CryptoCurrency and GPUs on the rise again?

[chazus]

I was under the impression GPU mining had long since gone the way of the dodo, with ASIC miners being king. I'm curious if anyone has better insight into this.

Over time, GPUs were supplanted by more power-efficient FPGAs and ASICs specifically designed for Bitcoin Cryptocurrency mining, but changes in the market have once again made GPUs a viable solution.

As such, there is another run on AMD Polaris-based graphics cards like the Radeon RX 580, and some mid-range NVIDIA GPUs as well, which is driving up their value. In an effort to prevent the same kind of shortages that happened in the past, DigiTimes is reporting that AMD and NVIDIA are both readying stripped-down graphics cards, specifically targeting Cryptocurrency miners

https://hothardware.com/news/nvidia-...urrency-mining

[Vapo]

My brother with some of his classmates are looking into it, he had math done that even with RX480s it would make him like 130e a month profit over electricity requirement on a single card i think it was, so yea seems like GPU mining is making a comeback.

[Remilia]

It indeed has gone on the rise. 4xx/5xx are pretty much getting sold out due to Ethereum these days for AMD. Zcash is going to be mined by Nvidia card due to it's preference for memory compression and bandwidth.

[Cyrops]

I was under the impression GPU mining had long since gone the way of the dodo, with ASIC miners being king. I'm curious if anyone has better insight into this.



https://hothardware.com/news/nvidia-...urrency-mining

ASIC's are king for older currencies, new currencies are made 'resistant' to them, no idea how.

[Remilia]

ASIC's are king for older currencies, new currencies are made 'resistant' to them, no idea how.

They hammer VRAM, something ASICs don't have enough of.

[Kagthul]

What a waste of time bitcoin mining and total dream for those people who believe to not work and get rich.

Depends. Like a lot of situations, it depends on wether you have the money to make the money.

I know.. four people (had to think a moment) that dont work and make money solely on cryptocurrency. All four of them make six digits a year or more.

But, they had the money to begin with to get into it in a big enough way to make real money.

Someone sitting in a basement with a few GPUs - yeah, they aren't going to make any real money.

But the guys im talking about had the ~15-25000 sitting around when it first got big to build mining chains and make money at it. And that money they made allowed them to continue to upgrade their equipment to keep pace.

For the average user, though? No way.

[Arbiter]

What a waste of time bitcoin mining and total dream for those people who believe to not work and get rich.

Could have been said years ago but frankly anyone "dumb" enough to invest into bitcoin mining when it was fresh was lucky enough to be sitting on fat stacks if they were patient. Unfortunately I felt that same way when I had the opportunity to do it so I didn't.

[Amalaric]

What a waste of time bitcoin mining and total dream for those people who believe to not work and get rich.

Can you really convert your Bitcoins or whatever that are worth millions into real currency? I suspect that you can not.

[tikcol]

Why mine them if you can play the market?

[Amalaric]

Can you claim that Bitcoin is stable as currency overall? I know you cannot.

Are you in the sausage factory?

[Amalaric]

It's all a scam... sure you can buy Bitcoins with real money but try to sell them for real money, that would fail miserably I think and of course Bitcoin is not a stable currency since it's being manipulated to make money for people who sells Bitcoins for real hard cash.

[Grishnaar]

Read up on Ripple and XRP.
May very well be the future, "new SWIFT", etc.

But read up first.

[Dangg]

I wouldn't do anything with CryptoCoins way to unstable.

[Arbiter]

That's the thing I dislike. Everyone speaks about it as if it's currently like that and it's not. I didn't even try the mining, I only investigate what is BitCoin and I gave up on first impressions.

But it IS like that. Believe me when I gave up on first impression too which is why I never made a cent on Bitcoin. Still doesn't mean I should ignore the facts that anybody worth risking a small amount of money could have made some huge profits if they were patient.

This guy, for example, didn't even even mine Bitcoin. He just simply bought $27 worth in 2009. A MEASELY $27. At that time that was 5000 Bitcoins. He forgot about those Bitcoins because it was such a small purchase and by the time the article was written in 2015, those Bitcoins were worth $886,000. He was able to sell (yes sell, for those saying that it's worthless because you can't sell them) a fifth of those Bitcoins to buy a home at that time and decided to save the remaining 4000. Assuming he saved the remaining 4000 until now, they're currently worth roughly 11 million.

Was it a safe investment? No of course not. But it did it pay off to those who DID invest? Hell yea it did.

[Triggered Fridgekin]

It's absolutely unreal at the moment. I could probably sell my 290x for more than I paid for it in my area because the market in which the Polaris cards reside are in such disarray. That said, for as much cards that are being sold I have to wonder if everyone is actually mining or if folks saw mining potential without knowing anything else about it, get frustrated at the lack of ROI and will eventually sell them back in to the wild with hit-or-miss quality.

Actually, for shits and giggles, I'm going to put it up for $260 on kijiji to see if anyone bites down on that deal and sit on a junky GPU for a couple months.

[Triggered Fridgekin]

I hardly believe that people (and by people, I mean vast majority that follows BitCoin with their snipe rifles) would sit and wait for BitCoin value to get it's lower value (and as I speak this I even more realize how unstable it is) just so they can buy it and then expect getting millions 8 years later. That would be so naive.

Isn't this essentially how the stock market works in a nutshell though? I mean, I wouldn't expect millions out of BitCoin or to use it as a means to live off of but if we are all in agreement that the market is unstable than why is it different from buying stock when shares are low and sell when shares are high?

I think we missed the boat on these huge money-making stories but I am sure it's not a poor supplement if you can afford the risk.

[Amalaric]

I agree with that. I just don't agree that BitCoin is going to replace current monetary system, any time soon.

Of course bits of code can't replace paper and low value metal money but if people had any brains some centuries ago they wouldn't have allowed the replacement of precious metal money with lesser and lesser valuable metals and then paper.

[chazus]

Of course bits of code can't replace paper and low value metal money but if people had any brains some centuries ago they wouldn't have allowed the replacement of precious metal money with lesser and lesser valuable metals and then paper.

You do realize that the 'paper' is just paper, and the value is of it is made 'worth' by bits of code, these days. The metal (gold/silver) barely covers a fraction of actual money. There's little difference between the two, except confidence.

- - - Updated - - -

Can you really convert your Bitcoins or whatever that are worth millions into real currency? I suspect that you can not.

Yes, you can.

Why mine them if you can play the market?

Because mining is safer than speculation.

It's all a scam... sure you can buy Bitcoins with real money but try to sell them for real money, that would fail miserably I think and of course Bitcoin is not a stable currency since it's being manipulated to make money for people who sells Bitcoins for real hard cash.

Not sure if you're joking or not.. It's not a scam. I've had no issues converting back and forth.

[Deleted]

Can you really convert your Bitcoins or whatever that are worth millions into real currency? I suspect that you can not.

"I have no clue about the subject, but I will talk about it anyways!" Well done. Ofc you can convert in my experience it was a hassle but entirely doable.

[Vash The Stampede]

What a waste of time bitcoin mining and total dream for those people who believe to not work and get rich.

There's a lot of ways to make money by doing no work. Cryptocurrency mining is just the latest craze.

Can you claim that Bitcoin is stable as currency overall? I know you cannot.

The fact that bitcoins have any value is proof of how quickly money has evolved into uselessness. Any currencies value is based on what the market feels it's worth. Bitcoins are based on your ability to rent your processing power for data crunching, and to transfer money internationally.

- - - Updated - - -

Of course bits of code can't replace paper and low value metal money but if people had any brains some centuries ago they wouldn't have allowed the replacement of precious metal money with lesser and lesser valuable metals and then paper.

South Korea has gone 100% digital. They no longer have denominations in paper or coins. Precious metal was just a representation of an IOU. Cowry shells was used as a currency much longer than any metal was. Gold itself has no value beyond of the IOU it represents. That and its use in electronics.