Honest question, how many GPU's are in the world just sitting there mining crypto all day?

[LAwLz]

20 hours ago, harryk said:

Here's some real numbers.

 

The total Ethereum network hash rate as of April 16 2021 is 514,120 GH/s

https://etherscan.io/chart/hashrate

 

There are few ASICS available for Ethash, so for simplicity I'll assume the entire Ethereum network is running on consumer GPUs. Of course there are a variety of GPU models out there but again for simplicity I'll assume they're all an older mid-range model, I'll pick an RTX 2070 which yields 36.77 MH/s.

https://minerstat.com/hardware/nvidia-rtx-2070

 

Simple division yields an estimate of 13.982 million GPUs mining Ethereum on April 16 2021. 

 

There are other mineable coins out there, but given Ethereum's current popularity and the GPU's affinity for Ethash, I think it is safer to assume the vast majority of GPU's that are mining are mining Ethereum. 

 

EDIT: Here's some estimated power consumption numbers.

 

13.982 million RTX 2070s at 156 W each, running 24/7 for a year consume ~19,100 GWh/yr

 

This puts the entire Ethereum network power consumption at #72 in ranking by countries and ~0.08% of the world'd electrical power consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption

It's also worth remembering that a large portion of that are most likely gamers running Ethereum mining when their computers would otherwise be idling.

[WillOfTheLand]

22 hours ago, LAwLz said:

It's also worth remembering that a large portion of that are most likely gamers running Ethereum mining when their computers would otherwise be idling.

Most gamers only have a PC for gaming, I know a lot and most of them, actually all of them, don't mine, or have even heard of mining. Going off the amount of cards, it would take for the hashrate, 14 million, I'd say at best 500k of those are gamers at all times.

[LAwLz]

9 minutes ago, WillOfTheLand said:

Most gamers only have a PC for gaming, I know a lot and most of them, actually all of them, don't mine, or have even heard of mining. Going off the amount of cards, it would take for the hashrate, 14 million, I'd say at best 500k of those are gamers at all times.

What do you base this (large) assumption on?

For example Linus have said that he uses all the computers at their office for mining during the downtime, and he has encouraged his viewers to do so too. Several large publications have also posted articles about how to mine on your gaming PC, such as this one.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of the more tech-savvy gamers are mining on their GPUs during the nights for example.

[WillOfTheLand]

12 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

What do you base this (large) assumption on?

For example Linus have said that he uses all the computers at their office for mining during the downtime, and he has encouraged his viewers to do so too. Several large publications have also posted articles about how to mine on your gaming PC, such as this one.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of the more tech-savvy gamers are mining on their GPUs during the nights for example.

You give people far to much credit, we think since we're tech savy we're the general consensus and that most people are the same, the reality is we're the minority. Most people couldn't be bothered to even change the settings on their phones, let alone figure out how to crypto mine and setup their system to do it.

 

You seem awfully contempt on trying to make miners look like they're not a issue. Throughout this entire thread, the whole point was to take a estimate of how many cards are mining, but you've just been defending miners. Do you have a investment in a mining farm or something?

[porina]

In the past when I was curious about "what do people do" vs "what do forum posters say" I'd run a poll. Of course the results will be skewed towards the LTT community and not wider. Also things are not necessarily either one way or another which is the way many posts end up going. There will be some proportion going either way, and that's the difficult part to quantify.

 

I'd consider myself comfortable with PC tech but I still question the benefits of mining at a personal level. I'm in the "mine when I'm not gaming" camp, although with weather getting warmer now I'm looking at winding down. Still, mining is a tradeoff of gain and risk. What if the value falls before I cash out? What if the extra wear on the GPUs leads them to fail earlier than otherwise? How easy is it to cash out? I can spend BTC easily but my holdings are mostly in ETH. What's the tax implications?

[LAwLz]

49 minutes ago, WillOfTheLand said:

You give people far to much credit, we think since we're tech savy we're the general consensus and that most people are the same, the reality is we're the minority. Most people couldn't be bothered to even change the settings on their phones, let alone figure out how to crypto mine and setup their system to do it.

Absolutely, but the same argument can be used for mining in general. It's only a small minority that mine at all. Without any evidence we can't be sure. That's why I asked for a source when you started throwing around a bunch of numbers and no sources.

 

50 minutes ago, WillOfTheLand said:

You seem awfully contempt on trying to make miners look like they're not a issue. Throughout this entire thread, the whole point was to take a estimate of how many cards are mining, but you've just been defending miners. Do you have a investment in a mining farm or something?

I don't think I have been defending them. I have only made a couple of posts in this thread and the ones I have made have said that Nvidia estimates that about 2 to 6% of their revenue is from mining. Then when someone presented an estimate I pointed out that it did not account for people who use their gaming PCs for mining.

 

That's all. Pointing out facts and oversights with estimates does not imply that I am "defending" miners, or that I must own a mining farm or something.

It just means I am interested in getting the truth and not on a crusade to bring someone or something down, even if it means lying or ignoring facts. Stop being so hostile. It makes me question what motivation YOU have.

It seems like quite a few people on this forum are religiously against mining and I don't get why. Whenever I ask I never get a clear answer, which makes me wonder if it's just a bandwagon, or if people are misinformed. The anti-mining crowd does not seem that interested in facts but rather are looking for reasons to hate it. 

 

If you're interested, my only experience with cryptocurrencies is that I mined dogecoins for a couple of hours back in like 2014 just to see how it worked. That's it. 

Apparently it's worth like 40 dollars today since it skyrocketed a couple of days ago, so maybe I'll sell it. Just need to look into how to do that first.

[WillOfTheLand]

2 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Absolutely, but the same argument can be used for mining in general. It's only a small minority that mine at all. Without any evidence we can't be sure. That's why I asked for a source when you started throwing around a bunch of numbers and no sources.

 

I don't think I have been defending them. I have only made a couple of posts in this thread and the ones I have made have said that Nvidia estimates that about 2 to 6% of their revenue is from mining. Then when someone presented an estimate I pointed out that it did not account for people who use their gaming PCs for mining.

 

That's all. Pointing out facts and oversights with estimates does not imply that I am "defending" miners, or that I must own a mining farm or something.

It just means I am interested in getting the truth and not on a crusade to bring someone or something down, even if it means lying or ignoring facts. Stop being so hostile. It makes me question what motivation YOU have.

It seems like quite a few people on this forum are religiously against mining and I don't get why. Whenever I ask I never get a clear answer, which makes me wonder if it's just a bandwagon, or if people are misinformed. The anti-mining crowd does not seem that interested in facts but rather are looking for reasons to hate it. 

 

If you're interested, my only experience with cryptocurrencies is that I mined dogecoins for a couple of hours back in like 2014 just to see how it worked. That's it. 

Apparently it's worth like 40 dollars today since it skyrocketed a couple of days ago, so maybe I'll sell it. Just need to look into how to do that first.

You are again trying to mislead on the data you provide, as I have already noted that the data you provide, is only referring to Nvidia's mining line of cards, not desktop earmarked GPU's, you also attempted to throw datacenter cards into the total as well, which would be completely invalid. All you do is try to dissuade from the actual conversation by pulling in random numbers from other areas and try to make them seem like they are something they are not.

[LAwLz]

22 minutes ago, WillOfTheLand said:

You are again trying to mislead on the data you provide, as I have already noted that the data you provide, is only referring to Nvidia's mining line of cards, not desktop earmarked GPU's, you also attempted to throw datacenter cards into the total as well, which would be completely invalid. All you do is try to dissuade from the actual conversation by pulling in random numbers from other areas and try to make them seem like they are something they are not.

I think you are misunderstanding a few things.

1) The 2-6% number Nvidia published was not how much their mining lineup makes. It is Nvidia's estimate from how much of their total revenue came from mining, regardless of what GPUs they used. The estimate is from before Nvidia launched their mining lineup and it was that estimate that they used to justify making a specific mining SKU to begin with.

This is essentially what they said: "Oh, 2-6% of the GPUs sold by us are used for mining. Let's make a separate lineup for it since the demand is clearly there!".

What you seem to think they said: "2-6% of our revenue is from our mining card lineup".

 

I am not trying to mislead with the data I provided. You're the one who has made massive assumptions about what the data means without even looking into it.

 

 

2) I did not try and throw datacenter cards into the mix. I mentioned datacenter cards for the total revenue since I tried to estimate how many cards 2-6% of the revenue was.

When Nvidia says 2-6% of their total revenue, it is 2-6% of all their profits including data center and gaming cards sold.

 

 

You are misunderstanding and misinterpreting what is being said and lashing out because of it. Again, stop being so hostile and arguing in bad faith. Read what is actually being said instead of labeling people as your "enemy" because they might disagree with some (seemingly unfounded) idea you got.

[WillOfTheLand]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I think you are misunderstanding a few things.

1) The 2-6% number Nvidia published was not how much their mining lineup makes. It is Nvidia's estimate from how much of their total revenue came from mining, regardless of what GPUs they used. The estimate is from before Nvidia launched their mining lineup and it was that estimate that they used to justify making a specific mining SKU to begin with.

This is essentially what they said: "Oh, 2-6% of the GPUs sold by us are used for mining. Let's make a separate lineup for it since the demand is clearly there!".

What you seem to think they said: "2-6% of our revenue is from our mining card lineup".

 

I am not trying to mislead with the data I provided. You're the one who has made massive assumptions about what the data means without even looking into it.

 

 

2) I did not try and throw datacenter cards into the mix. I mentioned datacenter cards for the total revenue since I tried to estimate how many cards 2-6% of the revenue was.

When Nvidia says 2-6% of their total revenue, it is 2-6% of all their profits including data center and gaming cards sold.

 

 

You are misunderstanding and misinterpreting what is being said and lashing out because of it. Again, stop being so hostile and arguing in bad faith. Read what is actually being said instead of labeling people as your "enemy" because they might disagree with some (seemingly unfounded) idea you got.

It would seem you are right, I saw the mention of miner specific cards in the title and drew conclusions from that, apologies.

 

 

That said you are saying the data provided was pulled out of thin air when it was clearly provided by Tom's Hardware and Jon Peddie Research, I made sure to include the credits to them in the screenshots. There has also been data provided by others such as the steam data proving very few cards are actually making it into the gaming/consumer market. 

 

And yes you clearly did try to pull datacenter cards into the mix when the thread clearly has nothing to do with them.

 

 

Datacenter cards and consumer/prosumer cards are 2 drastically different things. There was no need to pull them into the mix as they would not factor into what nvidia assumed was sold to miners, but you did.

[LAwLz]

4 hours ago, WillOfTheLand said:

That said you are saying the data provided was pulled out of thin air when it was clearly provided by Tom's Hardware and Jon Peddie Research, I made sure to include the credits to them in the screenshots. There has also been data provided by others such as the steam data proving very few cards are actually making it into the gaming/consumer market. 

Nowhere in your sources did they state that there are 500,000 people who both play games and mine Ethereum on their GPUs, and then rest are dedicated solely to mining, which you claimed here:

8 hours ago, WillOfTheLand said:

Most gamers only have a PC for gaming, I know a lot and most of them, actually all of them, don't mine, or have even heard of mining. Going off the amount of cards, it would take for the hashrate, 14 million, I'd say at best 500k of those are gamers at all times.

 

Also, the data you posted earlier does not say what you claim it says.

You can't just post a fact like "Nvidia sold 10 million GPUs in a single quarter alone" and then suddenly claim "there are hundreds of millions of GPUs just mining crypto in China".

You posted a lot of graphs and sources, but none of them actually backed up the points I objected to in your posts. 

 

 

You post one number, that is based on fact, and then you make up another number from nothing and says the first number proves the second number. 

 

 

The data provided by others like the Steam hardware survey are also jumping to conclusions from incomplete data and the results can be explained by other things too.

Maybe less people have 3060s because it costs like 3 times as much as the 1060?

Maybe there are more people with 1060s because it has been out on the market and has been in production for about 5 years and not 5 weeks?

The statement that only non-profitable mining cards are on the Steam hardware survey is wrong as well. Lots of cards at the top are profitable. 

 

 

4 hours ago, WillOfTheLand said:

And yes you clearly did try to pull datacenter cards into the mix when the thread clearly has nothing to do with them.

 

 

Datacenter cards and consumer/prosumer cards are 2 drastically different things. There was no need to pull them into the mix as they would not factor into what nvidia assumed was sold to miners, but you did.

I am not sure what your point is. I mentioned datacenter GPUs because the numbers from Nvidia that I was quoting included datacenter GPUs.

And again, stop being so hostile. What is the matter with you?