on doesn't even come close to proving the viability of the average consumer to mine while making a profit. And you never specified consumers you simply said Mining makes money so it is more valuable while I would argue that gaming as an industry makes far more money as a whole than mining making your idea that gaming isn't valuable kinda not true. And sure maybe most people can make money off of mining today but tomorrow maybe almost no one can because the difficulty of mining is ever increasing and cryptocurrency is simply too volatile to say for sure that by the time you sell your cryptocurrency you will have made profit until you actually sell it. 

[PCGuy_5960]

20 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

You can make money off of gaming as well so I don't see your point. 

Very few people actually make money off of gaming, while everyone with a decent GPU can make money off of cryptocurrency.

Quote

Also cryptocurrency isn't just a problem of people doing it on small scales but the fact that people are using many gpus and consuming more power per person than gaming.

Most games require multiple servers to function properly, which tend to consume a ton of power.

Quote

You look at the power consumption form gaming and look at the power consumption from cryptocurrency and the amount of people in gaming and amount of people in cryptocurrency and you clearly see which one is more wasteful.

Doesn't really matter, if one is destroying the planet, so is the other. Pollution depends on the amount, not the power consumption per person.

Quote

I would also like to point out that making money isn't really a reason for something to exist nor does it make something valuable. If anything folding at home which you don't make money on is far more valuable than cryptocurrency.

Yes, value is subjective. 

Quote

Also cryptocurrency is getting more and more power consuming as time goes on while the same can not be said about gaming. 

Really? Hardware in recent times is consuming more and more power for even the slightest bumps in performance. Look at the latest Intel CPUs and all the recent GPUs from Nvidia and AMD for example.

19 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

Well everyone has to have some kind of entertainment, and gaming for a few hours isn't nearly as bad as running 20 gpus for mining. 

Very few people are running 20GPUs to mine though.

15 hours ago, Bitter said:

Is saying this is for power use and the environment a way of them trying to regulate this while appearing caring and benevolent? Is this too political?

That's typical politician behavior. Pretty much every government in the world does this when they want to regulate something and avoid controversy. They point to the environment or some other important topic so they can easily deflect all criticism of the regulation.

[Brooksie359]

53 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Very few people actually make money off of gaming, while everyone with a decent GPU can make money off of cryptocurrency.

Most games require multiple servers to function properly, which tend to consume a ton of power.

Doesn't really matter, if one is destroying the planet, so is the other. Pollution depends on the amount, not the power consumption per person.

Yes, value is subjective. 

Really? Hardware in recent times is consuming more and more power for even the slightest bumps in performance. Look at the latest Intel CPUs and all the recent GPUs from Nvidia and AMD for example.

Very few people are running 20GPUs to mine though.

That's typical politician behavior. Pretty much every government in the world does this when they want to regulate something and avoid controversy. They point to the environment or some other important topic so they can easily deflect all criticism of the regulation.

What do you mean the amount of power used per person is irrelevant? It totally is relevant because it indicates what type of power scaling it has. If everyone who gamed mined instead power consumption would be way higher so it totally matters. Not to mention that it tells you how much is being produced from that power. You are creating entertainment for a vast amount of people so it is quite a valuable use of energy while mining encompasses far fewer people and is a huge waste of energy. Also you fail to consider that pollution being created for a good reason vs a bad reason are two very different things. Pollution form leaving lights on when they don't need to be is just plain wasteful while pollution created form heating houses when its cold out is not. Cryptocurrency doesn't need to exist and the world would be a better place without it. There are already existing systems in place that do the majority of what Cryptocurrency does other than providing a good way to do illegal trades. If anything Cryptocurrency is bad simply because it can be used for a ton of different illegal activities. If you got rid of it tomorrow it wouldn't matter and there wouldn't really be a void left from it being gone. 

[PCGuy_5960]

7 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

What do you mean the amount of power used per person is irrelevant?

Just because many people use it doesn't mean that pollution isn't an issue. Cars are a good example of that.

10 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

If everyone who gamed mined instead power consumption would be way higher so it totally matters.

Not really, mining only uses the GPU and most people who are serious about mining undervolt their cards to minimize power consumption. Games stress both the CPU and GPU and most gamers tend to overclock their systems (which maximizes their power consumption) to get as many frames as they can. Gaming also includes all the consoles too, which can't really be used for mining anyway.

15 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Also you fail to consider that pollution being created for a good reason vs a bad reason are two very different things.

Making money=bad?

16 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Pollution form leaving lights on when they don't need to be is just plain wasteful while pollution created form heating houses when its cold out is not.

Yep, agreed, leaving the lights on when they don't need to be just wastes energy and your money, it's a net negative. 

21 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Cryptocurrency doesn't need to exist and the world would be a better place without it. There are already existing systems in place that do the majority of what Cryptocurrency does other than providing a good way to do illegal trades. If anything Cryptocurrency is bad simply because it can be used for a ton of different illegal activities. If you got rid of it tomorrow it wouldn't matter and there wouldn't really be a void left from it being gone. 

You seem to think that everyone who uses cryptocurrency is a criminal, which is just not true.

Quote

The majority of cryptocurrency is not used for criminal activity. According to an excerpt from Chainalysis’ 2021 report, in 2019, criminal activity represented 2.1% of all cryptocurrency transaction volume (roughly $21.4 billion worth of transfers). In 2020, the criminal share of all cryptocurrency activity fell to just 0.34% ($10.0 billion in transaction volume). 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-false-narrative-of-bitcoins-role-in-illicit-activity/

[Moonzy]

7 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

you simply said Mining makes money so it is more valuable

...? Did I say mining is more valuable than gaming?

 

Don't put words in my mouth, you seem to think that I'm anti gaming, I'm not

 

I'm using gaming to point out the hypocrisy in some people's arguments

 

7 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

And sure maybe most people can make money off of mining today but tomorrow maybe almost no one can because the difficulty of mining is ever increasing and cryptocurrency is simply too volatile to say for sure that by the time you sell your cryptocurrency you will have made profit until you actually sell it. 

"I'm not sure if I'll have a job next year, so let's not work today"

What kinda logic is that? Just do it while it's still profitable...?

 

As for price dropping and losing your "money", I agree, set a stop limit and you'd be mostly fine

 

I put money in quotation because like your said, it's not money until you see fiat.

 

7 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

And tbh not many people have the ability to just let their computers run a program for days at a time nor does it make sense if you live in hot areas where running a Mining rig could result in an increase in air conditioning power consumption making the whole profitability thing a bit harder to determine.

Fair point, it's not for everyone

 

But need I remind you that the profit margin is not 2x right now, it's like 5-8x or higher. So even if you had to run your AC, it might still be profitable.

 

3 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Cryptocurrency is bad simply because it can be used for a ton of different illegal activities.

No crypto = no crime, crime never existed before crypto!

 

3 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

If everyone who gamed mined instead power consumption would be way higher so it totally matters

I'm curious, how much higher do you think it is? Because from the top of my head, if you game 2-4h a day vs mining, that's about 3-6x more energy for mining from my top of the head guesstimate, not 10-100x that people like to think

 

3 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

If you got rid of it tomorrow it wouldn't matter and there wouldn't really be a void left from it being gone. 

Tbf, same can be said to a lot of things

A lot of things can disappear and it won't change much in the grand scheme of things, including the entirety of humanity disappearing right now

 

It might not change your world, but it surely changes mine

[Drama Lama]

1 hour ago, Brooksie359 said:

Cryptocurrency is bad simply because it can be used for a ton of different illegal activities.

so can cash and even credit cards.

bitcoin is actually worse than cash. Every transaction can be seen publicly. Bitcoin is anonymus but not private. And if criminals turn their bitcoin into real money they can often deanonymized

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Drama Lama said:

so can cash and even credit cards.

bitcoin is actually worse than cash. Every transaction can be seen publicly. Bitcoin is anonymus but not private. And if criminals turn their bitcoin into real money they can often deanonymized

I seem to remember every mafia type movie the boss was taken down by the accountant turning on or being arrested by police and the financial ledger being decoded. Those also closely resembling reality where their crimes were almost always taken through the justice system as tax crimes etc. Crypto being an open book would have been an absolute dream for prosecutors back in the 70's, 80's and 90's (if the mafia's used them).

[Drama Lama]

59 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I seem to remember every mafia type movie the boss was taken down by the accountant turning on or being arrested by police and the financial ledger being decoded. Those also closely resembling reality where their crimes were almost always taken through the justice system as tax crimes etc. Crypto being an open book would have been an absolute dream for prosecutors back in the 70's, 80's and 90's (if the mafia's used them).

yup

once you've linked a crypto wallet to it's real owner, all the transactions and " business partners " can be found

[tikker]

9 hours ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Making money=bad?

Yes, how dare you make money! /s

9 hours ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Yep, agreed, leaving the lights on when they don't need to be just wastes energy and your money, it's a net negative. 

And even then (not denying this point), it's all the same net negative at the end of the day and equally bad. The reason we're in the climate mess is mostly because of everything we did before crypto mining was even a thing. One suiting a more fundamental need still doesn't justify pollution or make it less wasteful.

9 hours ago, Moonzy said:

As for price dropping and losing your "money", I agree, set a stop limit and you'd be mostly fine

 

I put money in quotation because like your said, it's not money until you see fiat.

I see this as a moot point against crypto honestly. The stock market goes up and down as well and can lose you tons of money easily there as well. If you don't like (trading in) volatile markets, then just don't deal in them is the way I see it.

9 hours ago, Moonzy said:

I'm curious, how much higher do you think it is? Because from the top of my head, if you game 2-4h a day vs mining, that's about 3-6x more energy for mining from my top of the head guesstimate, not 10-100x that people like to think

Pretty good guess with that number in my case. While gaming my card pulls 230-250 W. Taking 90 W for my (overclocked) 7700k that'd come down to about 1.4 kWh per day for gaming. While mining the card uses 180 W and me going about my business the CPU "idles" at around 30 W, so 5.0 kWh per day for 24/7 mining. If balancing 4h gaming with 20h mining it'd be 4.2 kWh mining + 1.4 kWh gaming = 5.6 kWh combined. So actually in my case and from the perspective of people using their gaming rigs for mining, the combination of gaming and mining would happen to use more power power day than mining or gaming alone.

[Brooksie359]

12 hours ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Just because many people use it doesn't mean that pollution isn't an issue. Cars are a good example of that.

Not really, mining only uses the GPU and most people who are serious about mining undervolt their cards to minimize power consumption. Games stress both the CPU and GPU and most gamers tend to overclock their systems (which maximizes their power consumption) to get as many frames as they can. Gaming also includes all the consoles too, which can't really be used for mining anyway.

Making money=bad?

Yep, agreed, leaving the lights on when they don't need to be just wastes energy and your money, it's a net negative. 

You seem to think that everyone who uses cryptocurrency is a criminal, which is just not true.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-false-narrative-of-bitcoins-role-in-illicit-activity/

Are you kidding me? Do you really think that power consumption wouldn't go up if more people mined? You say that miners undervolt to decrease power consumption but they also leave the thing on all the time. That not to mention that gamers running their rig at full throttle while gaming isn't even true. You think when people game their cpu and gpu are pegged at 100% the entire time? Absolutely not especially if they are playing a game that isn't intensive or they have a bottleneck somewhere or even if they decide to put vsync on or cap the fps. And clearly you didn't get the point. If the power consumption from a small amount of people mining now is comparable to gamers that amounts to a ton of people then when more and more people get into mining we will see power consumption that makes gaming look very small in comparison. Also how in the world did they come up with these numbers on cryptocurrency transactions being used for criminal use. The entire point of cryptocurrency is that the transactions aren't traceable so logically speaking they shouldn't even be able to tell how much of the transactions are related to illegal activities. The even worst part is that the figure you showed was massive regardless. I mean it came out to be what about half a billion dollars in illegal transactions that they know of. That is absolutely massive. 

[Brooksie359]

11 hours ago, leadeater said:

I seem to remember every mafia type movie the boss was taken down by the accountant turning on or being arrested by police and the financial ledger being decoded. Those also closely resembling reality where their crimes were almost always taken through the justice system as tax crimes etc. Crypto being an open book would have been an absolute dream for prosecutors back in the 70's, 80's and 90's (if the mafia's used them).

Yeah I believe alot of them went down by having the book thrown at them for tax evasion because they couldn't prove the murder and robbery charges. Just goes to show if the police can't get them the IRS sure will. 

[MageTank]

On 3/5/2021 at 10:37 PM, Brooksie359 said:

Well I am entertained by dumping oil in the river. That doesn't mean it's ok for me to do so.

You are going to some extreme lengths to avoid having a proper discussion with me, aren't you? You cannot compare an activity that is considered illegal in most parts of the world to an activity that is currently not illegal in most parts of the world as if that is a proper analogy to make. Again, you are clinging too deeply to making this a moral issue because you have no other points to your argument, and it's sad because I can do the exact same thing to gaming, as I've done dozens of times in these discussions every time they arise. Do not strawman me again. Have a proper discussion or move on.

 

On 3/5/2021 at 10:37 PM, Brooksie359 said:

If they want to tweak their hardware to run efficiently why not have them actually do something useful with it like folding at home or any other process that isn't a complete waste of resources.

This is a completely subjective opinion of yours. You consider mining a complete waste of resources while miners consider it a source of income. The irony is, you're perfectly fine with people wasting the exact same resources for folding, but not when it's in their own self interest for profit. That would be like me complaining that you're using your hardware for your own self interest (gaming) instead of putting those resources towards the greater good (folding). The irony of me complaining about strawman fallacies after using this analogy is not lost on me.

 

On 3/5/2021 at 10:37 PM, Brooksie359 said:

And cryptocurrency trading is objectively worse than traditional stock trading because its completely unregulated. If they find trading cryptocurrency entertaining then they can simply do it with stocks because cryptocurrency needs to go. 

This is again, completely subjective. It's also not "completely unregulated". Even my extremely limited understanding of cryptocurrency knows this to be true just based on various news articles that have popped up over the last few years. It's all publicly available on the library of congress website: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/cryptocurrency/world-survey.php.

 

You also have this little tidbit from the SEC:https://www.sec.gov/ICO

Quote

Companies and individuals are increasingly considering initial coin offerings (ICOs) as a way to raise capital or participate in investment opportunities. While these digital assets and the technology behind them may present a new and efficient means for carrying out financial transactions, they also bring increased risk of fraud and manipulation because the markets for these assets are less regulated than traditional capital markets.

"Less regulated" sounds different than "completely unregulated" to me. I've touched upon this in this thread, but I'll double down to make my point on it very clear. You do not get to dictate what others do with their time. If someone prefers to trade cryptos over stocks, and it is legal to do so where they reside, they are free to do so on their own volition. You not liking it doesn't mean they have to stop. Don't like it? Get active with your local forms of government and start voting on it, otherwise, accept it as an inevitable future if you refuse to put forth any effort to bring about change.

[LAwLz]

I wonder how the anti-cryptobrigade feels now that Linus have said that they mine crypto at their office, and that they will make a guide video for how to mine.

[WkdPaul]

5 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I wonder how the anti-cryptobrigade feels now that Linus have said that they mine crypto at their office, and that they will make a guide video for how to mine.

Well, as mentioned somewhere else in the forum, apparently they're either drug dealers, credit card scammers, or pedophiles, or a combination of those maybe ? Not sure how it works, still waiting on the details. /s

Edited March 8, 2021 by wkdpaul

[MageTank]

2 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

Well, as mentioned somewhere else in the forum, apparently they're either drug dealers, credit card scammers, or pedophiles, or a combination of those maybe ? Not sure how it works, still waiting on the details. /s

Pretty sure it's impossible to be a criminal AND Canadian, at least that's what we are taught here in the rest of the world. Maybe they get a free pass?