All About Ethereum, The New Cryptocurrency King

[Jsimenhoff]

I am in the market for a GPU upgrade and I want to get a 1070, particularly the Asus Strix model, but the price and availability are a major turn off. But I did like that Micro Center is letting coin miners know how they feel:

http://www.microcenter.com/product/466268/GeForce_GTX_1070_GAMING_X_8GB_GDDR5_PCIe_Video_Card

 

[why_wolf]

The people who are driving up GPU prices and causing the shortage though, can go, um, I probably shouldn't finish that sentence. :lol:

It's certainly a problem. The hardware manufacturers should definitely pay attention and sort out these supply issues ASAP. As we discussed in our recent article on the soaring costs of GTX 1070 retail prices, now is not the time to upgrade:

"As there are so many similarities between these two events, we suspect that it may take quite some time for prices to stabilize. Due to the recent increases in price and supply shortages, we recommend postponing GPU upgrades until prices have returned to normal if possible. Unfortunately, due to the nature of cryptocurrency, it is unpredictable how long it will take for prices to drop."

I am in the market for a GPU upgrade and I want to get a 1070, particularly the Asus Strix model, but the price and availability are a major turn off. But I did like that Micro Center is letting coin miners know how they feel:

http://www.microcenter.com/product/466268/GeForce_GTX_1070_GAMING_X_8GB_GDDR5_PCIe_Video_Card

lol. That's awesome.

 

[bit_user]

The implications of the Etherum Virtual Machine and the future promise of Web 3.0 could bring about an internet that is both more fair and secure. Securely distributing the network and the information it carries across all its connected nodes (that is, all web-connected devices) would make the need for net neutrality a thing of the past.

(emphasis added)

This is quite a bold claim. I think an explanation is warranted. As far as I can tell, it can only solve potential net neutrality issues for a tiny sliver of internet apps.

Not only that, but you're assuming that the Ethereum protocol, itself, isn't disadvantaged by lack of NN. I don't know if this ever happens with Ethereum, but I've heard of bitcoin miners being the subject of DDoS attacks by rival mining groups. I think it wouldn't take much of this type of nonsense for some ISPs to block Ethereum (or at least throttle it, to discourage home users from mining).

 

[why_wolf]

The implications of the Etherum Virtual Machine and the future promise of Web 3.0 could bring about an internet that is both more fair and secure. Securely distributing the network and the information it carries across all its connected nodes (that is, all web-connected devices) would make the need for net neutrality a thing of the past.

(emphasis added)

This is quite a bold claim. I think an explanation is warranted. As far as I can tell, it can only solve potential net neutrality issues for a tiny sliver of internet apps.

Not only that, but you're assuming that the Ethereum protocol, itself, isn't disadvantaged by lack of NN. I don't know if this ever happens with Ethereum, but I've heard of bitcoin miners being the subject of DDoS attacks by rival mining groups. I think it wouldn't take much of this type of nonsense for some ISPs to block (or at least throttle) Ethereum.

Yeah Ethereum has nothing to do with Net Neutrality an ISP could block its protocol as easily as it can block anything else.

 

[MrMakapuu]

If you are like me and "had" a rx480 you bought last fall for $250 for an ITX build. Or have a card or two lying around. Forget about using them in a mining rig. You may make about $6 a day (1 gpu rx480 no bios mod) hashing with Hashimoto or $180 a month - about $50 for power profit $130 x 12 months if you are really lucky.

Do what I did. Sell your card on ebay. I got $450 for mine. Open an account with a reliable buy/sell crypto coin site and buy low and sell high. Basically treat the coins as a small high volalitle % of your investment portfolio. Otherwise that 6 gpu/$2500+ may be worthless soon and just a power hog.

You can even buy/sell hashing power without hardware at Nicehash.

*****One other thing I like to point out is be careful of the Fee's! Each time you transfer coin from a pool or wallet you pay 1, 2 sometimes even 3%! *****

 

[why_wolf]

If you are like me and "had" a rx480 you bought last fall for $250 for an ITX build. Or have a card or two lying around. Forget about using them in a mining rig. You may make about $6 a day (1 gpu rx480 no bios mod) hashing with Hashimoto or $180 a month - about $50 for power profit $130 x 12 months if you are really lucky.

Do what I did. Sell your card on ebay. I got $450 for mine. Open an account with a reliable buy/sell crypto coin site and buy low and sell high. Basically treat the coins as a small high volalitle % of your investment portfolio. Otherwise that 6 gpu/$2500+ may be worthless soon and just a power hog.

You can even buy/sell hashing power without hardware at Nicehash.

*****One other thing I like to point out is be careful of the Fee's! Each time you transfer coin from a pool or wallet you pay 1, 2 sometimes even 3%! *****

Yeah I was noticing that, the rate of return on just buying and selling coins is much better than buying a bunch of cards and trying to mine.

 

[RomeoReject]

Yeah, the folks buying up all the cards have certainly thrown a wrench in to my plans. I was hoping to eventually move up to Vega to replace the two 280Xs (Inconsistent crossfire means my games either look amazing, or terrible). But something tells me it'll be kidney-selling expensive here in Canada to try and find one when they release.

 

[bit_user]

Open an account with a reliable buy/sell crypto coin site and buy low and sell high. Basically treat the coins as a small high volalitle % of your investment portfolio.

This is hardly risk-free. A price crash could wipe out all your profits and much of your principal. People shouldn't invest more in this than they're willing to lose, as it's not much different than gambling.

If you look back to what happened with bitcoin, in 2013, it went from like $1200 and dropped over the course of 2014 to a low of around $170 in early 2015. If you were aggressively playing the market in 2013, you could've been left high and dry until earlier this year, or else forced to sell at a big loss.

Another issue with actively trading crypto-currencies is need to constantly babysit your positions. And you're still at a disadvantage vs. the big boys who are probably using sophisticated high-frequency trading, machine learning, and data from other financial networks.

You can even buy/sell hashing power without hardware at Nicehash.

Is this like a Future? Because otherwise, I don't see the benefit from the operator's perspective. If they already have the hardware, then why wouldn't they just run it and keep all the profits? On the other hand, if you're fronting them the money, then it could be less profitable than just buying a couple GPUs that you could eventually use for crossfire/SLI or maybe dual-GPU VR.

*****One other thing I like to point out is be careful of the Fee's! Each time you transfer coin from a pool or wallet you pay 1, 2 sometimes even 3%! *****

Yup, and there's that.

 

[MrMakapuu]

Open an account with a reliable buy/sell crypto coin site and buy low and sell high. Basically treat the coins as a small high volalitle % of your investment portfolio.

This is hardly risk-free. A price crash could wipe out all your profits and much of your principal. People shouldn't invest more in this than they're willing to lose, as it's not much different than gambling.

If you look back to what happened with bitcoin, in 2013, it went from like $1200 and dropped over the course of 2014 to a low of around $170 in early 2015. If you were aggressively playing the market in 2013, you could've been left high and dry until earlier this year, or else forced to sell at a big loss.

Another issue with actively trading crypto-currencies is need to constantly babysit your positions. And you're still at a disadvantage vs. the big boys who are probably using sophisticated high-frequency trading, machine learning, and data from other financial networks..

Yeah IKR, Im only using the money from selling my card $450 (- $125 I got a new 1050Ti 4GB thats runs all my games a few a few settings down last spring when they were cheap)
But I am aware of the risks and babysitting. But that 325 I bought lite coin at $22.00 and now its $40 for now. Maybe it will hit $100 soon! or crash and burn... lol

 

[tstng]

I want someone to enlighten me. In a real life job, you work, your employer benefits from the work you do, and you get paid for it. With bitcoin (and the rest of the virtual money bunch) you do the work (well, your GPU does the work obviously), you get paid, but who is the employer and what do they benefit from the work you do?

 

[bit_user]

With bitcoin (and the rest of the virtual money bunch) you do the work (well, your GPU does the work obviously), you get paid, but who is the employer and what do they benefit from the work you do?

Are you aware that every credit card transaction costs the merchant several %? This is the fee charged by Visa/Mastercard/American Express/Discover/etc. simply to process the transaction (as well as the bank's cut). Pay Pal and ApplePay are similar examples.

So, what bitcoin miners are doing is essentially clearing bitcoin transactions in an analogous way.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining

 

[Jsimenhoff]

The implications of the Etherum Virtual Machine and the future promise of Web 3.0 could bring about an internet that is both more fair and secure. Securely distributing the network and the information it carries across all its connected nodes (that is, all web-connected devices) would make the need for net neutrality a thing of the past.

(emphasis added)

This is quite a bold claim. I think an explanation is warranted. As far as I can tell, it can only solve potential net neutrality issues for a tiny sliver of internet apps.

Yeah Ethereum has nothing to do with Net Neutrality an ISP could block its protocol as easily as it can block anything else.

It's not as bold of a claim as you think. In that passage I'm discussing the potential of distributed computing and decentralized networking, not Ethereum specifically. Ethereum is simply leading the charge on that front.

I still stand by my claim. If the internet was peer to peer (in other words distributed), and all blocks of information were cryptographically secured, with each block backed up on each node, destroying a single node would do little if anything to harm users or slow down the internet as a whole. ISPs could slow down certain nodes, but they couldn't slow down all of them, which would therefore make the idea of metered Internet traffic (what is known as "pay to play" in some circles), and the arguments against metered Internet traffic (i.e. Net Neutrality) obsolete and outdated.

The Ethereum Network of today is no where near the idealized standard outlined above. However, I believe it is a big step in the right direction and a clear sign of progress.

 

[bit_user]

Thanks for the explanation.

... If the internet was peer to peer (in other words distributed), and all blocks of information were cryptographically secured, ...

If enough content were that ISPs couldn't block or selectively throttle based on content or address, then you're right that it would basically enforce net neutrality (for non-realtime content). But with considerable overhead.

However, a large part of net neutrality pertains to realtime applications (e.g. video conferencing, telephony, gaming). So, even a fully-encrypted, peer-to-peer internet couldn't entirely obviate the issue of net neutrality, because you need point-to-point for latency-sensitive uses.

 

[palladin9479]

The implications of the Etherum Virtual Machine and the future promise of Web 3.0 could bring about an internet that is both more fair and secure. Securely distributing the network and the information it carries across all its connected nodes (that is, all web-connected devices) would make the need for net neutrality a thing of the past.

(emphasis added)

This is quite a bold claim. I think an explanation is warranted. As far as I can tell, it can only solve potential net neutrality issues for a tiny sliver of internet apps.

Yeah Ethereum has nothing to do with Net Neutrality an ISP could block its protocol as easily as it can block anything else.

It's not as bold of a claim as you think. In that passage I'm discussing the potential of distributed computing and decentralized networking, not Ethereum specifically. Ethereum is simply leading the charge on that front.

I still stand by my claim. If the internet was peer to peer (in other words distributed), and all blocks of information were cryptographically secured, with each block backed up on each node, destroying a single node would do little if anything to harm users or slow down the internet as a whole. ISPs could slow down certain nodes, but they couldn't slow down all of them, which would therefore make the idea of metered Internet traffic (what is known as "pay to play" in some circles), and the arguments against metered Internet traffic (i.e. Net Neutrality) obsolete and outdated.

The Ethereum Network of today is no where near the idealized standard outlined above. However, I believe it is a big step in the right direction and a clear sign of progress.

That's not how the internet works. It's a really nice high level concept but in practicality the entire internet is divided into segments and control nodes. ISP's merely operate the intermediary layer between your home and the wider internet because they own the physical infrastructure that gets those 1's and 0's to and from you. Don't make the mistake of confusing layer 4 and above with layer 1~3, they operate in entirely different regimes.

TLDR; you don't have a bazillion wires coming from your router to everyone else in the world and therefor net neutrality will always apply to you.

 

[bit_user]

That's not how the internet works. It's a really nice high level concept but in practicality the entire internet is divided into segments and control nodes. ISP's merely operate the intermediary layer between your home and the wider internet because they own the physical infrastructure that gets those 1's and 0's to and from you. Don't make the mistake of confusing layer 4 and above with layer 1~3, they operate in entirely different regimes.

TLDR; you don't have a bazillion wires coming from your router to everyone else in the world and therefor net neutrality will always apply to you.

Yes and no. Basically, what he's talking about is something akin to Tor. If websites could be hosted in a distributed fashion and accessed via cryptographic hashing, then your ISP couldn't tell what you were accessing. They'd just see encrypted packets going to a pseudo-random assortment of addresses, which means they'd either have to block (or throttle) none of them or all of them. It would prevent them from spying on what you were accessing and selectively charging upstream providers for (faster) access, as net neutrality seeks to prevent.

The downside is that if you like fast load times for your web pages... well, you can pretty much forget about it. Maybe some extremely popular content will be cached near you, but typical load times will tend to be much slower. Perhaps someone with Tor experience can back me up on this.

The other downside is that it's not going to work for realtime applications, which is a significant portion of what people are doing, nowadays.

The abstraction of a distributed VM is neat, but executing & hosting everything on the blockchain is a really expensive way to do it that will very quickly run into scalability problems.

 

[palladin9479]

Yes and no. Basically, what he's talking about is something akin to Tor. If websites could be hosted in a distributed fashion and accessed via cryptographic hashing, then your ISP couldn't tell what you were accessing. They'd just see encrypted packets going to a pseudo-random assortment of addresses, which means they'd either have to block (or throttle) none of them or all of them. It would prevent them from spying on what you were accessing and selectively charging upstream providers for (faster) access, as net neutrality seeks to prevent.

ISP's will still see the connection, it's nothing like TOR which is merely using a local SOCKS proxy to forward HTTP packets through a layer 4 SSL VPN that is constantly changing it's end points. TOR isn't anonymous, it's not hard to track and it doesn't hide your traffic, all it does is obfuscate the TCP path so much that casual inspection won't bother. Thwarting TOR would just require the entity involved having their own TOR client plugged in, maintaining a list of all TOR nodes and then automatically adding those nodes to an outgoing blacklist. Or if they really wanted to be sneaky they would instead log any connections from your host to an entity on those lists, and if they happened to be the ISP for those people, or worked with their ISP, they could then track from the other sides connection and map out the network. Lots and lots of effort involved, but entirely doable. They would need a really good reason to want to do this.

Anyhow net neutrality is more about ISP's charging for preferential treatment or deliberately impairing your connection so prevent you from utilizing their competitors. Seeing as they already knew who their competitors are and thus know the destination end points, screwing with traffic coming in from those would be sufficient. Trying to go an indirect path would thwart any hard blocks (geo-restrictions) but would be less efficient and therefor not a benefit for bandwidth throttling.

Oh and if your using IPv6 none of that matters because they can see the entire path regardless. The guys who wrote the IPv6 standard were absolutely adamant that every node in the world get to see every other node, so there is no method of obfuscation.

 

[bit_user]

it's nothing like TOR which is merely using a local SOCKS proxy to forward HTTP packets through a layer 4 SSL VPN that is constantly changing it's end points.

Thanks for the info.

Where I said Tor, I think I meant Freenet. I know it's hard to believe I'd confuse the two, but I've never actually used either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

A more familiar way to think of it might be a bit like USENET, since both it and blockchain are essentially broadcast mediums.