Can someone explain Etherium to me?

[The_Phenomenal_One]

Like what is everyone buying out all the 1050s and 1060s, for etherium mining. What is Etherium and how do you mine it"?

[The Sloth]

 

[minibois]

It's a cryptocurrency (much like Bitcoin is) that can be mined with, to put it simply, doing calculations. All the different cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ZCash, etc.) are most optimally mined in different ways, but for now I will mostly focus on Ethereum (or ETH) and ZCash.

 

As of now, these are most optimally mined (price to performance) with GPU's. ETH is best on AMD (but there are tweaks to make it run as good-ish on Nvidia) and and ZCash on Nvidia.

This is why it's impossible to get AMD RX 470, 480, 570 and 580 cards: they are best for ETH. This is when all the other kids wanted to make $$$ from this craze and they decided to also focus on ZCash and mostly got GTX 1070 cards for that. Than there were tweaks to make ETH run well on Nvidia and all the GTX 1060 cards got bought out.

As far as I know, GTX 1050, 1050 Ti, 1080 and 1080 Ti are still able to be bought, because the first two are too weak for their money and the latter two are just too expensive for these miners.

 

And how do you mine it? You run a program and just mine. Haven't set it up ever myself, so you'll have to find a guide to do that yourself (I think Ryan Vickers has a good guide in the Cryptocurrency forum).

 

[The_Phenomenal_One]

5 minutes ago, Minibois said:

It's a cryptocurrency (much like Bitcoin is) that can be mined with, to put it simply, doing calculations. All the different cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ZCash, etc.) are most optimally mined in different ways, but for now I will mostly focus on Ethereum (or ETH) and ZCash.

 

As of now, these are most optimally mined (price to performance) with GPU's. ETH is best on AMD (but there are tweaks to make it run as good-ish on Nvidia) and and ZCash on Nvidia.

This is why it's impossible to get AMD RX 470, 480, 570 and 580 cards: they are best for ETH. This is when all the other kids wanted to make $$$ from this craze and they decided to also focus on ZCash and mostly got GTX 1070 cards for that. Than there were tweaks to make ETH run well on Nvidia and all the GTX 1060 cards got bought out.

As far as I know, GTX 1050, 1050 Ti, 1080 and 1080 Ti are still able to be bought, because the first two are too weak for their money and the latter two are just too expensive for these miners.

 

And how do you mine it? You run a program and just mine. Haven't set it up ever myself, so you'll have to find a guide to do that yourself (I think Ryan Vickers has a good guide in the Cryptocurrency forum).

I have no interest in doing it myself, a friend of mine was cursing up a storm over the lack of availability of the cards. Is it illegal or is it working as intended? 

[minibois]

2 minutes ago, The_Phenomenal_One said:

I have no interest in doing it myself, a friend of mine was cursing up a storm over the lack of availability of the cards. Is it illegal or is it working as intended? 

It's not illegal, people can buy up 25 of the same GPU if they want (and the store allows it). It's just kinda shitty IMO, because yeah I personally wanted to buy a new pc last month, but had to postpone because RX 580 availability.