The Ethereum Effect: Graphics Card Price Watch (Updated)

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InvalidError

Titan
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GPU prices remaining stable FOR NOW doesn't protect AMD/Nvidia and GPU card manufacturers from the GPU market crash that will occur if the crypto currency market crashes and then, all that extra production capacity becomes a write-off.

On the regulation side of things, the point of many crypto-currencies is to make regulation difficult if not impossible: you can't effectively regulate ownership of crypto-currency when there is no way to prove who owned what coins at a given time since anyone can create countless wallets to obfuscate transactions through time and space. The only effective regulation governments can put on crypto that isn't under any sort of regulatory oversight is banning its use altogether.
 

kyotokid

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...there are some nations that have taken the lead to restrict crypto currencies and even ban cryptomining.

I see the craze as being little more than just the latest "get rich quick" scheme (albeit one that requires an investment in computer hardware) that never pans out, though this one actually requires a major financial outlay on the part of the participant to play. Sadly it is depriving a large community of enthusiasts, gaming and CG art (the original customer base for GPU cards) of the tools we need because of hos it has driven up prices in some cases to obscene levels. Like I mentioned, in some cases a Titan Xp or possibly even a Quadro P5000 is a better deal than a 1080 Ti.

Sadly, even as Bitcoin took a tumble, Eutherium began rising in value again, so there appears to be little end in sight unless more nations clamp down on this.

It is bad enough the memory shortage is already making it difficult to build or upgrade, and this has an affect on GPU card prices as well, so we are being hit with a "double whammy". Normally I'd be looking forward to the next generation (Volta) of Nvida cards rolling out as that normally would mean Pascal ones would drop in price, but not any more and have consigned myself to continue rendering my CG works on the CPU.. It has also made me pretty much ditch working with Iray and put off any plans to purchase Octane as both require high memory Nvidia GPUs to get rendering times down to a more manageable level.

I would buy a pre-owned card from someone who used it for gaming (as it would have run within it's normal operating parameters), but not from someone who used it for cryptomining which forces the card to operate at peak for months on end.
 

bit_user

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Their firmware could conceivably have it down-clock or otherwise cripple the GPU when it's running GPU compute workloads... unless you're running on a mining-specific or workstation/server card, that is. And I believe the firmware is signed, which should prevent unofficial firmware from being used to circumvent this.

But such moves can have unintended consequences, and they're probably worried about it backfiring somehow. Worse yet, the ingenuity of highly-motivated hackers means that a workaround will probably be found, meaning they could shoot themselves in the foot for nothing.
 

kyotokid

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...one area that could be impacted by such a move is GPU rendering as the compute functions of the card also come into play to calculate ray depth, path, and bounce.
 

bit_user

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Mining is probably easier to regulate than you think, as it involves providing a "public" service. I have faith that if the Chinese government really wanted to crack down on it, they could do so quite effectively. They have repeatedly threatened to do exactly this, and they allegedly comprise much of the mining workforce.

Also, crypto-currencies aren't yet entirely useful, unless you can convert them to your local currency. So, if a country clamped down on exchanges, as South Korea has suggested it might, that would certainly put a damper on its use. Of course, it wouldn't work so well for USD or Euro, since those are ubiquitous. So, you could use a foreign exchange to one of those, but moving fiat currency in and out of your country is harder to do without attracting attention (hence, one of the very reasons criminals like cryptocoins).

Finally, a prominent Egyptian cleric recently issued a judgement that crypto-coins are un-Islamic. This carries more weight than you might think, since it means observant Sunni Muslims not only can't use crypto-currencies, but they also cannot invest in ETFs or other investment vehicles that hold them.

So, there's still a lot that governments can realistically do to put a massive damper on crytocurrencies.
 

USAFRet

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But unless they just want to control the flow of "money", why should they?
Oh yes...governments want to control money, but who is being hurt here? People wanting to buy some fancy computer gaming components?
 

kyotokid

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...the fact they are only really freely used in illicit transactions and exchanges should be grounds enough. Keep in mind what ransomware predators prefer to deal in so they can remain anonymous.
 

USAFRet

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Car dealers:
http://spendbitcoins.com/places/c/car-dealers/

games:
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/the_ability_to_purchase_games_via_bitcoin

Others:
https://cointelegraph.com/bitcoin-for-beginners/what-can-i-buy-with-bitcoins

If ransomware were paid for with Wells Fargo money orders, should we shut that down as well?
I'm not advocating for or against, but it isn't ALL illicit.
 

bit_user

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The Chinese Government has complained that it's a waste of electricity, while the South Koreans have raised concerns about tax evasion. As noted, there are also concerns about enabling criminality (reference how India recently pulled one of its most popular paper notes from circulation, in order to force dark money into online banking).

The issues cited by the Muslim cleric were concerns that the speculation seemed too much gambling, and also that the volatility meant that people could stand to lose a lot of money by using crypto coins.

So, lots of reasons for governments not to like it, besides just the matter of control over their economy. I'm taking no stance on the matter, BTW. Just echoing what I've read.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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Not really: you can have off-shore coin-mining operations, mine to some number of anonymous wallets, transfer to various intermediate wallets which may also be used to pay your employees, create one-time-use wallets to cash in coins at various exchanges, then do your real-money exchanges from there. If you've covered your tracks well enough, the governments will have a very hard time finding out who is actually in charge of the operation and how much you've actually earned or tossed around.

That's why I said the only thing governments have any control on is domestic exchanges. Unless enough countries outright ban decentralized crypto currencies and crash their valuation, people will find ways to cash them in via the international market and bypass most regulations.
 

bit_user

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And how are you going to get the money to spend? If they ban mining and exchanges, then you eventually need to repatriate the money somehow, which is going to raise questions about where you got it.

The more hurdles they throw in the way (and the two big, easy ones are to ban domestic mining and shut domestic exchanges), the more annoying it gets and the more it becomes relegated to rogue nations and crime syndicates.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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Most governments don't care too much about where money comes from as long as you pay your taxes on it. As for being "relegated to crime syndicates", there is no point in doing so if the currency is rendered effectively worthless - maintaining coin mining infrastructure with a sufficient hash rate to prevent governments from out-hashing you and hijacking your block chain isn't going to be subtle nor cheap.
 

kyle.a.gunby

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.....I JUST WANT TO BUILD A GREAT GAMING PC FOR ABOUT A GRAND! And now I can't. I can only build a "pretty good" one for that much money. Thank you, Greed.
 

Exia00

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But see most of those jacked up prices are not even sold by newegg they're sold by a third party company which more than half the time those third party companies are kind of shady especially when i see them only have 1 - 2 eggs rating.

Also i don't see why these farmers have to focus on gaming GPU's since they can get pretty much the same results using something like the Radeon Pro WX 5100 instead of using the RX 570/GTX 1050 Ti/GTX 1060 3GB.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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Miners use mainstream GPUs because mainstream GPUs are (much) cheaper per MH/s when they're in stock.

Another reason for the shortage of lower-end GPUs may simply be board manufacturers focusing what GPU dies they manage to get their hands on on higher-margin SKUs, just like what AMD is doing with Vega where nearly all the Vega56/64 production is funneled into Frontier Edition cards, meaning there are next to no mainstream Vega cards on the market and what few there are cost about as much as FE cards which are currently retailing for ~$1500, which is itself ~$500 over MSRP.
 

Exia00

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Well if for the next generation of Nvidia cards i hope they just sell like the 1160/2060 (cause i don't know their naming for the next one) would be like 50$ - 100$ more so less miners would focus on those cards.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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Wishful thinking. Miners focus on whatever provides the most MH/s per buck. Newer GPUs will be faster and more power-efficient, which means they'll most likely easily be worth $100+.

The more likely scenario is that miners will gobble up the bulk of GTX11xx/20xx GPUs to upgrade their mining farms, ditch their older, slower, less power-efficient GPUs and non-miners may finally get a decent supply of affordable (albeit heavily used) previous-gen GPUs. Rinse and repeat when the GTX12xx/30xx launch, idem on AMD's side.

Basically, expect gamers on a budget to remain one generation behind miners until the mining fad dies, assuming it ever does.
 

tsoliassym

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Jan 31, 2018
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If I was nvidia or AMD would harvest for coins for about a week with new GPU’s
"FOR TESTING PURPOSES ONLY" and then sell them as brand new,
the other week the same thing, etc…….
lets say we produce 10.000 pcs per week, I cant imagine the profit in crypto of this!!
Then I would make suggestions to retailers to sell only to gamers because
"only gaming matters!!!" and we are all happy!
;-)
xaxaxaxax
 
I haven't kept up with GPU prices since the beginning of the year and out of curiosity checked GTX 10xx series prices on the usual suspect E-tailers. HOLY CRAP!!! Either out of stock - and I do mean EVERYWHERE - or exorbitant pricing from third party sellers/flippers. Fortunately Samsung saw this crazed Cryptocurrency GPU demand take off yet again and developed a dedicated ASIC chipset. It is now in mass production.

As a history reminder, the last time miners saw an ASIC build do better or equal to a PC mining build for a fraction of the power draw was back when Maxwell GPUs were around (GTX 6xx series) and there was never a run on them. Bear in mind ASIC chipsets are for Bitcoin which is CPU driven whereas Ethereum and others are GPU driven. So it depends on what the majority of miners are gunning for as to whether we will see an impact +/- on GPU demand from Samsung's new ASIC chipset.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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Ethereum and other similar alt-coins are MEMORY-based: they use a pseudo-random number generator to create a GB+ PRNG pad, then use a secondary PRNG to select the order that pad chunks will get hashed in. Complexity gets increased by both increasing the size of the pad block and the length of the hash block sequence. That makes hashing performance heavily limited by memory speed and memory size: the GPU can't process more concurrent hashes than it has VRAM to hold the PRNG pads of and RAM bandwidth is basically limited by how many memory chips you can connect to the ASIC.

While both of these combined effectively prevent massive ASIC performance scaling in memory-bound alt-coins, it should still provide massive power savings using a much cheaper ASIC than a GPU, basically a handful of simple CPUs with DMA-fed hard-wired hash functions and a ton of memory controllers to give each x32 DRAM chip its own channel. Since the CPU and hash function operate at memory-bound speeds and most of the work is in the memory controller, the ASIC can be made using older processes without sacrificing much power-efficiency. I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung's miner ASIC was on 20-28nm.
 

TJ Hooker

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Do we have confirmation that Samsung is making ASICs for eth? Most of the articles I've seen have just said generically that they will be producing ASICs for crypto mining, but not which algorithm.

Also, the reason there wasn't a big run on GTX 6xx (Kepler, not Maxwell), is that older gen Nvidia cards just weren't very good for mining. Bitcoin mining was still GPU driven (and there was a big run on AMD cards for that reason), it just isn't memory bound like Eth is and wasn't ASIC-resistant.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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TechCrunch says bitcoin, Ethereum and others.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/samsung-confirms-asic-chips/

Since the computationally intensive part of most crypto coins is the block hash and they all use the same set of hash functions, the block hash functions themselves can be hard-wired and you only need the CPU to do the supervisory tasks (ex.: setup the DMA transfer for the next block to hash once its address has been determined) which is where alt-coins differ. A little bit of carefully planned programmability can probably take care of 90% of alt-coins while dumping 99% of processing to hard-wired circuitry - alt-coins typically don't reinvent SHA1, SHA2, AES, etc. and that's where they spend most of their CPU time.
 

bit_user

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AMD's Lisa Su recently said:
At this point we are not limited by silicon per se, so our foundry partners are supplying us, there are shortages in memory and I think that is true across the board, whether you are talking about GDDR5, or you’re talking about high bandwidth memory. We continue to work through that, with our memory partners and that will be certainly one of the key factors as we go through 2018.
Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12380/amd-to-ramp-up-gpu-production-ram-a-limiting-factor

So, to the extent this thing is good at memory-bound coins, it's going to compete with GPUs for limited high-speed memory supply. Which means it might only serve to make matters worse, in 2018.

And with Samsung being one of the primary memory suppliers, perhaps they'll somehow bias supply towards their internal needs.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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If you can sell the same memory wafers to miners for 3-5X the net profit margin, then you're basically beholden to your shareholders to do so. Hopefully Samsung and others' memory supply will increase enough with their 7-14nm fabs to catch up with demand before prices go further out of whack.
 
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