Ethereum finally goes POS, marking the end of gpu mining era

[tikker]

23 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Since crypto became a thing ransomware (malware and groups) and the darkweb use it exclusivley because its near impossible to track down compared to traditional currency. Calling facts fearmongering is just BS, pull your head out of the sand.....

Naturally they use it. It's more convenient than credit cards or cash and pseudonymous, not anonymous. Privacycoins such as Monero are indeed anonymous and pretty much impossible to track so far. For other coins the ledgers are public and you can track transactions easily. The hard part is linking a transaction and/or wallet address to a person, which isn't that different from the situation where you give me $10,000 illicitly in cash, a transfer that is nigh impossible to track down, and they need to figure out that that money came from you.

 

More money is laundered in conventional fiat then there is in crypto, as referenced above, and known illicit transfers comprised small fractions of the total volume of crypto transactions for years:

https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-report-introduction/

Quote

In fact, with the growth of legitimate cryptocurrency usage far outpacing the growth of criminal usage, illicit activity’s share of cryptocurrency transaction volume has never been lower.

I'm sure the numbers will be countered with something along the lines of "but that is only the ones that we know about", which is true to an extent, but the argument that crypto is only or even majorly used for crime does not seem to hold water. You just don't hear about the other 95% of transaction that are just investments, purchases or whatever people do with it.

[jagdtigger]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

On the other hand once you have someone's wallet number their entire transaction history is visible to anyone, making it ripe for privacy violation and abuse.

Yes but you still cant attach it to a name usually. And its a pretty common practice on the darkweb to have burner addresses....

[jagdtigger]

2 minutes ago, tikker said:

you give me $10,000 illicitly in cash, a transfer that is nigh impossible to track down

Serial numbers, there goes your claim about impossible to track......

[tikker]

3 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Serial numbers, there goes your claim about impossible to track......

Blockchain permanently records wallet and transaction for everyone to read, there goes your impossible to track.

[suicidalfranco]

21 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Interesting how hard you have to push the narrative that, just because all crypto currencies are closed systems with 0 net value being created, ALL of the economy has to be. Which is patently false. That's the problem people are trying to point out with your "hobby", it's that most other types of economic activity that aren't just finance bros trading shit inherently add value. Crypto is just the turbocharged version of capitalism that's so focused on maximizing profits that it doesn't even care where it comes from. And since crypto is by definition a closed system, it must therefore come at the cost of someone else and not borne out of value that gets created. 

 

I suggest you study a bit harder for your "hobby", because you don't seem to have a firm understanding of money, value, the difference between the two and the economy in general.

And the same can be said about any industry,  unless you are claiming that outside of crypto you have access to a customer base that trends to infinity and will always stay on a path of constant growth without stops, not just you but anyone who sells the same kind of product you are selling.

 

Great! capitalism = good for me.  Better than the alternatives at least.

 

I suggest you actually study harder and stop applying double standards to justify your biases.

[Sauron]

13 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Yes but you still cant attach it to a name usually.

Maybe I can't but the FBI probably can. Plus if cryptobros are to be believed this is the "future of money", meaning regular people who don't make a burner wallet just to buy a hot dog would be immediately deanonimized.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

49 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

Like in any industry, market,  game

You can do whatever you want as long as is legal. It is legal to transfer wealth from poor players to yourself using Blockchain, so feel free to keep doing so.

 

You can't expect people to agree that working as processor designer at AMD is providing the same net result to society as transfering wealth from poor players to yourself by plugging a GPU to the grid and waiting. That's the difference between positive sums and negative sums games. 

22 minutes ago, tikker said:

More money is laundered in conventional fiat then there is in crypto, as referenced above, and known illicit transfers comprised small fractions of the total volume of crypto transactions for years:

This is a true statement on volumes. Real money volumes in blockchain is minute compared to real money flowing through the financial system. Criminals also want real money in the end, blockchain is at most a intermediate step in their scheme.

On ratios of legit transfers vs fraudolent transfers, it's hard to tell. Transactions are pseudonymous and there is lots of wash trading going on, I have no idea what it could be.

At very least tornado cash had a 30% fraudolent share, which is mindboggling. It's useless even to fraudsters having so much dirty cash in one place. There is no way to lauder money from a well that is this poisoned.

[suicidalfranco]

24 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Which can be uncovered because the whole system is logged and every account has a name attached to it.

Quote

10) Anti-money laundering activities recover only 0.1% of criminal funds.
The combined efforts of nations to combat money laundering seem to be ineffective, according to a study by Ronald F. Pol from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Using global statistics on money laundering, this researcher has found that only 0.1% of illegally gained funds are recovered from criminals. This leaves lawbreakers and organized groups free to use the majority of their funds for criminal acts.

Quote

13) 95% of system-generated alerts against money laundering resulted in false positives.
Financial institutions have systems to monitor suspicious transactions, such as substantial cash deposits and frequent movement of funds from one bank to another. However, anti-money laundering statistics show that 95% of those system-generated alerts are false positives, costing firms billions of dollars every year in wasted investigation time.

Quote

20) One of the most prominent money laundering cases in the USA involved Wachovia bank.
Wachovia, one of the largest banks in the US, was directly involved in the largest money laundering case of all time. The case worth $380 billion involved the drug cartel. The bank paid $160 million in fines to avoid criminal prosecution.

Quote

27) According to money laundering statistics of 2020, 90% of laundered money remains undetected.
The United Nations estimates that around $800 billion to $2 trillion are laundered every year. Unfortunately, about 90% of this amount remains undetected today.

https://legaljobs.io/blog/money-laundering-statistics/

 

Your reality seems way to rose tinted compare to what the real numbers are.

28 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Whats more you can nullify any transaction, or even freeze the receiving account

With cash? paper money? You sure about that?

 

29 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Not to mention the whole system is insured

Oh yeah sure, put an insurance on that 100$ bill your about to give to some random guy. Definitely a thing that happens.

[suicidalfranco]

5 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

You can do whatever you want as long as is legal. It is legal to transfer wealth from poor players to yourself using Blockchain, so feel free to keep doing so.

 

You can't expect people to agree that working as processor designer at AMD is providing the same net result to society as transfering wealth from poor players to yourself by plugging a GPU to the grid and waiting. That's the difference between positive sums and negative sums games.

Ah, so if I legally go on amazon, and legally pay for a GPU, at the price Amazon sets, and I legally receive said GPU, legally plug it to my network and let it crunch numbers, and out of those numbers I legally report to the gov my extra revenue,  I am in fact stealing from a poor player.

But if I as processor designer in Nvidia, design a good architecture, that beats the crap out of what AMD has to offer, that results in AMD losing revenue and forces them to resize their workforce to cut cost,  and somene looses a job in the process. That is a win-win situation for both Nvidia and AMD, me and the one who's now jobless.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

23 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

Ah, so if I legally go on amazon, and legally pay for a GPU, at the price Amazon sets, and I legally receive said GPU, legally plug it to my network and let it crunch numbers, and out of those numbers I legally report to the gov my extra revenue,  I am in fact stealing from a poor player.

Transfering wealth is not stealing, but yes. The real money that you are cashing out by selling the ETH comes from players that lost real money buying into ETH at some point. Your GPU helped process those transactions, and you have been given a share of the money for your trouble when you sold ETH for real money to exchanges. That money comes from the losers of the negative sums game.

What you did is fully legal. You have no legal liability in this. You don't have to feel attacked or justify yourself.

E.g. When Voyager failed, the real money had long disappeared, leaving large number of losers. If you were mining in that timeframe, some of those ETH went to you to reward you for helping to process those transactions.
ù

23 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

But if I as processor designer in Nvidia, design a good architecture, that beats the crap out of what AMD has to offer, that results in AMD losing revenue and forces them to resize their workforce to cut cost,  and somene looses a job in the process. That is a win-win situation for both Nvidia and AMD, me and the one who's now jobless.

Surely it's win win for Nvidia. That already beat the win-lose from a blockchain game.

 

Letting inefficient companies fail, is healty market dynamics. The company fail, but people move to other positions. In your case, Nvidia would be hiring, perhaps the good people that were fired from AMD, with perhaps higher salaries and doing even more better work. And the pressure increases AMD efficiency and lead to AMD creating even more value to compete. This is how ideally healty market dynamics work. Everyone is benefitting in the end. Your win, resulted in wins all around, making up for the losses.

Positive sums, doesn't mean there are no losers. Positive sums means that the sum of all winners > sum of all losers. Value is created in the process.

Negative sums mean that sum of all winners < sum of all losers. Value is destroyed in the process.

[Avocado Diaboli]

34 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

And the same can be said about any industry,  unless you are claiming that outside of crypto you have access to a customer base that trends to infinity and will always stay on a path of constant growth without stops, not just you but anyone who sells the same kind of product you are selling.

Again, you are conflating the size of any given market to value being added to that market. If two companies compete with each other, they're not selling a single product ad infinitum to a finite customer basis. They are evolving and improving their current products and services or researching and developing new ones. This adds value. That means markets are not finite, they can grow or shrink as a whole, so even if one company loses market share, the fact that the market grew can still leave both companies growing overall. I was going to ask you why you're so intent on not understanding this, but then again, you are a concerned party standing to lose your income source, so anything you say has to be taken with mountains of salt. Your arguments rest entirely on banking that whoever you're talking to has no idea how cancerous crypto really is, because you're holding a hot potato and you have to pretend you like doing so in order to convince someone to take that burning hot potato from you.

[Dracarris]

4 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

Yay! don't ever try to make your life easier I guess the take here is. You can have some extra income but your better off living every month pay check by pay check like the rest of us.

Educate yourself, get a better job so you can still put money aside. Start another income source that is fun and not based on wasting enormous amounts of energy.

 

And, finally, adopt a halfway modern banking system that does away with checks like the rest of the world did 30+ years ago.

4 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

I don't care about what I can do for society, all I care is what I can do to improve my life, and the people I care about.

Thanks for perfectly summarizing what's so utterly wrong in societies that are driven by capitalism on steroids (*cough* USA *cough). Me me me me me and everyone else, including the planet, can gtfo. I hope I don't have to explain to what this inevitably leads sooner or later.

[suicidalfranco]

37 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

When Voyager failed, the real money had long disappeared, leaving large number of losers. If you were mining in that timeframe, some of those ETH went to you to reward you for helping to process those transactions.

And that's normal, he gambled, he lost. If instead of putting that money on crypto he had put it on the stock market and lost it even there, would it have been more acceptable?

38 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

The real money that you are cashing out by selling the ETH comes from players that lost real money buying into ETH at some point. Your GPU helped process those transactions, and you have been given a share of the money for your trouble when you sold ETH for real money to exchanges. That money comes from the losers of the negative sums game.

No, that money comes from the pool generated out of the transaction fees happening within the network. Those loosing are the one selling their coins, gained through mining or trading fiat, on an exchange at loss. Those winning are the selling them at a profit. In the end you're either smart and have a good financial strategy to day trade or you go fomo and take bad decision out of impulse.

 

38 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

I was going to ask you why you're so intent on not understanding this, but then again, you are a concerned party standing to lose your income source, so anything you say has to be taken with mountains of salt.

Not concerned at all, my cripto gain its just an extra on top of what I get out of my work, given I don't operate at loss and always get back what I spend on it, losing it now would not be a problem, it would be an inconvenience for sure, but not an issue.

 

41 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Your arguments rest entirely on banking that whoever you're talking to has no idea how cancerous crypto really is

It's not cancerous, just tired of people aren't into spreading fud, when I'm an example that you can take something out of it for your own benefit.

43 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

convince someone to take that burning hot potato from you.

Not trying to convince anyone, I mean, the less people mining, the lower the network difficulty and therefore the higher the payout for me.

36 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Educate yourself, get a better job so you can still put money aside.

Already have a decent job, but I ain't go to say no to more money.

 

37 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Start another income source that is fun

This is fun

37 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

And, finally, adopt a halfway modern banking system that does away with checks like the rest of the world did 30+ years ago.

Living pay check by pay check is a figure of speach, and it doesn't literally mean I receive a check that I have to take to the bank. Though that was a well known way of saying what I receive monthly is what I spend monthly with no leftovers. Guess not.

40 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Thanks for perfectly summarizing what's so utterly wrong in societies that are driven by capitalism on steroids (*cough* USA *cough)

And yet I'm not American nor do I live in the US.

 

41 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Me me me me me and everyone else, including the planet, can gtfo. I hope I don't have to explain to what this inevitably leads sooner or later.

You do you, at least you can find peace of mind knowing that more sooner than later my crypto operation will be all solar powered thanks to the money I made from crypto. Or not you're just going to complain then that the power I generated on my rooftop wasn't being put back on the grid, that I would have to pay to insert it on the grid and receive nothing in return.

[Avocado Diaboli]

11 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

It's not cancerous, just tired of people aren't into spreading fud, when I'm an example that you can take something out of it for your own benefit.

Yes, that's why I said you need to bank on people not knowing how cancerous it is. You are afraid of people spreading "fud", because it cuts into your bottom line. Have you not caught onto the fact that much of the internal rhetoric of the crypto sphere is basically cult-like, with utter vilification of anyone who dares criticize crypto as spreading "fud"? It's an easy psychological trap to fall into and I'm not making fun of you for doing so. But you need to wake up to the fact that crypto is not a solution to traditional economic problems that are enabled by capitalism, at best it amplifies them, it's a complete waste of resources and morally reprehensible to engage with because again, you're relying on people being stupid enough to buy crypto (a worthless thing) at a higher price than you've paid for it.

 

If you have no problem with the fact that it's immoral, then prove it by stopping with your ill-fated campaign to convince us that "no really, crypto is great". Every attempt to refute our accusation is only a tacit admission that it does bug you that we call you immoral and if it really does, you should examine those feelings with a bit more introspection.

[tikker]

1 hour ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

This is a true statement on volumes. Real money volumes in blockchain is minute compared to real money flowing through the financial system. Criminals also want real money in the end, blockchain is at most a intermediate step in their scheme.

On ratios of legit transfers vs fraudolent transfers, it's hard to tell. Transactions are pseudonymous and there is lots of wash trading going on, I have no idea what it could be.

At very least tornado cash had a 30% fraudolent share, which is mindboggling. It's useless even to fraudsters having so much dirty cash in one place. There is no way to lauder money from a well that is this poisoned.

Oh yeah it'll definitely vary on a coin-by-coin basis. You won't hear me argue against that. With privacy coins that are indeed impossible to track I totally understand the concern because that is effectively as invisible as handing someone cash, making it a legitimate worry for fraudulent transfers. Like you say, crypto can be an intermediate step as even pseudonimity is one extra layer that'll have to be broken before getting to the target. I do think it's important to look at it by volume however, because otherwise our perception can get skewed. It doesn't make it better when a couple million bucks in crypto are stolen or that almost 700 million dollars went to ransomware payments each of the past two years, those are indeed bad situations, but since we mostly hear about those things we don't often see reports on how small a fraction that is in reality. It comes down to how big you think the ice berg underneath the tip we see is. I wouldn't think that the <5% we currently know is actually, say, ten times more in reality, but at the same time we see how hard fraud assessment is even with regular fiat money, so the possibility is there. The numbers also do indeed change when more gets known. Chainalysis regularly adjusts the numbers of the previous years, because more information became available.

[suicidalfranco]

14 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Yes, that's why I said you need to bank on people not knowing how cancerous it is.

I don't need anything.

15 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

You are afraid of people spreading "fud", because it cuts into your bottom line

Not afraid, tired. And no, it doesn't cut on my bottom line

17 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Have you not caught onto the fact that much of the internal rhetoric of the crypto sphere is basically cult-like, with utter vilification of anyone who dares criticize crypto as spreading "fud"

I could define a cult the sphere who's entire purpose is to trash on anything crypto related.

18 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

But you need to wake up to the fact that crypto is not a solution to traditional economic problems that are enabled by capitalism

Never said it was a solution, just that it would be stupid to say no to an extra income, specially once you know how to maximise it.

20 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

complete waste of resources and morally reprehensible to engage with because again, you're relying on people being stupid enough to buy crypto

what counts as waste is purely subjective, frankly I find more wasteful people throwing away time in front of the TV instead of doing something more productive. Yet those people will say it was the best time of their life.

And morally reprehensible? Telling about my exploit and sometime even helping others to replicate is morally wrong?

24 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

If you have no problem with the fact that it's immoral, then prove it by stopping with your ill-fated campaign to convince us that "no really, crypto is great"

I don't have a problem with it being immoral cause it's not.  And I'm not trying to convince no-one just giving a piece on my mind on the n-th circle jerk crypto is bad thread

26 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Every attempt to refute our accusation is only a tacit admission that it does bug you that we call you immoral and if it really does, you should examine those feelings with a bit more introspection.

I.E. You're in a cult, you don't want anyone to defy your dogmas, all who do are the devil incarnated.

 

[tim0901]

Well this thread has turned into a shitshow, but then what else did I expect from a thread on crypto...

 

Back on topic though: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/09/15/ethereum-miners-are-quickly-dying-less-than-24-hours-after-the-merge/

 

Quote

Ethereum Miners Are Quickly Dying Less Than 24 Hours After the Merge

Basically miners - as expected - have been moving to other POW coins, but the huge influx has - also as expected - made profitability all but impossible.

 

Quote

The hashrate, or computing power, used to mine PoW altcoins like ethereum classic (ETC) and ravencoin (RVN) doubled in the hours after the Merge took place. Alongside a rising hashrate, however, is rising difficulty, meaning miners are less likely to successfully mine a block and reap the block reward.

 

The reward for mining an Ethereum Classic block about 24 hours ago was ETC 0.0186484, or about 70 cents, but a check in the past hour found that’s tumbled to just ETC 0.00030658, or about 11 cents, according to data from Minerstat. Similarly, RVN miners could earn RVN 30.28478584, or $1.77 per block 24 hours ago, and in the past hour, that’s dropped to just RVN 0.82968431, or about 5 cents.

The minerstat page says it all - as I'm writing this the "average network hashrate" for today is nearly 5x higher than it was a week ago.

 

Quote

“As suspected, too many ETH miners switched over to ETC,” Ethan Vera, chief operations officer of mining services firm Luxor Technologies, tweeted on Thursday.

 

“Even running new generation hardware at sub 3 cent power is not profitable on ETC now … That electricity price is much lower than what households in the U.S. pay, and even to what industrial consumers like bitcoin miners pay in several parts of the country.”

 

Vera estimated that 20%-30% of ethereum miners have migrated to other networks, with the rest of them simply shutting down.

(emphasis mine)

 

Thoughts: It surprises me that only 20-30% of miners are even bothering to switch - I expected that number to be much higher. I guess it means we should expect eBay to be flooded with cards soon though.

[Avocado Diaboli]

19 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

I don't have a problem with it being immoral cause it's not. 

But it is. You're wasting enormous amounts of energy on wasted effort for minimal personal gain and literally zero contribution to society as a whole that could've gone into something more worthwhile. And don't attempt to assuage me that you're not using that much energy because you're a small fish next to the giant mining farms, because a lot of small operators still result in a large amount of wasted energy. The entire sector of crypto is a waste of energy. And for what? To dupe gullible people into buying your worthless ones and zeroes in the hopes of selling them at a profit. You're no better mining crypto than being an MLM shill. 

 

Because it's not just that it's a waste of energy that makes it immoral, it's that latter aspect of selling something worthless to gullible people that makes it truly cancerous. And I use that term deliberately, because like a cancer, its aim is to grow uncontrollably until it consumes the system and implodes. That's what "going to the moon" actually means, rapid deflation, which collapses the system and leaves anyone not already big in the game high and dry. You're only focused on the short term result of buying a little now and selling it off without "hodling", but your participation in the system is still morally reprehensible.

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, Sauron said:

at least in the case of a country the wealthy have to work indirectly through lobbying or corruption whereas in the blockchain they directly have power over everyone else, as in an oligarchy

They have the same direct power in the share market and property market so not much difference really. GameStop is another perfect example of such power being weaponized, this is not at all unique to cryptocurrencies other than the lack of regulation and entitles like the SEC.

 

Yes it's a little more wild west, no in that the rich are able to influence it more than basically anything else .

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Serial numbers, there goes your claim about impossible to track......

If it were that simple in reality more crime would get solved. Since we all actually live in reality it would be a good idea not to deny it. Just because cash has a serial number doesn't make it any easier to actually tie it to crimes and track it. Cryptocurrencies are by their very nature serialized, audited, and tracked. They are more traceable than cash, so if that really did help that much then 100% of illegal activity involving cryptocurrencies would be getting solved because it's so traceable. right...

 

Also there is a reason "under the table" payments is a thing and why it's called that and why it's so hard to find, punish and prevent. In fact there are reasons to not want to stop that sort of thing entirely anyway.

[Arika]

3 hours ago, Sauron said:

Maybe I can't but the FBI probably can.

You don't need to. most of these people post their address publicly all over the place or create .eth address for their wallets and then make that their twitter user name

[jagdtigger]

11 minutes ago, leadeater said:

If it were that simple

Comparativrly speaking it is, good luck identifying someone based solely on their crypto wallet address... Especially if they have an army of burner accounts to shuffle it around. Hell since there is no fee for creating a wallet they can create one for every single withdrawal....

[Brooksie359]

On 9/15/2022 at 4:41 AM, Sauron said:

if true it also makes ethereum's existence up to this point a crime against humanity...

That and cruise ships. If you got rid of cruise ships you could easily cut world energy consumption by a huge margin. Actually looking at it again it's not even that energy consumption is high which it is but they also just have way higher emissions to generate that energy vs basically anything else. 

[Sauron]

26 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

That and cruise ships.

At least on cruise ships you go somewhere, you eat, you sleep. It's wasteful but I can see some purpose. Crypto exclusively exists to scam people and make money in exchange for nothing.

[Spicedaddy]

Good for next gen video card prices and availability.

 

Gaming might be useless, but not as useless as mining!