Cryptocurrency Markets Tumble Following India Finance Minister Speech

[kcarbotte]

If you invested in Bitcoin in December, today is going to be a bad day for you. Following an announcement from India's Finance Minister, the cryptocurrency took a hard tumble in the last 24 hours and washed away the recent gains.

Cryptocurrency Markets Tumble Following India Finance Minister Speech : Read more

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

Let it fall even lower , so the Card Prices drop for Gamers.

 

[bit_user]

It's instructive to look at the fallout of the bitcoin crash in 2013. If you bought at the peak, you'd have had to hold for about 3 years, in order to break even. That's a long time to be out of the market.

And it's not even a given that it'll ever return to its recent heights... or, it could go yet higher.

 

[Jeff Fx]

Let it fall even lower , so the Card Prices drop for Gamers.

GPUs aren't used to mine Bitcoin, but they are used to mine other Cryptocurrencies. If Etherium drops to the point where the electricity used to mine costs more than the coin is worth, that could mean a lot of used cards on the market. The fans may need replacing, but they're otherwise be solid cards.

 

[positiveinflux]

Gamer here but its not just video cards that have gone up either. Replacing hardware isn't fun and building a new system is out of the question right now. We all wish it would end price wise, just my 2 cents and not in cryptocurrency.

 

[Jeff Fx]

It's instructive to look at the fallout of the bitcoin crash in 2013. If you bought at the peak, you'd have had to hold for about 3 years, in order to break even. That's a long time to be out of the market.

And it's not even a given that it'll ever return to its recent heights... or, it could go yet higher.

I don't think it'll go higher. If the price was rational, it wouldn't have crashed. You can't bypass governments using technology forever. Eventually they crack down.

 

[canadianvice]

Let it fall even lower , so the Card Prices drop for Gamers.

GPUs aren't used to mine Bitcoin, but they are used to mine other Cryptocurrencies. If Etherium drops to the point where the electricity used to mine costs more than the coin is worth, that could mean a lot of used cards on the market. The fans may need replacing, but they're otherwise be solid cards.

People keep commenting this, but it's always based on something they forget:

When bitcoin falls, so do these other currencies. Seriously, look at the charts, and it's lock step. So, if BTC falls, we still get what we want.

Edit: It's literally in the charts.... the fall may not be proportional, but larger BTC news has bearing on those markets for other eCoins, and thus far they have gone down almost in tandem with BTC. They may be different commodities, but they share an investor base and news in one does generally have bearing on the others.

 

[juju_357]

Let it fall even lower , so the Card Prices drop for Gamers.

GPUs aren't used to mine Bitcoin, but they are used to mine other Cryptocurrencies. If Etherium drops to the point where the electricity used to mine costs more than the coin is worth, that could mean a lot of used cards on the market. The fans may need replacing, but they're otherwise be solid cards.

You don't think miners clock those cards as hard as they can?

 

[TJ Hooker]

@junu_357 eth mining doesn't really benefit from high core frequencies. So for eth mining you typically underclock/under volt to minimize power costs.

 

[bit_user]

It's instructive to look at the fallout of the bitcoin crash in 2013. If you bought at the peak, you'd have had to hold for about 3 years, in order to break even. That's a long time to be out of the market.

And it's not even a given that it'll ever return to its recent heights... or, it could go yet higher.

I don't think it'll go higher. If the price was rational, it wouldn't have crashed. You can't bypass governments using technology forever. Eventually they crack down.

Um... lots of prices crash, only for many to recover, later on. As I pointed out, bitcoin has already been through numerous boom & bust cycles - most notably in 2013.

I don't mean to defend bitcoin, but I think you're off-base by bringing rationality into the picture. It's purely speculative - we all know that - but that hasn't killed it, yet. Why would it suddenly happen, now?

I think it'll take a bigger existential crises to really bring it low. Until then, it might recover or it might not, but I don't think we're seeing its last days.

 

[bit_user]

@junu_357 eth mining doesn't really benefit from high core frequencies. So for eth mining you typically underclock/under volt to minimize power costs.

What about memory clocks, though?

Anyway, it reminds me of this slide (page 55), from AMD's Polaris Architecture presentation (http://gaming.radeon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2016/08/Polaris-Tech-Day-Architecture-Final-6.24.2016.pdf):

Adaptive aging compensation

• 
  ■ GPUs require 2 - 3% clockspeed margin to accommodate transistor aging
  ■ Other aspects of the system also exhibit aging (e.g. lower voltage from system)
  ■ We want our parts to self-calibrate and adapt to changes over time – good or bad
  • 
    ■ More robust operation over time
    ■ Out-of-box performance is improved

 

[TJ Hooker]

@bit_user at least for AMD cards, memory often undervolted as well. Mem frequency is typically overclocked, but not necessarily to the max as that can result in memory errors and invalid shares.

 

[cryoburner]

@junu_357 eth mining doesn't really benefit from high core frequencies. So for eth mining you typically underclock/under volt to minimize power costs.

How about the college kids mining cryptocurrency in their dorm rooms with electricity that they don't have to directly pay for? Most mining cards are probably undervolted, but that doesn't necessarily apply to all of them.

 

[richardvday]

Any time you buy used cards its a lottery. You might get a good one or you might not.
When they dump these cards on the market GPU prices will drop as a result buy a new one is my advice.

 

[bit_user]

@bit_user at least for AMD cards, memory often undervolted as well. Mem frequency is typically overclocked, but not necessarily to the max as that can result in memory errors and invalid shares.

My intuition is that they don't undervolt memory quite enough to offset the additional power dissipation from the O/C. Wouldn't this still accelerate the transistor wear?

If you had to choose, would you rather buy a card that's been mining 24/7, for 6 months, or a gaming card that's only been used a few hours/day for a year? Ignoring the state of the fans (if air cooled).

 

[nitrium]

All current cryptos are heading to ZERO. As long as governments don't recognise (and can and will even ban them) they'll revert back to their intrinsic value. Unlike actually money, given that there is nothing backing these "currencies", the value is exactly that, nothing. ALL cryptos are thinly veiled Ponzi scams designed to bilk money from suckers.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article61157.html

 

[uglyduckling81]

There is nothing backing your official currency either.
Gold standard died 30 years ago or more.
I don't touch crypto because I can't afford to lose the money but it's not much different to any other currency, just less regulated.

 

[nitrium]

There is nothing backing your official currency either.
Gold standard died 30 years ago or more.
I don't touch crypto because I can't afford to lose the money but it's not much different to any other currency, just less regulated.

Utter nonsense. All actual currencies are backed by the production/assets of said country (or region in the case of the EU) - this is inherently true since ALL goods, services, labour and assets are denominated in said currency. In the US (for example), the Federal government guarantees your dollars are legal tender for the purchase of goods, services and assets. No such guarantee of "legal tender" exists for craptocurrencies - you're literally at the whim of what someone else will pay you (if anything) for them (in actual money I might add) because they have no tangible value outside of that.

 

[TJ Hooker]

@nitrium just because the government backs it as legal tender doesn't guarantee its value. Fiat currencies can and have collapsed or at least plummeted in purchasing power. Off the top of my head, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, post war Germany. It is definitely less likely than a cryptocurrency crashing, but the value of fiat currency depends on whether people have faith in the currency/government that issued the currency. Kind of like the value of crypto depends on people believing it has value (or that the underlying tech has value)...

 

[TJ Hooker]

All current cryptos are heading to ZERO. As long as governments don't recognise (and can and will even ban them) they'll revert back to their intrinsic value. Unlike actually money, given that there is nothing backing these "currencies", the value is exactly that, nothing. ALL cryptos are thinly veiled Ponzi scams designed to bilk money from suckers.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article61157.html

The word "cryptocurrency" is a bit of a misnomer, as many of them are not intended to ever function as "currency" in the common use of the word. A better word would be crypto assets. Given that, I don't see government resistance to allowing crypto as currency as necessarily putting a stop to the crypto market. Bitcoin is already being billed more as a store of value ("digital gold"), rather than a currency. Ethereum is billed as a platform for distributed applications and smart contracts, with the ether token being being used to exchange on the platform. Volatility is still an issue with either of those, but as adoption increases and the 'get rich quick' aspect of crypto dies down, I think (or at least hope) we will see increasing stability.

Other networks address other use cases or problems, with their associated tokens being used to pay for services on the network. For example, Sia is a distributed cloud storage network, with the sia coin being used to pay for using said storage to those doing the hosting. Yes, there are many tokens/coins whose value far exceeds the value of the network/technology they represent. In some cases the team behind the crypto will likely never deliver on their promises, or the network will never achieve the real world adoption that was hoped for. Some crypto is a straight up scam, or wildly overvalued with little backing other than hype. But that doesn't change the fact that some crypto is backed by solid technology already being used in the real world, or at least legitimate business plans to bring useful tech to market.

Even if we never get to the point where I can go buy a coffee with crypto as easily as with a credit card, that doesn't mean that crypto has no value.

 

[TJ Hooker]

@bit_user at least for AMD cards, memory often undervolted as well. Mem frequency is typically overclocked, but not necessarily to the max as that can result in memory errors and invalid shares.

My intuition is that they don't undervolt memory quite enough to offset the additional power dissipation from the O/C. Wouldn't this still accelerate the transistor wear?

If you had to choose, would you rather buy a card that's been mining 24/7, for 6 months, or a gaming card that's only been used a few hours/day for a year? Ignoring the state of the fans (if air cooled).

My cards are running at a 10-15% memory OC (1750 to 2000, and 2000 to 2200), and a 15% undervolt (1000 to 850 mV). If we assume power draw is proportional to frequency and proportional to the square of voltage, net power consumption would be lower overall. I don't know how well that assumption applies to DRAM circuits though.

I'll readily agree that if I had to choose between a card used for mining and a card used for a typical amount of gaming, I would choose the latter. I'm just trying to dispel the notion that all mining cards are overclocked to the hilt and run at crazy power/heat levels 24/7.

 

[nitrium]

@nitrium just because the government backs it as legal tender doesn't guarantee its value. Fiat currencies can and have collapsed or at least plummeted in purchasing power. Off the top of my head, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, post war Germany. It is definitely less likely than a cryptocurrency crashing, but the value of fiat currency depends on whether people have faith in the currency/government that issued the currency. Kind of like the value of crypto depends on people believing it has value (or that the underlying tech has value)...

I get what you're saying, but it doesn't make what I said any less factual. Sure, a currency's value can collapse if the Government//country backing it collapses - but you do realise that the entire fabric of society of said country must also collapse for this to occur(?). Cryptos have NOTHING backing them whatsoever. Put it another way, if cryptocurrencies actually have genuine "value", why is their "worth" measured only with respect to actual currencies? Why is the price of gold, for example, not given in bitcoin right now? Or, for that matter, why is the "value" of Ethereum not given in Bitcoin and vice versa? Answer: because these things have next to zero stability given that rather than their "value" rising and falling based on actual tangible production and assets backed by an entire nation relative to the rest of the world, they're entirely determined by speculative gambling. Hardly something you could use to buy your groceries with.

 

[TJ Hooker]

I get what you're saying, but it doesn't make what I said any less factual. Sure, a currency's value can collapse if the Government//country backing it collapses - but you do realise that the entire fabric of society of said country must also collapse for this to occur(?).

There may have been political turmoil, but none of the examples I gave involved the collapse of the government...

Cryptos have NOTHING backing them whatsoever. Put it another way, if cryptocurrencies actually have genuine "value", why is their "worth" measured only with respect to actual currencies?

So? The worth of a company's stock is measured with respect to fiat currency, what does that prove?

Why is the price of gold, for example, not given in bitcoin right now? Or, for that matter, why is the "value" of Ethereum not given in Bitcoin and vice versa?

You can look up the price of gold to bitcoin. http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=XBT&to=XAU
Just like you can look up gold to USD, gold to CAD, etc.
You can also quite easily look at the price of eth in terms of bitcoin.
USD just happens to be the global standard against which many assets are compared. That doesn't inherently mean that you can't value things against other currencies, fiat or otherwise.

Answer: because these things have next to zero stability given that rather than their "value" rising and falling based on actual tangible production and assets backed by an entire nation relative to the rest of the world, they're entirely determined by speculative gambling.

As I said in a previous post, there are plenty of crypto assets that are backed by legitimate tech and use cases. With regard to bitcoin, consider gold. Its value has little to do with it's practical use cases, but more so to do with the notion that you can sell it to someone (for fiat currency), hopefully for more than you paid for it. Sounds somewhat speculative to me. Yes, the volatility of crypto is definitely a weakness, but the hope is that it will eventually stabilize. You may always have volatility in the small market cap altcoins, but that's not really different from penny stocks.

I'll readily admit that the current crypto market is driven in large part by emotion and wild speculation. And there may be a huge crash eventually as a result, where only a handful of existing crypto currencies survive and ultimately thrive not unlike the dot com bubble. But the crypto market isn't going to zero.

 

[nitrium]

As I said in a previous post, there are plenty of crypto assets that are backed by legitimate tech and use cases.

So you're saying that a crypto backed by "tech" (I have no idea what that even is) is pretty much as good as a fiat currency backed by an entire nation? Mkay.
Also you haven't yet explained how a crypto can work in a world where no government accepts it. i.e. how do you think craptocurrencies can possibly be allowed to exist alongside an actual government-backed currency within the current legal framework? What government would allow this to occur in a significant fashion? How would taxes be collected? If crypto's "value" is predicated on revolution, well I have a shiny bridge to sell you.

 

[difuid]

Cryptocurrencies can only survive if they gain the trust of all parties in the economy, not just the venturous or shady/illegal ones. The current governmental actions target exactly that trust.. and you see what happens.

If you think this is just like the "crash of 2013" then you are delusional, since governments all around the world are reacting and regulations are incoming, as the Bitcoin prices of 2017 opened their eyes.