And making budget GPUs cost as much as mid-range GPUs before the cryptocurrency craze. I can’t even buy a good GPU now thanks to that. >_>
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I’m gonna steal that one.
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It’s not mine, so you’ll be doing the best kind of stealing: taking it from another thief!
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You know words. You have the best words…
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Roger that!
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Deflation is weird is all I can say. I’m waiting for some economist to come up with a concept similar to a gravitational singularity for permanent economic downturns (if you follow Damn_Jehu on Twitter you know he’s actually tried to tie the phenomenon of blackholes to the collapse of capitalism which got… weird).
I’m right there with you. but the 1080 only launched about 2 years ago. It is somewhat the consumer/enthusiast version of an older, far more expensive professional card. That cost over $1k, The 1080 launched with an msrp of $600.
Which sounds even worse. Those things are currently retailing well above their launch price, 2 years down the road. And routinely for more than the crazy expensive professional only card it was meant to be a more affordable and attainable version of.
It looks like they’re currently going for 2x their original msrp, despite there being newer and competing cards. And reduction in that msrp.
And things seem even worse over in AMD land. See a lot of people who are happy to over pay for nvidia cards. Because the amd equivalent are commonly selling for more. Despite a lower starting price. And lower performance in the vast majority of things that aren’t mining. I picked up an rx480 not long after the aftermarket cards launched. I was convinced I would regret it. There’s almost always a prompt refresh card that’s better. Or a price drop. Within 6 months to a year. After a new line launches. And sure enough there was both. But by that time everything was going for a few hundred more than it was worth, And was getting hard to find. And it’s only gotten worse. So I got the card I wanted below msrp, And didn’t have to wait or hunt it down. And I regret nothing.
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I’m a Finn, significantly nerdier than average, interested in investment stuff, and I’ve never heard of either this cryptocurrency project or the guy behind it.
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Oops, you’re right. I was remembering my most recent build as longer ago than 2 years, when I was speccing out cards and had to settle for a lowly 970 for my rig because the new hotness was too expensive. But the fact that this same card is STILL too expensive makes my blood boil.
| >Bitcoin’s electricity consumption as a percentage of the world’s electricity consumption | 0.20% |
|---|---|
| >Annual carbon footprint (kt of CO2) | 21,568 |
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… To achieve this, a holder had to affix to the back of a certificate a 1-cent stamp before the end of every week, for the certificate to maintain its validity.
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You know, I had wondered when I was posting that if it was widespread, or even how I would figure out how widespread it was. Thanks for this info!
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Mark Blyth’s line on bitcoin
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Yeah it’s still even worse. A card that was explicitly out out under the idea of “hey remember Titan?! And how it’s was a grand!? And you couldn’t find it!? Well this is just as powerful but for $600 and it’s everywhere!”
Is now more expensive and less available. 2 years after it was released to be less expensive and more available.
I think what’s even worse is how the mid-range is gone. 1070s looked like around a grand on Google earlier too. Which is absurd, And nearly everything else is sitting in top tier prices even for budget performance. For a while there people were buying the top grade cards from the last few used it new old stock. The same or better performance than current mid-range but cheaper. But the inflation seems to hitting then too.
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GOD DAMN you’re not kidding! Back in 2015, right before this craziness (and shortly after I briefly got into it,) I bought an R9 380 off Newegg. It was like a $180 card or so, got it on sale for maybe $120. 2 years later and the cheapest I’m seeing it is $270. Cryptocurrency may be shitty as a medium of exchange, but it sure isn’t shitty for the shovel makers, is it?
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Yeah I have a 270 in a box in the closet I’ve been thinking about throwing it up on eBay just to see what happens. There’s almost nothing out there that’s worth a damn that’s isn’t selling for more than its original retail cost.
But the only help the shovel makers are getting is in selling out there cards. When something goes 2x it’s msrp at retail. It’s the retailer getting all that extra cash. They still paid the same to aquire it from the producer.
If there’s anything the cryptocurrency boom should have you investing in. It’s been gpu makers.
Bitcoin’s transaction fees and high valuation have nothing to do with its processing ‘speed’ - nor, in fact, is it a technological limitation. The fee simply buys you priority, and the averaged transaction speed is software determined.
If the miners wanted to, they could simply agree on a new block size and hey-presto, transactions are ‘faster’ (in reality more occur at once, increasing the average transactions per second). This has been repeatedly mooted over the years, but always fails because Bitcoin is designed as a Prisoner’s Dilemma for libertarian theory - changing the block size, and therefore the average transactions per second requires majority approval from miners, and miners like having a small block size because the smaller the block needing to be made the faster it propagates, confirms, and rewards them for ‘discovering’ it, so they vote it down because it’s not in their direct interest - even though it might be in the interest of Bitcoin as a whole.
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In this case “the man” means “the US taxpayer”. The people you probably really want to stick it to aren’t hurt at all by something like this.
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The seven-transactions-per-second limit is a “technological limitation” in the sense that it is intentionally built into the Bitcoin software. Bitcoin calibrates itself such that a block is added to the blockchain every 10 minutes, no matter how much computing power is available (if the available power goes up or down, the mathematical puzzle to be solved in Bitcoin mining – basically, calculating a hash value over the previous and currently-considered blocks that exhibits certain defined properties – is made harder or easier, respectively).
Adding a high bounty to your transaction doesn’t make Bitcoin faster, it just makes your transaction more interesting for miners to consider working on within the available capacity, to a point where transactions with low bounties are basically frozen out of the system and never actually end up on the blockchain.
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