Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards

vanished · July 31, 2017

and people thought it was almost over

wow, this is insane to imagine, even my wildest idea of how well it might be going didn't extend this far

muskie · August 2, 2017

On 01/08/2017 at 4:32 AM, AnonymousGuy said:

Article quality is incredibly low and screams bullshit + exaggeration. FedEx flies a plane filled with goods for 100 people, some of which is GPU's-> "MINERS OMGZ FLYING 747S!!!!!1!!1!!!"

My initial thoughts when seeing the article was that it was highly exaggerated to make it newsworthy, however, it appears the source of the original store (Quartz - https://qz.com/1039809/amd-shares-are-soaring-ethereum-miners-are-renting-boeing-747s-to-ship-graphics-cards-to-mines/) quoted Marco Streng, chief executive of Genesis Mining as saying...

Quote

Time is critical, very critical ... For example, we are renting entire airplanes, Boeing 747s, to ship on time. Anything else, like shipping by sea, loses so much opportunity.

If you look at the Etherium hash power, there's certainly a large increase as of late..

On 01/08/2017 at 4:39 AM, TetraSky said:

I'm happy for AMD that they can sell a ton of cards... But I hate this so much because it makes graphic cards for those of us who actually need one for gaming, unable to find one or afford one due to price hikes.

I think a solution here that would benefit both AMD, gamers and miners is that they develop a miner-specific SKU.

This should then incentivize the miners to buy the miner-specific stock, with the incentive of a hardware device that is catered for the workload and stipped of anything that does not benefit a miner workload. Gamers can then purchase standard GPU stock, with AMD continuing to benefit for the mining surplus and having a tigher control of GPU availability.

Certainly not a perfect solution, and I'm sure there are some hobbyist miners that will continue to use gamer-oriented GPUs to benefit from a dual-usage scenario - however, i suspect the broader stock availability issue is from commercial mining operations, rather than hobbyists.