Cryptocurrencies Tumble After SEC's 'Unlawful' Exchanges Statement

[InvalidError]

The main problem with it all is no price stability, no finite number of miners no underwriting.

The "no finite miners" part is why most crypto-mining has complexity scaling to keep the network's hash rate relatively constant regardless of how much new processing power people throw at it. The more miners there are, the less effective each individual CPU/GPU/ASIC/whatever becomes.

 

[derekullo]

Even a $100 profit a month is a real nice steak dinner practically for free.

You would only need 2 1060s.

https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator#nvidia-gtx-1060-6gb;USD;0.06;2;180;0;a5=580.22;a7=32;a8=0.75;a14=30.7;a20=24.93;a21=2.11;a22=0.5;a23=0.21;a24=345.48;a25=0.725;a27=1.32

 

[Math Geek]

when reading these types of comment sections it is obvious to me how badly many want the miners to go away so they are willing to declare the practice dead at any and every turn.

i to would love to be able to buy gpu's at MSRP and my business is hurting as much as anyone's due to the rising costs. but that does not mean i am willing to stick my head in the sand and pretend it's all just gonna go away simply because it would make my life easier.

there is no way to stay 100% off-grid with crypto unless literally everything you want to buy accepts it, and everything that business needs is also available and so on. that is unlikely with all the uncertainty the various world gov's are creating. so somewhere along the line someone is going to have to be able to convert them to cash. as i noted above, if they really wanted to kill crypto currencies, all they have to do is block the banks from dealing with these transactions. all they are trying to do now is make sure folks pay taxes on the income so they are requiring companies to register and report the dealings they have (that was required last year sometime but i forgot when). that alone is not enough to send everyone running no matter how much gamers want them to run away.

 

[kyotokid]

i don't know. at still over $10,000 apiece, it should still be profitable if the dedicated miner gets in with a good pool. I know it has gotten a ton harder to mine them now but at $10,000+ there is still plenty of incentive to stay in the game. i'm sure smaller miners running only a card or 2 won't stick with it. but no reason for someone running a dozen cards to not be able to turn a profit.

at least the few folks i know running larger set-ups are still making plenty to justify staying in.

You seem to be referring to Bitcoin prices, but refer to mining with cards...
Nobody is GPU mining bitcoin anymore, that ended years ago due to ASICs. And AFAIK most bitcoin mining is in industrial scale operations (mostly in China I believe) so I doubt they're turning off their rigs during the summer to save on A/C.

Pretty sure @natx808 was referring to altcoin miners (ethereum, etc.), many of whom are small time running a few cards up to a few racks in their apartment/basement/whatever. Given that eth has been down anywhere from 30-50% (depending on when you look) from its all time high for going on two months now, I imagine some people are starting to panic a bit and sell off their gear.

...true, much of the recent GPU shortage is due to the "Johnny come lately" miner. They are like those who came in on the tail end of the California Gold Rush hoping to still strike it rich but entering an already crowded market and often competing against well organised, well funded, and even established mining operations. Instead of mining farms built on enterprise or datacentre hardware, their tools are home PCs with maybe a rack of consumer grade GPUs. They will never truly strike it rich for their systems simply do not have the same number crunching horsepower as dedicated mining farms do.

Basically there are other more well equipped, more experienced, and more well heeled players already in the game who already have the "inside track". so to say.

Just over a year ago, this wasn't an issue, availability and prices were still reasonable as I was still seeing 1070s retailing for 380$ - 410$ at the various online outlets. Were I not involved in an SS eligibility case, as well as trying to find an affordable place to live at the time, I would have bought one then. By the time everything finally settled down, it was too late, card prices had doubled, if not tripled in some cases seemingly overnight and the online outlets were pretty much out of stock. Bitcoin was still months from it's peak of 13,181$ in late December but the amateur Crypto Rush of 2017 was on.

Added to this was a supply shortage of memory chips which also affected GPU card production, most likely causing it to shift into a lower gear. For Nvidia came the choice, do they keep producing your low cost cards at the usual rate to keep the gaming sector happy, scale back on their more expensive professional/datacentre ones, do they reduce production slightly in both possibly losing out on sales/contracts for their high end products/services, or do they keep their top end product production intact (if not expand it slightly) while further reducing production of their consumer line to cater to the big players, which includes engineering, academic, industrial, and even government clients, all with large sums they are willing to offer? This is something I have been thinking about for the last several weeks now.

Nvidia has over the years been moving more and more towards the high end application of visual and digital technology. Even their Titan cards have dropped the GTX designation and seem to have more in common with the higher priced Quadro line (case in point the 3,000$ Titan-V with 640 Tensor cores that support AI development). When I built my system 5 years ago Nvida wasn't involved in project development such as the newest fastest supercomputer (Summit) , AI/deep learning, and autonomous control like they are today. The latter two are industries of the future and Nvidia, like any tech company, want's to be there first. It just so happens they are also one of the two primary commercial GPU card producers in the world.

Could the gaming market continue with just AMD producing consumer GPUs? Most likely provided they increased production, as graphics processing language (CUDA, Open CL) is not an issue for games, they can use either Nvidia cores or AMD stream processors for acceleration. For CG enthusiasts, it would be another matter entirely as a couple of the more popular PBR engines are CUDA based (one being Nvidia's own Iray). What it would mean for us is having to sink thousands, instead of a few hundred, into a Quadro GPU card. Unfortunately, most of us are on the same "beer budget" as gaming enthusiasts.

 

[InvalidError]

Could the gaming market continue with just AMD producing consumer GPUs?

AMD's own product development is also gearing up toward the compute/AI market with Radeon WX / SSG and I'm expecting AMD to launch Navi 'Pro' cards months ahead of the consumer stuff just like it did with Vega. There is no shortage of 16GB WX9100 GPUs at ~$1600 or 2TB Radeon SSGs at ~$5000.

 

[ubercake]

The real threat to banks is they no longer control 100% of the money laundering that goes on. The banks are paying politicians a lot of money to control things such as this. When something interferes, they put pressure on D.C. Crypto-currency markets must be getting a big enough chunk of the pie now that it's affecting bank money.

Another threat to the status quo because insider trading is only ok for those politicians in D.C.:
"...Broker-Dealers must also register with the SEC, and they need “reasonable policies and procedures” to prevent insider trading and other misuses of non-public trade information...."

Initially, this announcement seems damaging to the crypto-currency markets, but once everyone is done with the knee-jerk, they'll remember corruption through government intervention into banking/currency/markets is among the reason crypto-currencies exist in the first place.

 

[ubercake]

Perhaps the most significant aspect of crypto currency is that it cannot be centrally controlled by the parasites. If people mine and/or use it in that context, there's no need to ever convert a crypto into fiat currency. As the number and type of vendors who accept it increase, it will be possible to take one's transactions entirely off-grid; not tracked by government extortionists, advertisers, or other malignant actors.

Well said!

 

[Finstar]

In case governments end up killing crypto... I wouldn't be sad about the money i'd lose but rather about losing the hope for a currency people can use without being monitored and controlled.
It's already disgusting that here in Finland you get worse penalties for tax evasion than you get for rape or murder.

 

[kyotokid]

Could the gaming market continue with just AMD producing consumer GPUs?

AMD's own product development is also gearing up toward the compute/AI market with Radeon WX / SSG and I'm expecting AMD to launch Navi 'Pro' cards months ahead of the consumer stuff just like it did with Vega. There is no shortage of 16GB WX9100 GPUs at ~$1600 or 2TB Radeon SSGs at ~$5000.

...in this arena, AMD is still looking at Nvidia's taillights in the distance. They may have dealt a bit of a blow to Intel with their Zen and Epyc series CPUs, but in deep learning, AI, and autonomous sensing/control, Nvidia is still well ahead in the game.

Again there is also no shortage of Quadro or Tesla GPUs either. Nvidia also recently unveiled their 4 Volta based Tesla V100 AI workstations that have 2nd generation NVLink (5 times faster than PCIe) and 500 TFlops of 16FP performance. Basically a mini supercomputer.

 

[TJ Hooker]

...true, much of the recent GPU shortage is due to the "Johnny come lately" miner. They are like those who came in on the tail end of the California Gold Rush hoping to still strike it rich but entering an already crowded market and often competing against well organised, well funded, and even established mining operations. Instead of mining farms built on enterprise or datacentre hardware, their tools are home PCs with maybe a rack of consumer grade GPUs. They will never truly strike it rich for their systems simply do not have the same number crunching horsepower as dedicated mining farms do.

Basically there are other more well equipped, more experienced, and more well heeled players already in the game who already have the "inside track". so to say.

AFAIK even the big players are mining using racks of consumer grade graphics cards to mine eth. Cards like teslas and quadros don't offer enough hashing performance to make up for their high cost; you're better off just buying more RX 580s or something. And you don't necessarily have a warehouse worth of mining power to make a profit. By mining in a pool, you're not competing against the big boys all on your own so even people with a few cards can still be profitable.

The biggest factors impacting profitability for miners starting recently are:
-Increasing difficulty. Network hashrate is up already up 50% from what it was just two months ago. Meaning eth rewards keep dropping.
-Price of eth dropping or moving sideways for the last couple months.
-Inflated graphics card prices mean it takes that much longer to even recoup your initial investment.

 

[Finstar]

Could the gaming market continue with just AMD producing consumer GPUs?

AMD's own product development is also gearing up toward the compute/AI market with Radeon WX / SSG and I'm expecting AMD to launch Navi 'Pro' cards months ahead of the consumer stuff just like it did with Vega. There is no shortage of 16GB WX9100 GPUs at ~$1600 or 2TB Radeon SSGs at ~$5000.

...in this arena, AMD is still looking at Nvidia's taillights in the distance. They may have dealt a bit of a blow to Intel with their Zen and Epyc series CPUs, but in deep learning, AI, and autonomous sensing/control, Nvidia is still well ahead in the game.

Again there is also no shortage of Quadro or Tesla GPUs either. Nvidia also recently unveiled their 4 Volta based Tesla V100 AI workstations that have 2nd generation NVLink (5 times faster than PCIe) and 500 TFlops of 16FP performance. Basically a mini supercomputer.

In AI and deep learning? yes. In raw compute? no. The Vega FE is only slightly behind the Titan V in raw compute while costing 3 times less.
AMD hasn't yet mentioned of making a competitor for Nvidias Tensor cores.
But it'll be interesting if they end up doing so. Looking at Ryzens senseMI, AMD clearly has some knowledge of how AIs work.

 

[kyotokid]

...true, much of the recent GPU shortage is due to the "Johnny come lately" miner. They are like those who came in on the tail end of the California Gold Rush hoping to still strike it rich but entering an already crowded market and often competing against well organised, well funded, and even established mining operations. Instead of mining farms built on enterprise or datacentre hardware, their tools are home PCs with maybe a rack of consumer grade GPUs. They will never truly strike it rich for their systems simply do not have the same number crunching horsepower as dedicated mining farms do.

Basically there are other more well equipped, more experienced, and more well heeled players already in the game who already have the "inside track". so to say.

AFAIK even the big players are mining using racks of consumer grade graphics cards to mine eth. Cards like teslas and quadros don't offer enough hashing performance to make up for their high cost; you're better off just buying more RX 580s or something. And you don't necessarily have a warehouse worth of mining power to make a profit. By mining in a pool, you're not competing against the big boys all on your own so even people with a few cards can still be profitable.

The biggest factors impacting profitability for miners starting recently are:
-Increasing difficulty. Network hashrate is up already up 50% from what it was just two months ago. Meaning eth rewards keep dropping.
-Price of eth dropping or moving sideways for the last couple months.
-Inflated graphics card prices mean it takes that much longer to even recoup your initial investment.

...pretty much based my comments on TJ Hooker's observations and a little more digging myself.

True the more players that become involved, the more difficult it will be to get a reasonable return. Those on their own who don't have a warehouse size farm in operation are at a distinct disadvantage as wtiwill take a god amount of time to see any appreciable return. However what does one do with it? you can't use crypto at the local market, when boarding the bus, paying for petrol, or paying our utility charges.

Also, the spike in GPU card prices has only been a recent phenomenon coinciding pretty much with the "small fish" becoming involved. I wouldn't doubt that some operations don't use GPU cards however like TJ mentions the large "industrial" ones that dominate mining have pretty much moved on to ASICs.

As to pooling resources with other miners, just how many even consider doing so?

There is, as I have mentioned previously, also another factor in the matter and that is a shortage of memory chips. One cannot ramp up production even if they wanted to when key components are not as plentiful. This is whey we have seen a near doubling of system memory prices over the last 18 months and it has also become contributory to high memory GPU cards being in short supply.

In any case if this portends to be an ongoing situation, it pretty much spells the end or the line for us CG enthusiasts and artists who have to either totally eat the inflated GPU card prices we are seeing today or just go without (and as to the latter, rendering with a PBR engine on the CPU is akin to sitting on the porch and watching the grass grow). Gaming on the other hand will survive fine, as most likely AMD will respond with lower cost, low VRAM Vega cards that employ HBCC.

 

[InvalidError]

I wouldn't doubt that some operations don't use GPU cards however like TJ mentions the large "industrial" ones that dominate mining have pretty much moved on to ASICs.

Most alt-coins are designed to be memory-intensive specifically to make ASIC mining impractical: investing tens of millions into ASIC, board and system R&D is not worth your time and money if performance is ultimately bound by the memory interface at similar levels to off-the-shelf GPUs.

The original Bitcoin is the only major crypto-currency systematically dominated by ASIC-mining because it is the only one which relies entirely on raw compute, no external scaling bottlenecks.

 

[bit_user]

Perhaps the most significant aspect of crypto currency is that it cannot be centrally controlled by the parasites.

That's certainly the PR line, at least. The reality is somewhat different. Bitcoin, for instance, is centrally controlled by a small group of core software developers. I guess several major mining networks as well, since they might decide not to go along with a certain upgrade of the Bitcoin software/protocol.

As the number and type of vendors who accept it increase, it will be possible to take one's transactions entirely off-grid; not tracked by government extortionists, advertisers, or other malignant actors.

Except the number of vendors is decreasing, because people are discovering that crypto currencies don't scale (i.e. leading to higher transaction costs and longer transaction clearance times). Maybe someday, but it's currently a false promise that they can replace fiat currency.

But your comment about going off-grid is what I find really funny. If you want to go off-grid, you'd better use cash or gold. You're never more on-grid than with crypto.

 

[bit_user]

It's already disgusting that here in Finland you get worse penalties for tax evasion than you get for rape or murder.

Sounds like an urban legend. How about some specific examples?

On the flip side, in the hypothetical case of someone who robs thousands of people of their retirement accounts through some sort of white collar crime, that is a crime I think should be punished comparably with violent crime, because of all the pain and suffering caused.

In the US, white collar criminals (if they even get convicted!) usually get away with comparatively light sentences. You literally have cases of someone doing the same or less time for embezzling millions of dollars as someone who merely stole a car worth 1/1000th as much.

 

[bit_user]

Again there is also no shortage of Quadro or Tesla GPUs either.

They use the same silicon as the gaming GPUs (except for V100, unless you consider Titan V a gaming card). They are merely diverting limited supply to their higher-margin products.

Nvidia also recently unveiled their 4 Volta based Tesla V100 AI workstations

It's not recent. The recent news about it is that it's on sale for 25% off, because it's a weird product.

Most people that can afford it and want a NVLink-enabled multi-GPU rig for deep learning will go with its bigger brother - the DGX-1 (or a 3rd-party equivalent based on their HGX reference architecture). People who don't need NVLink are probably going for multi-Titan V systems, which are far more cost-effective. That's why they're probably not selling well @ the launch price.

 

[TJ Hooker]

@kyotokid as pointed out by @InvalidError, no, even the "industrial" miners are not using ASICs for mining eth, because those don't exist.

And pool mining is very common. I'd say virtually everyone other than massive mining farms does it. You only lose maybe 1% profit (from pool fee), while making your earnings much more reliable and consistent.

 

[InvalidError]

@kyotokid as pointed out by @InvalidError, no, even the "industrial" miners are not using ASICs for mining eth, because those don't exist.

Ethereum ASIC miners (ex.: Bitmain F3 which is going to launch in late 2018 or the AM200) are starting to pop up but they only do 200-230MHs/s at $2500-2700 and 730-1350W with no resale value vs GPUs. That's maybe three times as cost-effective as GPU-mining. We're far from Bitcoin territory where ASICs are well in excess of an order of magnitude more cost-effective. Also, it isn't as if AntMiner and Bitmain are going to be able to round up enough RAM to decimate GPU miners' alt-coin viability overnight either.

 

[kuhndj67]

When one shady outfit was putting out mainstream advertising about how they pump the crypto market I could tell it wouldn't be long.