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

[Lightwreather]

14 minutes ago, tikker said:

exchangeable for goods

Here's the thing, money Should (not saying it is but that it should) be the medium by which goods are exchanged not for. Else, you run into the same problems the gold standard does. And many cryptos fall into the latter currency.

[tikker]

48 minutes ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

Here's the thing, money Should (not saying it is but that it should) be the medium by which goods are exchanged not for. Else, you run into the same problems the gold standard does. And many cryptos fall into the latter currency.

What would exchanging "by" be? Our fiat money is exchanged for goods as well and that works fine no? The difference with the gold standard is that $1 is only worth $1 because the government says so and you can pay $1 of taxes with it. It has no intrinsic value.

[Lightwreather]

35 minutes ago, tikker said:

What would exchanging "by" be? Our fiat money is exchanged for goods as well and that works fine no? The difference with the gold standard is that $1 is only worth $1 because the government says so and you can pay $1 of taxes with it. It has no intrinsic value.

by would mean that it is a medium of exchange. And just that, a medium. And as for fiat not having intrinsic value, that is by design for this purpose.

I should also note that this stuff is just my viewpoint, as flawed as it may be, and is way out of my league, so yea. Anyway, I found this video series interesting, it notes the development of currencies until fiat and the reasons for it:

 

[tikker]

6 minutes ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

by would mean that it is a medium of exchange. And just that, a medium. And as for fiat not having intrinsic value, that is by design for this purpose.

I should also note that this stuff is just my viewpoint, as flawed as it may be, and is way out of my league, so yea. Anyway, I found this video series interesting, it notes the development of currencies until fiat and the reasons for it:

 

I think were on the same, or at least similar pages. I don't see the current cryptos becoming large, due to their unregulated volatile nature. That doesn't mean it can't function as a currency, just that there are (much) better ways to go about that, depending on what you see as better. I think crypto is a good example of why regulation is important for a stable currency/economy. Fiat solves the value issue by making it inherently worthless and regulation fixes (largely) the volatility issue.

[ComradeIT]

On 9/16/2022 at 3:32 AM, 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.

This is silly. You can't just say "there's no economic benefit." You have to respond to the value proposition. I've spent so much of my life studying this hobby and I have robust, mathematical arguments that I can make against very specific value propositions that other people claim for other blockchain technologies. Thinking you can just wave your hand in the general direction of your conclusion that the whole space must be worthless and then telling us that we have to do more research on our hobbies is the peak of arrogance. It's lazy. It's Begging the Question. 

 

On 9/16/2022 at 1:26 AM, ComradeIT said:

Other coins are either Bitcoin, which uses different hardware, or are a tiny fraction of the value of Ethereum and they won't be able to squeeze much from that stone. Mining is only profitable if you get paid for it, and there's not going to be very much miners can squeeze from those stones. You can check https://whattomine.com/gpus and even the most efficient GPUs won't be able to make a profit for almost five years at current price and difficulty. The drop in GPU prices shows that a lot of miners are unplugging too. 

 

Trent Vanepps predicted a slow, late sell-off https://nitter.com/trent_vanepps/status/1511348011405828097#m so we might see this trend get even more exaggerated.

 

Also the EU is in the middle of an energy crisis and there have been talks suggesting to ban proof-of-work mining if the Ethereum merge proves proof-of-work isn't necessary. Bitcoin is the monster we need to slay if we want to really put a stop to mining, and this is how that will go. We prove mining isn't necessary, then we offer a better alternative, then we bury Bitcoin underneath their crippling supply cap. 

Anyway, I just came back to say that the profitability on alternative PoW coins has completely fractured since I made my last comment. The five year return on investment I quoted then is already over 16 years now. The only reason anyone should be mining now is if they're stealing electricity from their landlord  or they're mining Bitcoin on ASICs 

[Jito463]

On 9/15/2022 at 9:53 AM, suicidalfranco said:

Hopefully it dies and another mine-able coin takes it's place

Hopefully it dies along with all other crypto.

On 9/15/2022 at 11:20 AM, NastyFlytrap said:

Great, but another will just take its place.....

We're rid of ethereum, soon we'll be dealing with the next.

Yeah, that's my primary concern.

On 9/15/2022 at 8:57 PM, Alex Atkin UK said:

its actually wasting our limited fossil fuels

Hah!  Limited, that's funny.  I mean, if by limited it's not 'technically' infinite, I suppose so.  However, people have been crying about the end of "fossil fuels" since the 70's, and yet we continue to find more.  Not looking to make this political, but I couldn't let that stand uncontested.

 

So far as Crypto goes, I couldn't give a rat's patootie about the waste of electricity (though it is rather pointless, in my opinion).

 

My primary issue with it is that there's literally nothing behind.  Yeah, I've heard the counter argument of "but neither does the dollar!", which isn't exactly accurate.  The USD (or any other currency) has the backing of that nations economy, whereas crypto is literally just a math equation.

 

The previous comparisons in this thread to stocks would be more apt, in my opinion, except that even stocks are backed by the performance of the company they belong to.  Crypto lacks even that stability.

 

Crypto is not a currency, nor will it be unless a nation takes it on as such.  It's a commodity, and a fairly worthless one at that.

[Moonzy]

23 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Crypto is not a currency, nor will it be unless a nation takes it on as such.

You might wanna update yourself...?

[Jito463]

20 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

You might wanna update yourself...?

Are you saying one has?  Last I heard that wasn't the case, but feel free to share.

[Lightwreather]

16 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Are you saying one has?  Last I heard that wasn't the case, but feel free to share.

El salvador.

[tikker]

8 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Hah!  Limited, that's funny.  I mean, if by limited it's not 'technically' infinite, I suppose so.  However, people have been crying about the end of "fossil fuels" since the 70's, and yet we continue to find more.  Not looking to make this political, but I couldn't let that stand uncontested.

No. Limited means that there are very real limits to them and that at this pace we will run out within a forseeable time. For example, a BP review from 2015 and this estimate from 2009 put our time left with fossil fuels at just over a century all considered. Finding more deposits won't fix our problem, because the overall supply is still decreasing and the remaining supply will be increasingly take more effort and/or become more costly to extract, ignoring their geopolitical locations which will be influenced by international relations.

Quote

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421508004126
The new formula is modified from the Klass model and thus assumes a continuous compound rate and computes fossil fuel reserve depletion times for oil, coal and gas of approximately 35, 107 and 37 years, respectively. This means that coal reserves are available up to 2112, and will be the only fossil fuel remaining after 2042.

We also simply need to move away from fossil fuels. The "cry" since the 70s was not just about the immediate consequences of running out, but also about the unsustainability of it and it driving climate change (which was already predicted as a consequence from using fossil fuels around then). Fossil fuel usage needs to go, even for the least important reason that we will run out of them.

 

2 hours ago, Jito463 said:

My primary issue with it is that there's literally nothing behind.  Yeah, I've heard the counter argument of "but neither does the dollar!", which isn't exactly accurate.  The USD (or any other currency) has the backing of that nations economy, whereas crypto is literally just a math equation.

The value of crypto isn't just a math equation. Crypto nicely highlights why value is (mostly) subjective. When nobody cared about Bitcoin it cost pennies. Only when the idea of it being valuable took hold the price started increasing. Just like the myth where the market was led to believe that diamonds were rare and therefore should inherently be expensive. People saying there is nothing backing the dollar are correct that there is no commodity backing it. Fiat currencies are only backed by the government's word that they are worth what they are, i.e. $1 is worth $1, and that they can reliably be used to interact with the economy. And if you consider the economy as a backing of the value, then you can argue that cryptos are backed in a similar way, like a fiat currency:

Quote

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041615/what-difference-between-fiat-money-and-representative-money.asp

Is Bitcoin a Fiat Currency?

Bitcoins aren't backed by commodities, so they're not necessarily a form of representative currency. They are, though, backed by the faith of investors and—to some degree—governments, so they may be considered a form of fiat currency.

 

[Dracarris]

2 hours ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

El salvador.

Yeah and that turned out great, right? El Salvador is literally the biggest laughing stock when it comes to crypto adoption. The only tried it bcs they were in deep deep inflation shitland before.

[Jito463]

2 hours ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

El salvador.

Can you give me an example that matters?

[Jito463]

48 minutes ago, tikker said:

No. Limited means that there are very real limits to them and that at this pace we will run out within a forseeable time. For example, a BP review from 2015 and this estimate from 2009 put our time left with fossil fuels at just over a century all considered

So in 40+ years, we went from 30 years until we run out, to 100 years.  So 100 years from now, will we be 300-400 years from running out?  It's obvious you've bought into the hype, so I'm not going to try and change your mind (especially so the mods don't lock it down for political talk), I would just advise you to do some research into the alarmism of the 70's and 80's, and how it pertains to the alarmism of today.  There's a reason I don't trust any of these so-called scientific studies.

 

54 minutes ago, tikker said:

And if you consider the economy as a backing of the value, then you can argue that cryptos are backed in a similar way, like a fiat currency:

Um, no.

[Lightwreather]

45 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Yeah and that turned out great, right? El Salvador is literally the biggest laughing stock when it comes to crypto adoption. The only tried it bcs they were in deep deep inflation shitland before.

I forgot to add the line, "For all the good that it does them"

[tikker]

53 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

So in 40+ years, we went from 30 years until we run out, to 100 years.  So 100 years from now, will we be 300-400 years from running out?  It's obvious you've bought into the hype, so I'm not going to try and change your mind (especially so the mods don't lock it down for political talk), I would just advise you to do some research into the alarmism of the 70's and 80's, and how it pertains to the alarmism of today.  There's a reason I don't trust any of these so-called scientific studies.

And yet you do not provide sources that you would trust, but rely on the classic "if you do your research" deflection. Those estimates are tricky and will be revised, that is how things go. Where are those many hundreds of years of supposedly undiscovered fuel? You, nor anyone else, knows where or even if and that is the problem. I also elaborated why the amount was the least of our problems. We can't afford to use it in the first place.

 

Crypto's power consumption from proof of work coins wouldn't have been as much of a problem if the world, or at least all of the mining, ran on green energy. That isn't baseless alarmism, but based on solid scientific evidence. Fossil fuel use driving the observed climate change hasn't been a debate within the scientific community for quite a while. Science has also advanced a great deal since the 70s and 80s, so it is not a fair comparison to directly compare then and now without accounting for that substantial knowledge gap. We have much longer time baselines and a much better understanding of climate then 40 years ago.

53 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Um, no.

Well you can read my argument in the part you didn't quote. Happy to see counter-reasoning.

[Jito463]

11 hours ago, tikker said:

And yet you do not provide sources that you would trust, but rely on the classic "if you do your research" deflection.

Actually, I'm just trying not to get the thread locked.  Unless things have changed, I know the mods used to be pretty quick about tamping down "political discussion", especially in the news section.  Of course, if someone like you posts "politically correct" theories, then they're left up.  I'll send you a couple links to some YT videos I found in a quick search, just to give you some ideas.

[Alex Atkin UK]

You do realise fracking was considered unthinkable back then?  Its literally such an expensive, dangerous thing to do that is happening now only thanks to governments subsidising it, ignoring the risks.

Sure we can get more gas (though how much more we do not know), but not sure what good it will do us if the water table is poison and earthquake/sink holes destroy the land where we live.

This is not just alarmist propaganda, its literally been happening and anyone with an ounce of common sense could have predicted it without any formal geological training.  Would you knock out the foundations of a building and replace it with liquid and expect the building to remain stable?

 

7 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Actually, I'm just trying not to get the thread locked.  Unless things have changed, I know the mods used to be pretty quick about tamping down "political discussion", especially in the news section.  Of course, if someone like you posts "politically correct" theories, then they're left up.  I'll send you a couple links to some YT videos I found in a quick search, just to give you some ideas.

That's certainly problematic, given politics is at the root of everything so its pretty much impossible to discuss anything without getting political, or someone claiming it is.

[Kisai]

21 hours ago, Jito463 said:

 

Hah!  Limited, that's funny.  I mean, if by limited it's not 'technically' infinite, I suppose so.  However, people have been crying about the end of "fossil fuels" since the 70's, and yet we continue to find more.  Not looking to make this political, but I couldn't let that stand uncontested.

 

 

They haven't been "finding more", energy efficiency went up. In the 50's, and then stopped in the 80's after the oil crisis. 

https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2011/04/history-of-fuel-economy-clean-energy-factsheet.pdf

 

That's the line of thinking that got us into the climate change mess in the first place. The oil companies absolutely already did the science in the 70's and knew exactly what would happen, and did it anyway instead of trying to diversify rapidly into alternative energy sources. No we waited until the late 90's to start taking the "global warming" part seriously and didn't even consider the other aspects until the late 2000's. Meanwhile "burn it if you got it" was standard operating procedure for the oil companies.

 

If you are over the age of 30, you likely have observed your local climate change for the worse. For people in BC, like where Linus lives, you've noticed the mild metro Vancouver weather change from occasional light dustings of snow, to heavy snow dumps that last a week longer, but the rest of the province has gone from "heavy snow dumps that last all winter" to "one heavy snow dump one year in mid-october" to "no snow until late December". Like I distinctly remember years where the snow would fall, and then about a week later it was pretty much just a foot of ice and you could walk on top of it, even if you were over 100lbs. Then there was one year where it snowed so hard that the snow blower had a hard time with it and created an 8' wall along the driveway. Further east, like in Alberta to Ontario, has started having regular tornado touchdowns every fall. 

 

We shouldn't be expanding oil use at all, but what's the alternative? Build nuclear reactors? We haven't even solved the "what do we do with the high level nuclear waste" problem, and we can't incinerate it or bury it perpetually, because generations later will still be dealing with all the "Chernobyl" accidents for the next 20,000 years. Human civilization hasn't even been around that long. 

 

Pretty much we have to stake bets on energy sources that don't require exotic materials to harness, so that puts PV solar at a disadvantage, the materials for making solar panels will dry up eventually. Wind is the next obvious, but the wear-rate on wind turbines makes those not really good, though one could argue that we just need a way to recycle those, and it's just not economical to recycle fiberglass. Geothermal is the "safest", "zero emission", "zero-waste-in-theory" energy source, but we don't tap into it because it uses local fresh-water sources. Gee if only there was some water source we could vaporize to run it (eg greywater, sea water) and then reclaim the clean water vapor.) Tidal power is the next easiest to access, but hard to build.  Hydro-electric could be re-engineered into manmade reservoirs, and pumped storage against other mechanical energy sources (eg wind.) 

 

Ultimately, in regards to wasting energy to mint virtual coins, is a problem because it caused more dirty energy sources (eg coal, oil, natural gas, waste-to-energy/incinerator plants) to be operated instead of shutdown. One could easily make the argument that "if you're paying for the energy, who cares what you do with it", but it misses the point of where that energy comes from, and collectively the entire city or state is paying for the infrastructure to get you that energy. You should care, because everyone's careless waste of energy is why the energy transmission costs go up, not just the generation costs. Some places, like California import energy from Canada, line-losses and and all, to cover shortfalls in their own generation capacity. Meanwhile, parts of Canada like Quebec sell energy  super-cheap to the US states it sells to.

 

If every state and country had identical energy costs, perhaps the cryptocoin problem wouldn't have driven "cheap, dirty energy" countries from effectively subsidizing everyone else playing the same crypto-ponzi game. Because that's effectively what happened, people stole energy, or fraudulently obtained low-cost energy by various means. (Look at all the stories about cryptominers running on various employee computers.)

 

Anyway. I don't ever see another GPU-based mining boom. Something else will come along and we will again have another GPU shortage, but I think the next one will be an AI/Machine Learning driven shortage, where people build their own AI clusters and sell the compute power (a la BOINC) using the high-end GPU cards. The only thing preventing that right now is the lack of network bandwidth (you really gonna push a 100GB training data set to 1000 compute nodes? Probably not.)

 

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

23 hours ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

El salvador.

It's true El Salvador is using BTC as legal tender, it's not being used at scale because of enormous problems. El Salvador uses L2 Lightning Network to have some throughput of transactions, but the network is very leaky and is prone to just losing transactions. Lightning does stuffs off chain. When transactions aren't committed to the main net for some reasons, your shop will lose the transactions of the day. The ATM also sometimes just don't give you the money, or the system doublespends.

8 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

You do realise fracking was considered unthinkable back then?  Its literally such an expensive, dangerous thing to do that is happening now only thanks to governments subsidising it, ignoring the risks.

Energy is a BIG problem our civilization is facing right now, there is no obviously good and/or easy solution.

 

ETH PoW and BTC PoW are making this problem harder. ETH used 0.2% of world energy according to its creator. BTC is estimated to be around 0.5%. It's my belief that PoW is criminal, and should have been banned years ago.

 

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

They haven't been "finding more", energy efficiency went up. In the 50's, and then stopped in the 80's after the oil crisis. 

The USA has been able to harness the Shale deposits only in recent history. Those deposits were inaccessible without the right technology, and didn't count toward the reserves back then. Production has increased, and can increase enormously with new technologies.

 

I'll share a chart that worries me: BTC Hashrate has been growing at about 50e18 hashes/s each year. If for some reasons, BTC wins and is used at scale like the USD, eventually most of the resources of our civilization will be spent churning PoW hashes for the BTC network... Those calculations are done under the assumption that all network operators are using the most efficient mining rig possible, about one and a half million of them drawing 3KW each. Under those assumptions, each BTC transactions yesterday used about 50 liters of gasoline worth of energy.

The two big dips in the hashrate are :

1. China ban that forced lots of hashrate to be disconnected. Hashrate returned when rigs were moved out of the China in Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Texas, etc... or when BTC farms went "underground" in China
2. Price crash, it forced miners to disconnect the least efficient rigs. Miners have billions of dollars in new rigs that were ordered during the ATH, that are slowly coming on line to replace them.

in comparison, ETH was using about four liters of gasoline per transaction. ETH was somewhat faster than BTC at 15TPS, and ETH is less pricey, justifying fewer GPUs.

[Jito463]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

If you are over the age of 30, you likely have observed your local climate change for the worse.

Nope, can't say I have.

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

They haven't been "finding more", energy efficiency went up.

Are you sure about that?  I found these through just a simple search, imagine if I really went digging.  And all of this was just within the past 10 years.

 

October 2012: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/american-oil-find-holds-oil-opec/story?id=17536852

November 2016: https://www.ibtimes.com/nearly-1-trillion-worth-oil-found-texas-largest-deposit-ever-discovered-us-2448534

December 2017: https://www.rt.com/business/411524-china-trillion-oil-deposit-discovered/

[leadeater]

39 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

It's my belief that PoW is criminal, and should have been banned years ago.

It's not really so much that PoW is the issue in itself it's that as currently implemented the algorithms and the hardware aren't done in a way to ensure energy efficiency and outright overall low energy usage. PoW doesn't have to be how ETH was and BTC is, those are just examples of PoW done a way, not the only way.

[Lightwreather]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

If you are over the age of 30, you likely have observed your local climate change for the worse

I will add to this and say, I'm Not over 30 yet, here where I live (in a desert), summer temps ten years ago were in the mid 30s (Celsius), if my memory serves correctly but now, we're getting mid 40s on a regular basis (in summer) with occasional peaks into the early 50s.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

30 minutes ago, leadeater said:

It's not really so much that PoW is the issue in itself it's that as currently implemented the algorithms and the hardware aren't done in a way to ensure energy efficiency and outright overall low energy usage. PoW doesn't have to be how ETH was and BTC is, those are just examples of PoW done a way, not the only way.

Unfortunately not. If a rig emerges that is 10X more efficient, miners will keep the power consumption the same, and simply use 10X rigs. It's a wicked structural incentive, a positive feedback loop that emerges from game theory. It doesn't matter what the W in PoW is (computation, energy, space, etc...). Line Goes Up summarizes it very well:

 

[leadeater]

58 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Unfortunately not. If a rig emerges that is 10X more efficient, miners will keep the power consumption the same, and simply use 10X rigs. It's a wicked structural incentive, a positive feedback loop that emerges from game theory. It doesn't matter what the W in PoW is (computation, energy, space, etc...). Line Goes Up summarizes it very well:

No that's just your bias based on how it's done now. You could for example only allow it to be run on dedicated specific hardware and the purchase of said hardware is restricted to merchant banks, or literally whatever. PoW is not the issue, it's how it's been implemented right now.

 

You can do whatever you want, it's just software when it comes down to it.

 

Edit:

Just to generalize on the core of the issue then that would be the desire to power grab. Those that are at the heart of cryptocurrencies really just want to move the power away from banks, because evil, yet they want to have the power the of banks so just want to be "the evil guys".

 

Really has nothing to do with the utility of the technology, want to provide a "decentralized currency", a means for the masses to trade globally with ease. Yea none of that, if those really were the objective and goals being worked towards it would have already been achieved. 

[tikker]

54 minutes ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

I will add to this and say, I'm Not over 30 yet, here where I live (in a desert), summer temps ten years ago were in the mid 30s (Celsius), if my memory serves correctly but now, we're getting mid 40s on a regular basis (in summer) with occasional peaks into the early 50s.

Yep, same here. Winter and summer temperatures are like 1-3 degrees hotter than "normal" this year. Winters used to mean freezing weather, snow and ice skating 15-20 years ago. Now it's rare to get proper snow at all, let alone proper freezing weather for many days.