[HN Gopher] TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
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TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 544 points
Date : 2021-08-26 11:20 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (asia.nikkei.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (asia.nikkei.com)
| noelherrick wrote:
| Gosh I wish Apple with their loads of cash and drive to have the
| highest performing chip would get big ole fabs on US and EU
| shores. The fact that a disputed country owns the best fabs is
| downright scary for the future of the world (add in that the
| disputing country is the next superpower).
| segphault wrote:
| TSMC is building a $12b manufacturing facility in Arizona that
| will be able to produce the 5nm chips used in Apple products.
| They are fully aware of the geopolitical risks and are taking
| responsible steps to mitigate them.
|
| To the extent that the higher unit prices help them cover those
| investments, I'm more than happy to pay whatever portion of the
| increase gets passed on to consumers.
| pradn wrote:
| There's a complex game being played here by TSMC, the
| Taiwanese government, and the US. TSMC as a company probably
| wants to be resilient by having manufacturing in multiple
| locales. But it has a unique set of benefits provided by
| Taiwan - a solidly educated workforce with fewer options than
| in, say, the US for top-tier jobs, a dense and well-connected
| country that allows them to shift talent much easier than
| elsewhere, and a government thats extremely interested in
| maintaining their dominance. These factors make it hard to
| move out of Taiwan. Taiwan itself wants to keep its golden
| goose, the one thing it has that guarantees it a seat at the
| negotiating table with the US, China, and EU. Why voluntarily
| give up the one thing that makes people want to defend you,
| especially in light of NATO promises of protection falling
| flat recently with Afghanistan and the anti-internationalist
| angle made prevalent by Trump. The US, of course, wants to
| protect its economy, reliant on high-tech components and be
| the guarantor of a country that gives the US leverage over
| other countries.
|
| The 5nm plant is a good step for the US, but AFAIK, produces
| a small fraction of total 5nm output. And by the time it
| opens, 3nm will be the leading edge. It feels like a small
| concession by TSMC/Taiwan to keep the US off their back, but
| not significant enough. I mean, how do you even transfer
| thousands of talented engineers that far, with logistics and
| factory construction, too? It's not easy.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Apple is already on 5nm. By the time that fab is built, Apple
| will want to be on 3 or 2nm
| janekm wrote:
| Apple know that just setting up fabs without all the
| infrastructure to package, test, and then manufacture products
| with the chips doesn't really solve anything. The last time
| Apple tried to do any manufacturing in the US the project
| failed because they couldn't find anyone to manufacture the
| screws: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-
| apple-...
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| Would anyone else on here be willing to pay money for a data feed
| that showed you real-time measures of semi manufacturer capacity?
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Theoretically that will spawn some real competition which is
| sorely needed. In reality fabs are hard to spin up, but this does
| draw attention to the matter.
| StephenSmith wrote:
| I'm in charge of sourcing components for multiple companies right
| now. I believe they could double (100%) prices and companies
| would pay it. There's chips that I'm sourcing from obscure places
| in China just to get the part and paying whatever price they ask.
|
| Designers are getting overwhelmed because they're having to
| redesign boards for components that are available, only to
| realize by the time they finish the changes, the part they
| redesigned for is also out of stock.
|
| There's been some talk of a Chip-induced cold war, and I would
| say that's not crazy given the market conditions. I also love the
| guy who posts here all the time saying he works for the company
| that makes the machines that makes the chips and they can't make
| more machines because they don't have the chips that go in them.
| XD
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Concur. We are currently paying a chip broker $6.30 for an
| Infineon chip we typically buy by the 100,000s for $0.47. Cuz
| without them, our customers cannot sell their $10,000,000
| product.
| iyn wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what's the $10,000,000 product?
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| As parent indicated, they are machines that make chips.
| iyn wrote:
| Thanks for clarification.
| petra wrote:
| Why do they need 100,000 of the same part in a 10M$
| machine?
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| One $10,000,000 machine uses about 1000 of these chips.
| vdfs wrote:
| If you don't mind answering, what type of chips?
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| 24 volt digital output drivers. We're also getting
| crushed on Xilinx FPGAs, certain Cypress CPUs, AD MUXes,
| Relay switches... It's something new every week.
| [deleted]
| mywittyname wrote:
| I don't think they need 100k per machine. I think the
| comment is saying they would buy them in batches of 100k
| from the supplier.
|
| It's not crazy that a complicated bit of machinery has a
| few thousand individual chips in each one.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| How were the chip-making machines made before there were
| chip-making machines?
|
| Can't chip-making machines be made without chips? Yes.
| The very first one, at least, was made like that.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Nobody wants the chips made by the chipless chip making
| machines.
| kragen wrote:
| How many chips could a chipless chip making machine make
| if a chipless chip making machine could chip chipping
| chips?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If all the chip making machines were destroyed and we
| couldn't repurpose chips due to DRM, we would have to
| redo everything again.
| acchow wrote:
| Bootstrapping the second time is much easier
| bcrl wrote:
| Venor Vinge's The Children of the Sky is hard sci-fi
| touches on this issue of how to bootstrap a civilization
| to the point where the technology necessary to restore a
| highly advanced spaceship becomes available. Humanity
| will need this skill if we are ever able to venture out
| of our solar system.
| gowld wrote:
| Software analogy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)
| bagacrap wrote:
| or was made with a handmade chip
| reassembled wrote:
| We need Hamdmade Hero for chip making.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The first chip-making machines were made in the 60s.
| Sure, we can make 60 year old chip designs without any
| modern technology, but what for?
| acomjean wrote:
| My partner designed computer chips.
|
| My understanding is that as you design more powerful
| chips you use those chips to design more and more
| powerful chips.
|
| Some older 8bit cpus now have kits where you can make
| them from components (20x slower and many times
| larger...)
|
| https://monster6502.com/
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| Ignoring the other answers, I'll give an analogy I like:
| the same way the Go compiler is written entirely in Go!
| TearsInTheRain wrote:
| Sounds military
| tdeck wrote:
| > There's chips that I'm sourcing from obscure places in China
| just to get the part and paying whatever price they ask.
|
| When sourcing like this, how do you ensure that you're not
| getting factory seconds or counterfeit parts?
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| From my experience no one cares if they are as long as they
| more or less work.
|
| Source: I'm a software engineer who has had to fix so many
| issues due to unannounced component changes from suppliers.
|
| "Oh you just replaced the specific USB chip with something
| different that has a whole lot of errata (Bugs in chip logic
| that you have to work around in software) and didn't tell us?
| GREAT! THANKS!"
| milesvp wrote:
| Oh man. I just did a board bring-up recently and didn't
| notice that the flash chip I was having trouble with was a
| previous version than the one we specified. I only just
| barely managed to get those boards working, and best as I
| can tell, it was the conductivity of the particular flux I
| was using to reflow the part that was nudging an NC
| connection to actually use it's internal pull-up. When the
| factory couldn't follow my steps, they finally realized
| that if they were going to substitute that chip, they'd
| need to add a 10k pullup resistor on a pin that had a use
| on that revision but not on the one we wanted. What's
| worse, is even if I'd noticed that the chip was older,
| looking at the datasheet for it that I had access to,
| nowhere did it mention a need for a pullup on that pin.
| Only the factory datasheet mentioned issues with the
| internal pullup and suggested using an external one.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| It's a nightmare. A broker in HK recently quoted me $71/ea for
| an industrial temp rated 10/100 Ethernet PHY (KSZ8081MNXIA) ...
| we're making a design change instead. I am now buying qty
| 500-1000 of any new part that is getting designed in, before
| the design is even started.
|
| Our Analog Devices sales rep told me to expect another 12-18
| months of everything being completely fucked. It's going to be
| super fun.
| pcurve wrote:
| Their margin is approaching 40%. They're basically printing
| money at this point. It's hilarious how a manufacturer can be
| so profitable nowadays.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| "service economy" was always a meme being sold to the
| gullible masses, manufacturing capacity is the only thing
| that matters for an economy. Manufacturing has always printed
| the money
|
| It amazes me how the US allowed itself to be nearly
| deindustrialized after manufacturing effectively won them
| WWII and global dominance. Now the US can't even make
| ventilators or face masks
| minikites wrote:
| Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. The
| relentless drive to shave fractions of a cent off costs in
| the short term creates the conditions you describe in the
| long term. In other words, it's like being penny wise and
| pound foolish on a global scale.
| syshum wrote:
| Fake News... that is not capitalism, that is a by product
| of decades and decades of tex based incentives that push
| people in to market index funds, mutual funds and other
| institutional investment where it is all managed funds
|
| These managed funds are driven by quarterly earnings
| people expect to see...
|
| This intern drives public companies to focus on quarterly
| earnings
|
| Privately held companies almost never look at quarterly
| earnings, they look at a 5 year picture... It is mainly
| public companies majority owned institutional investors
| (401k's, pensions, etc) that focus on quarterly earnings
|
| So once again what people blame capitalism for, is in
| reality government putting their hands on the scales and
| tipping the market in ways that have unintended
| consequences
| monocularvision wrote:
| US Manufacturing is still going. In fact, we manufacture
| more than ever. Folks conflate manufacturing with
| manufacturing _jobs_. Our manufacturing is more efficient
| then ever which is why you constantly hear this false
| refrain that US manufacturing is down or gone.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| people always point to this dumb metric, "we're producing
| more than ever" compared to ourselves, while ignoring
| that the number in comparison to the rest of the world
| has dropped massively. Our share of global manufacturing
| is tiny compared to what it used to be
| kragen wrote:
| That's because the rest of the world is no longer a
| bombed-out postwar wasteland or its near-enslaved
| colonies as it was in 01945. "Producing more than ever"
| is what you needed last year when you couldn't get N95
| masks or ventilators, not "producing more than the rest
| of the world". But something went wrong and the masks and
| ventilators were not forthcoming, something that looks an
| awful lot like an absolute decline in manufacturing
| abilities.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The US is 4% of the world. All else being equal, we would
| eventually move towards manufacturing 4% of things.
| viscanti wrote:
| > Our share of global manufacturing is tiny compared to
| what it used to be
|
| You mean compared to a time when most developed
| countries' production capacity was significantly limited
| because they had been bombed out in WW2 and developing
| countries were a long way away from being competitive?
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Of course it is, after WWII the rest of the world's
| manufacturing capacity had more or less been bombed to
| smithereens.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I've worked for manufacturing companies my entire 30+
| year career. It's not a dumb metric. It's usually pulled
| out in response to the silly complaint that "the US
| doesn't manufacture anything anymore."
|
| Sure, our share of global manufacturing is smaller, but
| that's hardly surprising when many more countries up
| their manufacturing game. A more interesting metric would
| be US percentage of total worldwide manufacturing as a
| function of sophistication: I'd rather be building
| complex medical instruments than toasters.
| minikites wrote:
| >I'd rather be building complex medical instruments than
| toasters.
|
| Why? In what way is it better to have a handful of elite
| workers creating a handful of units sold to a handful of
| consumers instead of having many ordinary workers
| producing many units for many consumers?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Because ordinary workers, producing many units, is a
| business with low margins.
|
| And in modern developed economies, those margins are
| insufficient to support a decent salary.
| minikites wrote:
| So what happens when every economy becomes developed?
| What happens when we can't rely on the existence of low
| wage workers?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I have a sneaking suspicion that's fundamentally
| impossible, as some of the prerequisites for developed
| economies (in the modern, not-industrialization sense)
| seem to require predatory exploitation of developing
| economies. And the global inequality of capital ensures
| there's a power disparity sufficient to enforce it for
| the former, to the detriment of the latter.
|
| But I guess it's really a question about post-scarcity
| economics, and whether they're possible?
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| I think your mistaking how it tends to be for how it must
| be.
|
| I'm more optimistic. Not really sure I have much to base
| my optimism on, but oh well.
|
| Edit: fixed a word
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| This always seems like a question with an agenda.
|
| What happens? Well I suppose the economy collapses and
| the proletariat rise up and usurp power, or something
| fantastical.
|
| What'll more likely happen is we'll further automate
| repetitive low skill tasks, and / or start making more
| durable goods, or otherwise ingenuity our way forward.
| [deleted]
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| Eventually it becomes more profitable to automate. See:
| Sony's automated PS4/5 factory. Formerly these would've
| been assembled in some Foxconn plant by tens of thousands
| of low wage workers.
| sennight wrote:
| Post-industrialized countries make it impossible to for
| those countries arriving late to the party to advance any
| further, by way of global environmental agreements and
| glass bead "carbon credit" payments, thereby ensuring a
| permanent pool of slave labor.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It happens very gradually, and in aggregate we tend to
| end up working fewer and fewer hours per year.
| natebleker wrote:
| I build complex medical instruments, I'd rather build
| toasters the way the chip shortage is nuking my BOMs
| right now.
| CRConrad wrote:
| Most toasters suck. I have to buy a new one every other
| year or so, for some stupid electrical or mechanical
| reason. Right now, for instance, the latch on our current
| toaster -- the one that latches on to the handle you
| press down to lower the bread and close the circuit to
| start the heating elements -- isn't latching any more.
| Fucking low-grade crap! I mean, I'm not asking for a
| self-lowering magically-correct-degree-of-toasting
| toaster like in the old TC video -- I just want a stupid
| mechanical latch in a product I bought a couple of years
| ago to keep stupidly mechanically latching for six or ten
| more years. That is _not_ too much to ask.
|
| So, stick to your complex medical instruments. Or, if you
| switch to toasters, _please_ don 't build the same shitty
| crap as everyone else.
| jbay808 wrote:
| It seems to me that if you can make a product of a given
| quality very cheaply, that probably indicates that you're
| very good at making it.
|
| The fact that I can't get competitive production quotes
| in the USA for most products, like electric motors,
| injection molded plastic parts, printed circuit boards,
| stamped metal parts, castings, etc, suggests that the US
| is also not particularly efficient at making those parts.
| There was a time when the cheapest place to go for such
| things in production volumes was actually the US.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Moldex masks are made in the US. Their unique construction
| also protects them somewhat from counterfeits since the 3M
| masks are the low hanging fruit everyone is copying.
| rat87 wrote:
| "Manufacturing economy" was a meme sold to gullible
| nostalgic masses
|
| Work is work, money is money. There's nothing fundamentally
| more important about manufacturing then other types of
| jobs. The US still has tons of manufacturing but
| unsurprisingly its on the backs of much fewer jobs, many of
| which require more education and specialization then
| manufacturing economy of old used to supply
| paulmd wrote:
| > There's nothing fundamentally more important about
| manufacturing then other types of jobs.
|
| the idea that manufacturing is the only work that matters
| is especially bizarre on _a social media website for tech
| workers_.
|
| microsoft or oracle or any number of other software
| products absolutely deliver value to customers just as
| much as a machine stamping out parts, those companies
| couldn't work without that software just like they can't
| work without an assembly line or a delivery truck or
| whatever.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| US is smart enough to retain the cream of the
| manufacturers. I think some smaller western countries are
| really in the danger of a complete de-industrialization.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It's not for lack of trying. It's hard to compete on the
| global stage and it takes more than wishful thinking to
| maintain a competitive edge in a world full of people
| trying to top you.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > "service economy" was always a meme being sold to the
| gullible masses, manufacturing capacity is the only thing
| that matters for an economy.
|
| Service economies work great in places where food and
| housing are free, so money is only needed to buy luxury
| goods. They only work poorly in the US because capitalists
| have leverage over service workers.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Service economy is kinda fun when you really think about
| it. Rather few sectors really make sense. Food, you can't
| make living just by selling food to each other, the
| ingredients and hardware has to come from somewhere.
| Hospitality quite similar. Banking? Banking and finance
| is just extracting money from others, and actual goods
| produced is quite minimal... Same can be said from quite
| many other field like law. Some of the work does increase
| productivity, but you have to have some base line of it
| to increase...
| spfzero wrote:
| To their credit, they own unique tech that makes the chips
| built on it the most attractive in the market.
|
| Very very few manufacturers are in that position.
| skybrian wrote:
| On the other hand they are spending billions on building new
| plants. I guess those are assets, though? I wonder what cash
| flow looks like.
| ozarkerD wrote:
| Genuine question because I'm unfamiliar with the market. Why
| aren't competitors undercutting these big players? 40% is
| ridiculous
| zsmi wrote:
| ASML is trying to increase the world's capacity by ramping
| up their production of EUV machines to 50 per year. [1] The
| ASML CEO stated it's probably not possible for the world to
| produce more than that. These machines are ~$150 million ea
| and building one is insanely complicated. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15428/asml-ramps-up-euv-
| scann...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJIO7aRXUCg
| ericd wrote:
| So they don't have the potential to make more than $7.5B
| in revenue per year? With a market cap of $338B?
|
| Something doesn't add up there.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Their max is about double that (other kinds of systems,
| and service.) That's about a p/e of 60 which is too high
| but what this market has done to many stocks. There is
| some expectation of growth, too, of course. ASML will
| keep pushing their capabilities and if trends continue,
| they should eventually be selling individual machines
| worth an order of magnitude more.
| klohto wrote:
| What competitors lol? You can't exactly make chips in a
| basement.
| hathawsh wrote:
| That's starting to change. Sam Zeloof is inspiring.
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7E8-0Ou69hwScPW1_fQApA
| Kirby64 wrote:
| What he's making is basically caveman technology compared
| to actual cutting-edge nodes.
|
| No offense to his accomplishments, but the modern fabs
| like TSMC are so advanced you cannot just make the things
| they make without billions of capital investment. It just
| is not possible.
|
| Unfortunately, many of the chips in short supply are on
| pretty small nodes, so you need extremely specialized
| equipment limited to a few of the big players to make
| them.
|
| Certainly there's some stuff that can be made in larger
| nodes, but if you want something in 5nm you basically
| have one game in town.
| kragen wrote:
| It's possible, we just haven't figured out how to do it
| yet.
| hathawsh wrote:
| No disagreement here. It's just good to see someone
| trying. :-)
| londons_explore wrote:
| Building a new factory is a 10+ year effort for a
| competitor. (They have to do the R&D to get on-par with
| performance, and physically build the factory).
|
| The shortage won't last that long.
|
| But in the meantime, anyone who owns a suitable factory can
| pretty much set the prices as high as they like. I'm really
| surprised the price hike is only 20%, rather than 10% per
| month for the next 3 years.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| I imagine if things get too out of hand that governments
| will step in to limit prices. Maybe.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Which government? Taiwan, where it matters? This is a
| major part of their economy; they all win big. I bet
| they'd sooner surrender to China.
|
| Some other government? This wouldn't have much impact on
| chips, except to make it a lot less likely anyone makes
| chips in that country ever again -- which isn't to say no
| nation would do it; economic history is full of this sort
| of thing, particularly as nations start going the way of
| Venezuela.
| zsmi wrote:
| Probably the limiting factor is one needs to make sure
| the customers of chips stay viable. I mean, one hopes the
| shortage will eventually be over and foundries will want
| to make sure they didn't gut their own market.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Few consumers will say "eh, modern tech is too expensive,
| I don't need the internet, phones, computers or cars
| anymore".
|
| For most uses of tech, demand is there even if the price
| doubles.
| imtringued wrote:
| That just disrupts the profit incentive of competitors.
|
| The entity that manufactures the product is compensated
| for it, meaning the money isn't being siphoned off by a
| random third party. Price controls grant a wind fall to
| consumers who are in no position to build another
| semiconductor plant. It's basically a wealth transfer
| away from the semiconductor industry into the consuming
| industries. If you want semiconductor prices to drop then
| either grant a subsidy or let the government build a
| plant that produces way more than the market really
| needs.
|
| A single shortage plus price increase might not be able
| to pay for a whole plant, but any plans to expand
| capacity will be shifted forward rather than be delayed.
| If the profit motive exists the construction of the new
| plant will happen one year sooner and it will be bigger
| in anticipation of future shortages.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| There are three companies (TSMC, Samsung and Intel) that
| compete at the top end of chip fabrication in the whole
| world. One of them (Intel) didn't make chips for anyone but
| themselves until about 4 months ago. Preparing a
| semiconductor for a given companies fab process takes time.
| You cant just call them up and ask for however many units
| of your design. Its a months to year long process of your
| engineers working with their engineers to optimize your
| circuit design to work best with their methods.
|
| Also there is only one supplier (ASML) in the entire world
| who makes a critical machine (extreme ultraviolet laser
| photolithography machine) needed for these cutting edge
| processes. It is unable to match the increased demand for
| their tools. And even if they were these super advanced
| might as well be magic machines have a lead time in years
| themselves as do the factories they go in to.
|
| If you want to start marking modern semiconductors or
| increase your existing capacity to do so it isn't as simple
| as throwing a couple million at it and having it running in
| a few months. Its billions of dollars in a massive sterile
| factory using machines made by a handful of suppliers
| taking up acres of land and consuming impressive amounts of
| electricity and water to do so. Semiconductor fabs are
| massive sprawling industrial campuses https://images.anandt
| ech.com/doci/13749/intel_kiryat_678_678...
| makapuf wrote:
| Many missing chips for automotive or devices are not gpu
| or top of the line level but simple microcontrollers.
| Those can be done with 130nm to 40nm process for the most
| modern. 130 nm has been used for pIII or amd athlon64 and
| dates from 2001. Those need near UV, not extreme UV.
| tomp wrote:
| Their competitor is Intel which stands for _I am NoT really
| Even trying Lol_
| reportingsjr wrote:
| Because all of their competitors are also raising their
| prices. Why would companies reduce prices and profits when
| the demand exists even with higher costs?
|
| Samsung, which is the largest IC manufacturer, recently
| increased prices:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-foundry-to-hike-
| wa...
|
| If you look at prices for the stuff a lot of wafer capacity
| is going towards, particularly Flash and RAM, you'll see
| that the prices have gone up 20%+ over the last year.
|
| I think people like to pick out TSMC because of the
| politics surrounding Taiwan and China, and maybe because a
| lot of companies use TSMC for their IC production and like
| to complain. People don't notice as much when other ICs
| like flash, ram, micros, etc are slowly increased in price.
| kragen wrote:
| People like to pick out TSMC because they're the winner
| of the foundry wars; GlobalFoundries bowed out of further
| process node development, I think two years ago, and
| Intel is trying and failing to equal TSMC's performance
| with their in-house fabs. GF and Samsung and other
| players are still around, but only TSMC offers the
| highest-resolution parts, so they're your only option if
| your part needs current fabrication technology, and they
| may be your cheapest option even if it doesn't.
| abricot wrote:
| There are no small players, only the big ones. The machines
| they use cost $300m and then comes the expertise needed.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > by the time they finish the changes, the part they redesigned
| for is also out of stock
|
| One of the things my last employer did to get around
| availability problems was to buy a vendor's entire supply of a
| chip we could use and then redesigning the product to use it.
| IIRC, the supply was projected to be enough to last a year.
| Hopefully, a year from now it will have proven to be a good
| decision :-)
|
| It's crazy out there!
| spfzero wrote:
| Similarly, my company just redesigned a product after running
| out of an IC that's been on order for many months, still
| without an estimate on delivery by the distributor.
|
| We redesigned it to use another chip we had in-house,
| intended for another product, but that product sells for much
| less and is in less demand, so...
|
| We initially thought we could move pins around in firmware,
| and the parts have the same footprint, so it seemed possible,
| but they were different enough that we had to rev the PCB.
| Now we're waiting for PCBs and crossing our fingers that they
| will test out.
| dingaling wrote:
| Bosch recently opened their own chip fab in Dresden, primary
| focus for now is on automotive chips and those required for
| their in-house tools and appliances:
|
| https://www.bosch.com/stories/bosch-chip-factory-dresden/
| fy20 wrote:
| This makes a lot of sense as Bosch make so many automotive
| parts. In Europe, it doesn't matter whether you buy a BMW, a
| Peugeot or a Volvo, under the hood they are all using Bosch
| electronics to control the engine and many other parts of the
| car.
| f32jhnjk33jj wrote:
| Thank you cryptominers for everything you did for the mankind,
| especially huge GPU prices and insane air pollution caused by
| your mining farms.
| neb_b wrote:
| Also, thank you for providing fast and cheap remittance
| payments to poorer countries.
| bongoman37 wrote:
| sarcasm? Nobody uses crypto for remittance payments to poorer
| countries. It is mostly used by rich folks in countries like
| China to get around exchange restrictions.
| neb_b wrote:
| That's not true
| thehappypm wrote:
| Correct, it's mostly used for money laundering and
| illegal transactions.
| beefjerkins wrote:
| Source?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > fast and cheap
|
| ???
| neb_b wrote:
| Bitcoin onchain payments are still faster and cheaper than
| using something like Western Union.
|
| The lightning network is even faster and cheaper than that.
|
| https://twitter.com/jackmallers/status/1428429890957848591
|
| (tweet text, also includes a video and some more info)
| "With @Bitnob_official's Lightning Network integration, we
| now have free, instant, non-reversible remittances of any
| size to and from the United States, Nigeria, and Ghana.
|
| $10 in my US bank account became spendable NGN for
| @bernard_parah in seconds.
|
| Monetary history."
| f32jhnjk33jj wrote:
| I don't know a single person who uses bitcoins or a
| single store that accepts them... and it's very risky for
| companies due to it's extreme volatility (the price may
| increase/decrease by hundreds percent within days or
| weeks)
| neb_b wrote:
| That's anecdotal. I know many people that use bitcoin
| every day.
|
| Bitcoin is much more useful (currently) to people that
| don't have access to traditional banking systems that
| many people take for granted.
| anchpop wrote:
| How many people do you know that send or receive
| remittances?
| igammarays wrote:
| The real value is only in the USD and NGN. Using Bitcoin
| to move the value is only propped by hype-fueled insanity
| that doesn't need to exist. International banks could
| easily create an international money-transfer system that
| would be far more reliable and secure than any
| decentralized Ponzi scheme. An in fact, such systems do
| exist - for example I used to earn in USD and spend
| instantly in other countries using international
| Visa/Mastercards like Revolut or Wise.
| neb_b wrote:
| You are lucky that you had access to those services. In
| many poor countries the majority of citizens do not have
| a bank account.
|
| Even if international banks created these services (why
| haven't they done more of this already if it's easy?)
| these people would not be able to access it.
| fullstop wrote:
| Not op, but faster and cheaper than services like Western
| Union.
| akmarinov wrote:
| Wonder whether that impacts contracts like Apple's where they
| bought out all of the initial 3nm production that TSMC can manage
| more than a year ago.
|
| If not that means that Apple will have a competitive advantage on
| price with other manufacturers that utilize TSMC.
| johnnywasagood wrote:
| There are contracts for years and years ahead so I doubt
| current price changes will impact Apple or any other major
| client.
| tyingq wrote:
| Contracts are what they are, but they don't preclude
| discussions like _" if we honor this as-is, it leads to a
| situation where we have no incentive to value you as a
| customer"_.
| bluGill wrote:
| Firm orders years in advance are in general far more
| valuable than much more expensive orders today. With the
| years in advance orders you can make plans around them.
| carl_dr wrote:
| MacRumors reports this may increase the price of the next
| iPhone - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/26/iphone-13-price-
| increas...
|
| Lots of "reportedly", "may", "could" in there, of course.
|
| (I'm linking that article since the original DigiTimes article
| is paywalled, and this article quotes from it.)
| noisy_boy wrote:
| That might be the reason for rumours of higher storage (1tb).
| An excuse to charge 30% more to not only offset increased
| costs but to increase profit margins.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Supply shortages are the excuse du jour, but so long as TSMC has
| the kingmaking node I expect it to become expensive. Very
| expensive. Expensive enough to move margin from the king their
| node made right back to TSMC.
| skohan wrote:
| As it should be. Without competition, and with demand
| outstripping supply, TSMC is free to find the price the market
| will bear.
| da_chicken wrote:
| In the short term, sure, I'll buy that. In the long term,
| monopoly or near monopoly of any sort will turn toxic.
| bluGill wrote:
| That depends on if someone else gets in. AMD or Intel could
| if they wanted to - without the expertise it will be hard,
| but a few expensive years of research and they can get back
| into it. Hire a few TMSC people.
|
| Or it could be someone completely new. The problem is hard,
| but solvable.
|
| TMSC does have incentive to keep prices low enough that
| that doesn't happen. They also have other incentives to
| treat good customers well (though who the good customers
| are is an open question)
| p_j_w wrote:
| >a few expensive years of research and they can get back
| into it.
|
| I haven't kept up much in the last couple of years, but
| back when I did, I was under the impression that AMD
| couldn't actually afford to do this. I know their
| condition has improved with the good fortunes of Zen, but
| is it enough that they could get back into semiconductor
| fabrication?
|
| I have no doubt Intel can afford to, though.
| bluGill wrote:
| They don't have to go it alone.
| skohan wrote:
| I am not an expert, but I thought it was more like a few
| expensive _decades_ than years. Intel is _already in_
| this business and they have only been able to fall
| farther behind TSM even given billions in investment.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, the higher the price, the more incentive other
| companies have to catch up and compete with them. (Or take
| a more flexible portion of the market by price.)
|
| Chip fabrication is a difficult market, with barriers to
| entry only similar to stuff dominated by governments, but
| there is still a little bit of competition there.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Right. If AMD and Intel both got out of the fab business,
| on account of it being low margin, then TSMC would promptly
| yoink their collective margin, because if you choose the
| king you get to charge for the privilege. Fortunately Intel
| decided to compete instead.
|
| See also: AMD and NVidia, and whichever other pairs rely on
| leading-edge nodes.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Silicon OPEC. I flouted the idea 10 years ago, and people were
| laughing.
| skohan wrote:
| It's a different case. TSMC isn't colluding with Samsung to
| limit the supply of silicon, they're simply succeeding where
| others have failed.
| [deleted]
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Wouldn't other people catch up quickly?
| Retric wrote:
| This isn't a price hike on their best node this is a price hike
| in their more mainstream nodes which have real competition.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Sure, but it's not _not_ a price hike on the leading node.
| Technically you are correct, the leading node price hikes
| will happen separately, behind closed doors, but it makes
| sense to talk about them here. There won 't be a HN post
| about the non-public price hikes because, well, they aren't
| public.
| njovin wrote:
| Forgive the naive question but why doesn't the US government fund
| several foundries in the US immediately? $20B over 3 years is a
| drop in the bucket compared to a lot of military spending and
| these chip shortages surely have downstream impact on the defense
| industry, no?
|
| At this point I'd be much happier subsidizing chip manufacturing
| than most of the other ways this country spends money overseas.
| naruvimama wrote:
| It is one thing to build massive fabs it is quite another to
| run them profitably especially with China in the game, you are
| competing with a large pool of cheap R&D engineers and a
| captive market.
|
| This was a mistake with 5G, where each country guarded their
| patent pool, R&D and failed to collaborate with strategic
| partners.
| noelsusman wrote:
| The US Senate recently passed $52 billion for domestic chip
| manufacturing.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| They are currently doing this with Intel afaik
| epsilon_greedy wrote:
| There were early talks but I believe this only recently
| became official. See https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/
| newsroom/news/intel-...
| nexuist wrote:
| Might scare Taiwan and embolden China? A huge reason we hold
| Taiwan as an ally is their chip production capabilities. If we
| become self reliant on those then we don't really need Taiwan
| and China might try to invade them, which would be bad for our
| own national security interests.
| vmception wrote:
| Why would that be bad for our own national security interests
| if we have our own semiconductor lines?
|
| What else does Taiwan offer to the US?
|
| We have "strategic bases" everywhere. One being 100 miles
| from mainland china versus 200 miles makes no difference to
| US in the 21st century.
|
| A shipping lane maybe? Also not US problem really, got plenty
| of those too.
| Rafuino wrote:
| Well, for one, we don't want a humanitarian crisis and
| civil war or even international war... that's bad for the
| whole region and thus bad for US interests.
|
| We also don't want China able to just take over land and
| territory at will, which they've threatened to do all over
| the region. That destabilizes the region and once again is
| bad for US interests. This also emboldens other nations
| with expansion desires which threatens stability across the
| world... No US ally would trust us again if we just let
| Taiwan be taken over... again, bad for US interests...
| vmception wrote:
| There are 190 other countries that applies to so where
| are they?
|
| I don't share the ego for the US' hegemony or the for US'
| soft power. I do care about semiconductors though.
|
| Is there a stronger argument, because I'm still stuck on
| what specific strategic advantage that _Taiwan_ has _to
| the US_ , after we duplicate their one interesting
| company's infrastructure.
| laputan_machine wrote:
| My PC is 11 years old this year. I've been waiting to upgrade it
| for 2 years but held off because GPU prices are utterly
| ridiculous.
|
| I don't know who can afford these inflated prices, I was hoping
| things would settle but it doesn't appear to be the case.
| topspin wrote:
| "I was hoping things would settle but it doesn't appear to be
| the case."
|
| I've come to the conclusion that it's not going to 'settle' for
| a long time. Not until competition arrives from new foundries
| (several years out, although they _are_ being planned and
| built) and competition from Intel and their GPU platform
| appears and eventually becomes competitive. So your wait will
| be a couple years longer.
|
| Proof Of Stake with Ethereum won't change anything. There are
| many other POW block chains around and people invested in GPUs
| farming will migrate, find profit and continue indulging their
| livelihoods. COVID isn't going away and isn't really causing
| any of this to begin with; it's just the go-to excuse for every
| complaint.
|
| The real problem is obvious to me; the manufacturers,
| particularly those in Western countries, have been on a 20 year
| long lemming-like off-shoring race to Taiwan and S. Korea
| foundries and now there is a foundry oligopoly and competition
| no longer exists. Prices go up. Big surprise. And it won't
| return to 'normal' anytime soon.
|
| With that in mind I bit the bullet ordered up all the parts for
| my new machine two weeks ago; $3k with a 3070 TI GPU. About a
| week after my order the the exact same GPU appeared in stock
| from the exact same reseller with a $200 price hike. The prices
| aren't going down. They're going up.
| pbourke wrote:
| Apple's move, a decade ago, to control their own silicon
| seems quite prescient.
| pjscott wrote:
| They have their own chip designs, but the manufacturing is
| done by TSMC.
| pbourke wrote:
| Indeed, but they control the supply chain risks to a much
| greater extent now.
| larkost wrote:
| Very true. But they have hedged that very well with long-
| term contracts, so they are effectively first in line for
| most of their needs. I would guess that this is still
| biting them on some components (they have so many in so
| many products), but they appear to be riding through this
| pretty well.
| coryfklein wrote:
| Well they certainly weren't going to be able to fabricate
| their own Intel chips, that's for sure! Baby steps, my
| friends.
|
| (Not that it's in any way fair to call "design your own
| chip" a baby step haha.)
| [deleted]
| topspin wrote:
| Update: that GPU is about $250 more now than what I paid on
| 8/6.
|
| The worst part of all of this is now my PC is this precious
| asset. Used to be a GPU could die and "meh, whatever... could
| have used an update anyhow." Now I feel the need to pay for a
| 'protection' plan.
|
| The good part of just paying the cost is now I'm no longer
| involved in 'newegg shuffle' nonsense or participating in
| 24/7 Live Stock Watcher videos on YouTube[1]. How messed up
| is that?
|
| [1] 24/7 Live stock alert
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfyJ5XBchoQ
| sva_ wrote:
| Onboard graphic is pretty good these days, unless you plan to
| game high-end stuff. I'm actually using my 4790k's onboard
| graphic (2017) as a daily driver since I use my GPUs for
| compute only.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Why not just purchase a used one on eBay?
| laputan_machine wrote:
| My current GPU is a used 980, it's mostly ok but it makes
| noises when doing certain tasks for some reason (like
| scrolling a browser window), I'm really not sure what causes
| it but it's put me off buying second hand cards, if it fails
| there's not much you can do to fix it
| orliesaurus wrote:
| I use 980Ti too - i'm lighting 6 candles on the cake this
| year...It keeps me warm at night and during the winter. I
| am surprised it's still working after 6 years of daily use
| with that TDP and heat released.
| bavell wrote:
| My 970 is still limping along... kinda hilarious that
| it's paired with a 5950x in my new workstation. I'm
| impressed it can still play modern games pretty decently
| on my 1440p monitor although usually I've gotta dial it
| down to medium gfx settings.
|
| Gonna try to hold out till next gen, crossing my fingers
| supply issues have been sorted out by then.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I'm running an RX 470, since I upgraded one of my
| monitors to QHD, it has been having some issues. Luckily,
| I hate action games, don't care much about high-end
| graphics, and grew up with 30 FPS as target ;)
|
| Some day I'll be able to upgrade to a new budget GPU.
| initplus wrote:
| It's just coil whine, not really worth worrying about.
| Happens on many graphics cards even when brand new.
| laputan_machine wrote:
| I've just looked this up and it's exactly that noise, at
| least I know what it is now, thanks.
| bserge wrote:
| Noises? As in fan noises or GPU/VRM/component noises?
|
| If it's the former, repaste it and grease the fan, if it's
| the latter, it's normal (except when caused by overheating,
| in which case repaste/grease).
| photon-torpedo wrote:
| Prices for used GPUs are also inflated, though I think they
| have started to come down a bit. Once Ethereum moves to
| proof-of-stake (early 2022?) the market will probably get
| flooded with used GPUs.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I don't think proof-of-stake will actually work. Not
| because of any technical reasons, but because 95% of the
| people involved in crypto just see it as a free money
| printing machine. Once their hardware is no longer useful
| for mining, they will just move to some other proof-of-work
| crypto.
| TillE wrote:
| It's incredibly unfortunate that Bitcoin and similar
| proof-of-work currencies blew up and remained hot
| commodities. Because I do think that cryptocurrency is
| abstractly a very exciting idea, but the popular
| implementations are fundamentally abysmal.
|
| If proof-of-stake works out, particularly as a currency
| people can actually use, then maybe nobody wants to buy
| Bitcoin anymore and the whole thing dries up as only
| speculators are left.
| vimy wrote:
| Miners will probably move to Ethereum classic.
| photon-torpedo wrote:
| If many miners move to another cryptocurrency, the
| difficulty for that network will go up, to the point that
| it's no longer profitable to mine it (electricity costs
| exceed income). Unless the price for the cryptocurrency
| goes up as well, but it won't magically do that just
| because of an influx of miners. After all, those other
| networks don't have the utility that Ethereum has.
| vimy wrote:
| Ethereum Classic will probably be 500 dollar at the end
| of this bull run. It will be worth it for miners.
| breckenedge wrote:
| This. I have a gut feeling that a lot of mining rigs were
| bought with credit and haven't paid for themselves yet.
| Those rigs will find a new asset to mine rather than
| being dumped. Outlawing mining is the only thing I see
| that causes prices to move downward
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Like how China banned it in May, and it has been creeping
| back? You can't ban mining. At least not in any
| jurisdiction with free speech type laws. Be careful what
| you are asking for -- the ability to run arbitrary
| software should not be controlled by governments.
| l-lousy wrote:
| I'm saving up for the flood of old GPUs. I can finally
| realize my dream of taking all my ML work off the cloud
| once I scoop up some old mining GPUs for relatively cheap
| trainsplanes wrote:
| You really may be waiting a good while. And if a
| desirable used model is ever a decent price, it'll be a
| unit burnt out from mining fake money that's only used to
| buy real money or a mail order of LSD.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Mining usually does not "burn out" a GPU. Most miners
| cool their cards adequately and undervolt them. If a GPU
| is somehow damaged from mining then it's typically
| observable - it either does not work or it artifacts
| quickly, making it easy to detect and avoid.
| kulahan wrote:
| Even if they do that, they're still running it 24/7/365
| for possibly years at a time. Wouldn't that be some
| serious wear and tear? Genuine question - I have no clue.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Consider a pre-build PC, and then a Steam Deck or Xbox for
| gaming?
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Try finding a PC starter bundle that includes a gpu from
| GameStop or some other retailer and you can find one for MSRP.
| The trade off is you're buying other PC parts you may not need,
| for example a PSU.
| csomar wrote:
| A modest new desktop will be definitively much better than
| anything you could have had 11 years ago.
|
| Unless you are looking for high-end gaming, the most important
| parts will be your motherboard and SSD (nvme) speed. You could
| get all high-end components except for the graphic card, and
| just wait it out and replace it later when the prices come
| back.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Good. If they keep making huge profits then others will invest in
| factories to get in on the action.
| ffggvv wrote:
| thats gauranteed inflation in everything then. GG fed. good job
| powell
| seibelj wrote:
| I was told the inflation was temporary. This doesn't sound
| temporary!
| pas wrote:
| How big chunk chips are of the median consumer's basket? Sure,
| everyone and their dog has smartphones, but not everyone has to
| buy the next-gen high-end ones. (Where the price increase
| happens.)
| qeternity wrote:
| Inflation is a rate of change, not an absolute change. When
| people say inflation is transitory, they mean that the rate of
| change is transitory (prices will stop going up). But the
| inflation that has occurred will not go away. You will not pay
| less when the inflation subsides. You will merely stop paying
| more.
|
| This is what happens when you print $5T and refuse to let the
| economy go through any sort of healthy contraction.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| The inflation has been there for a while now; wages have been
| artificially depressed for decades while the stock market was
| growing 15% a year. But when there's inflation for the rich we
| call it an "asset bubble".
| qeternity wrote:
| No. This is because inflation has a very specific meaning in
| economics. Inflation is not a synonym for "higher prices".
| sylens wrote:
| Starting to get the feeling that the current prices for PC
| components are here to say.
| simfoo wrote:
| My guess is also that the age of high-end graphics cards for
| 500EUR/$ has come to an end. Going to order a 3070 for 850EUR
| now, after waiting for months
| thejosh wrote:
| I had a gutfeel around 3080 launch it was going to be big, so
| grabbed one on launch day (had to wait for months for the
| local store to have stock though..). Now seeing them 2x the
| price. Crazy times.
| baybal2 wrote:
| 1080 GTXes bough and resold on ebays for tens of times are
| still going strong.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Long gone are the days for decent $350 card.
| sylens wrote:
| I am in need of an upgrade but having a harder and harder
| time justifying the expense for what is a hobby.
|
| I guess eventually my system will be old enough that I will
| be better off just ordering a prebuilt, where I'll get gouged
| a bit overall but not by some insane amount just for a GPU
| Chilinot wrote:
| Price of pre-built will reflect the price for components.
| So if the GPU price increases, so will the pre-built price.
| lrem wrote:
| Then again, a corporation is likely able to contract with
| another corporation in a way that's not disturbed by
| scalpers?
| vardump wrote:
| This might be the start of the end of high-end PC gaming,
| unless prices get back to a more reasonable level. Consoles
| (and phones) are very competitive and cost significantly less.
|
| Or perhaps it just causes the games to have lower performance
| requirements. Is integrated graphics the future of PC gaming?
| dangus wrote:
| High-end PC gamers were always about money-is-no-object
| gaming. None of the tech they use has ever been strictly
| necessary.
|
| The vast majority of gamers still use 1080p. More people
| login to Steam on a Mac than login to Steam with a 4K monitor
| attached.
|
| Maybe the high-end is more expensive now, but you still see
| forums riddled with people paying $1000+ for cards. If nobody
| was paying for it the price would go back down. High-end PC
| gamers are the most price inelastic gamers on the market!
|
| I'd say that integrated graphics are the _present_ of PC
| gaming. eSports games, Minecraft, Fortnite and similar games
| dominate sales and play time, and they don 't have any
| serious requirement for discrete graphics.
|
| This is all to say that the high-end isn't going to just go
| away. The overall gaming market is bigger than ever, so high-
| end gaming along with other niches like VR are here to stay.
| These niches on their own are just large enough to support a
| variety of gaming markets, while in the past they might have
| been too obscure to warrant investment and development
| effort.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by high-end. If you want to run
| the latest AAA games then you will need a decent machine.
| If you want to do >1080p gaming then the requirements are
| even greater. But it's actually not that expensive, if you
| play 2 every day for 8/10 days, then you will play 584
| hours/year. If your gaming setup costs $3000 every 5 years,
| that comes out to $1/hour. That's a lot cheaper than most
| hobbies.
|
| The popularity of eSports is because pretty much anyone
| _can_ play those games not that high end gaming is becoming
| a niche. Plus eSports & low-end gaming are super popular
| in less wealthy, non-western countries where as high-end
| gaming is going to be limited to developed countries.
| Within developed countries, high-end gaming is not a niche
| like VR.
| sofixa wrote:
| Or is cloud gaming the future of gaming? GeForce Now and
| Stadia work fairly well and are price competitive with a
| modern powerful GPU.
| sneak wrote:
| Stadia doesn't work "fairly well". It's also low-res
| (still) compared to a local GPU, which may be okay for some
| but certainly isn't sufficient for serious gamers.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Stadia doesn't work "fairly well
|
| Yes it does? What issues do you have with it? It just
| works.
|
| > It's also low-res (still) compared to a local GPU
|
| 1080p for free or (upscaled) 4K for 10EUR/month is fairly
| decent, and on the latest games is better than most
| integrated or older GPUs.
|
| > serious gamers
|
| What percentage of the gamers' market is "serious
| gamers"? For the people that "must have" 8K low latency
| etc sure, cloud gaming isn't the best option. But IMHO
| they're the minority and vastly more people are "casual
| gamers" that are more than fine with playing
| 1080p/upscaled 4K for peanuts for multiple years ( how
| much does a RTX 3080 cost, and how many years of Stadia
| can we buy with the same amount of money?)
| ahtihn wrote:
| Consoles are significantly under-priced or there wouldn't be
| continual issues with them being out of stock and flipped by
| scalpers.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > Consoles are very competitive and cost significantly less.
|
| If you can get one
| cwkoss wrote:
| I feel like high-end PC gaming, trying to maximize graphics
| of brand new titles has always been a silly dick-measuring
| competition.
|
| For me the sweet spot of games is 2-8 years old. Reviews are
| out, so you can skip the crap. Patches have been released to
| fix bugs. And everything that has stood the test of time runs
| pretty well on low- to mid-tier hardware by now.
|
| Dust off those games in your steam library that you never
| touched before.
| sylens wrote:
| I think it's interesting that we have three options now for
| sidestepping this by streaming games and yet none of them
| have made much of a dent.
|
| Microsoft seems to have the best business model but you're
| stuck streaming the games on Game Pass, and their latency
| seems to be the worst in my experience.
|
| Stadia seems to have the best tech in terms of latency, but
| the weird "it'll only work on these certain Chromecasts"
| launch situation put me off it for a bit, and then there's
| the business model - trusting Google to honor purchases on
| this service in perpetuity.
|
| Luna is the one I haven't tried but seems to be going for an
| approach where they partner with publishers to sell catalog
| packs, even if they're not quite there yet.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| The availability of the high bandwidth, low latency FTTP
| internet is lagging severly enough for these to have no
| impact.
|
| The use cases where I, a high end gaming PC owner, would
| use streaming services are: travelling. Except unless you
| visit a city center, you aren't getting 5G, and you aren't
| getting WiFi 6 speeds. I'm in the UK, and here my parents
| live, where I live and where my friends live, none have the
| speeds capable for it. I imagine things are even worse in
| 95% of the US too.
|
| Game streaming won't happen in a country unless most of the
| country has 100MBit down
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Game streaming won't happen in a country unless most of
| the country has 100MBit down
|
| Not just down, but up too with low latency and jitter.
| philjohn wrote:
| That was my assumption - I managed to pick up a 3080 TI FE at
| MSRP in the UK a couple of weeks back. I would have gone for
| the 3080, better price/perf, but since the only ones available
| are AIB for the same price, or more, than the 3080 TI FE that
| made the decision for me.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Where from?
| patrickwalton wrote:
| At the moment, we'd pay several X over price versus not being
| able to find needed ICs at all and having to redesign our
| satellite for ones that are available.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I'm guessing, though, that semiconductors do not make up a
| large percentage of the cost of a satellite...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Supply shortage is another way of saying demand excess. I don't
| see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed production, at
| least for their most advanced processes that are in high demand.
|
| This is yet another way we're all forced to pay the price for
| cryptocurrency. As long as GPUs are profitable for mining, they
| will be purchased and put to work. The saddest part is that each
| additional GPU added to the mining networks only makes the
| overall system less efficient. Mining difficulty is automatically
| adjusted upward to cancel out the additional computing power. The
| networks processed just as many transactions last year as they do
| now, but countless new GPUs have been added to the mining network
| due to the incentive structure of mining. It's a race to the
| bottom, consuming ever more GPUs and energy until equilibrium is
| reached.
|
| It's frustrating to watch so much of the output of our most
| advanced chip manufacturing be diverted straight into making
| arbitrary proof-of-work systems less efficient so someone can
| capture incrementally more coins. And now we must all pay higher
| prices for everything.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I agree that it is simply an excess of demand, the whole
| bitcoin rant though. Really?
|
| There is a demand for semiconductors that exceeds supply. You
| have made a leap that the current demand driver is bitcoin and
| its consumption of GPUS. As much as I appreciate the sentiment
| that Bitcoin is a waste, that leap doesn't hold up when you
| look at the actual numbers for semiconductor demand.
|
| The number one demand item for 7nm semiconductors is cell
| phones.
|
| If you read the various analysts reports you will find this
| sums it up well: _It(demand) is mainly driven by the increasing
| demand for consumer electronics and the integration of
| semiconductor into several devices across sectors like
| automotive, industrial, communications, military, and others._
| (that is from this report[1] that for $2500 you too could read
| it (https://www.marketreportsworld.com/global-semiconductor-
| mark...))
|
| During the pandemic it appears that everyone upgraded their TV
| (at least in the US) which, not surprisingly, consumes a lot of
| semi-conductors. The pandemic has also botched a lot of
| logistics which will sort itself out but these small bumps can
| cause unusually large ripples in the supply chain because so
| many industries are built around "just in time" delivery of raw
| materials. Semiconductor manufacturing is a process that is
| intolerant of frequent line starts/stops.
|
| So TSMC, knowing that new fabs cannot come online instantly,
| has chosen to risk alienating their customers a bit by raising
| prices to capture the value associated with their assets
| (productive plants) during this period.
|
| [1] To be clear, I didn't pony up the $2500, I looked at a
| number of sites that reported on the contents of the reports
| and pulled quotes from them. Market information is itself a
| market.
| pkulak wrote:
| Can we say "Bitcoin" when we're talking about Bitcoin and not
| lump all proof of stake and other very efficient systems in
| with proof of work coins?
| wiz21c wrote:
| > It's frustrating to watch so much of the output
|
| well, frustrating maybe. But you know what, chips production is
| not like gravity, there are human controlling who gets what
| chip... Someone, somewhere could better arbitrate things...
|
| And it's not the invisible hand which is, as often, well,
| invisible.
| pW9GLKxm9taFEhz wrote:
| Are people mining crypto on PS5s and Xboxes?
| officialchicken wrote:
| No love for automotive infotainment systems and dashboard
| gauges? Those have actually caused real economic damage due
| to manufacturing shutdowns.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > No love for automotive infotainment systems
|
| None at all, I hate those big display things.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Cars cost tens of thousands of dollars, so I think they
| should be somewhat entitled to use whatever tech they want.
| I'm more upset at every fridge and light bulb and oven
| having WiFi.
| zip1234 wrote:
| While Crypto is certainly a contributor to demand, I think a
| large part of the problem is related to a demand spike similar
| to the 'toilet paper shortage', where companies try to
| stockpile because they hear there will be a shortage, which in
| turn makes the problem worse. Additionally, COVID stoppages
| caused chaos in supply.
| ATsch wrote:
| The toilet paper shortage is kind of a bad example, because
| it was caused by a very real and sudden shift in demand from
| the very seperate commercial and personal toilet paper
| manufacturing markets.
| stefan_ wrote:
| So is GPUs for crypto mining demand, though. GPU makers
| don't hate it because they have a conscience, they hate it
| because it can collapse any moment when a bubble unrelated
| to their product bursts (or someone makes an ASIC, for some
| of them).
| smhost wrote:
| demand shift and panic buying are not mutually exclusive.
| and it also keeps happening (from this week:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/costco-shoppers-
| stockpiling-...)
| lobochrome wrote:
| Is there a source for this?
| xxs wrote:
| look for companies retooling their output - company
| toilet paper rolls are quite different than home use
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| All over the place. From April 2020:
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/04/08/coronavir
| us-...
| exporectomy wrote:
| It's no fun before supply catches up with demand, but when it
| does, we'll be in a world that has higher chip production
| capacity and maybe some advances will come from all that extra
| money chip makers will be making. It seems more promising long
| term than, some under-produced stagnant technology like nuclear
| power plants.
| cwizou wrote:
| > I don't see much evidence that TSMC ever really slowed
| production, at least for their most advanced processes that are
| in high demand.
|
| One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50 years in
| Taiwan) has really affected them, and various sources seem to
| confirm it, here's one : https://fortune.com/2021/06/12/chip-
| shortage-taiwan-drought-...
|
| And while I wholeheartedly agree with the crypto/GPU issue, all
| in all, the GPU market is overall fairly tiny compared to
| TSMC's total output.
|
| Most of the GPU issue is linked to massive demand and
| conservative allocations that were bought by GPU makers a while
| back. Adding extra allocation because of demand is really hard
| specifically on constrained high end nodes like GPU uses.
|
| Car makers and others in the industry don't use those nodes,
| they use older ones and those are equally constrained.
|
| The GPU/crypto issue is the cherry on top of an already very
| constrained TSMC, it seems.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50
| years in Taiwan) has really affected them,
|
| The power issues earlier this year in Texas also impacted
| production.
|
| Weather issues are often the cause of the bust cycles in
| silicon manufacturing. Just people outside of the industry
| rarely discuss when memory prices or whatever spike due to a
| typhoon hitting Japan/Korea/Taiwan. This year, we've have
| major weather events hit chip production across the globe, at
| basically the same time, plus the pandemic.
| routerl wrote:
| The drought was over months ago. Taiwan is well into typhoon
| season (they've had two already). The water reservoirs are
| full[1].
|
| And TSMC was never really affected. They were not forced to
| save water, unlike every other company on the island.
|
| [1] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2021/07/05/
| 200...
| webmobdev wrote:
| > _One thing I heard is that the drought (worst one in 50
| years in Taiwan) has really affected them ..._
|
| This is the one aspect of manufactuing of chips that many are
| actually ignorant about - it needs huge amounts of pure
| water.
|
| This is the main reason why India doesn't yet have any fab,
| despite having the human resource for it and investors and
| government showing great interest to setup one.
|
| Two or three decades back Intel desired to setup a fab in
| India, but the deal fell through because it would mean India
| would have to divert a huge amount of water from agriculture
| and potable water for the population to such fabs. TSMC has
| approached the indian government many times (even this year)
| seeking permission to setup a fab in India. But the indian
| goverment has remained non-commital.
|
| The indian government believes it is in their long-term
| interest to wait for fab tech to evolve to use less water.
| Indian states already squabble over sharing water resources,
| and India has to feed a billion people, and such a diversion
| of resource doesn't make sense in the long-term.
|
| (Perhaps the James Bond movie was right - we'll all be
| fighting for fresh water in the coming decades. :)
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| What happens to the water the plants use? Is it polluted
| and unusable, or just tied up temporarily and can be
| released [safely] back into wherever it was diverted from?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Evaporation, goes to ground water table, stored in plant
| matter, goes back to river now enriched with fertilizers
| from fields. If there is fight over water the last one is
| likely quite small fraction.
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| Is the returned water safe though? That's what I wasn't
| sure about, do the fab plants pollute the water to the
| point it's unusable, or is it able to be re-used(drank).
| zargon wrote:
| They meant the water used in fabs, not agriculture.
| naruvimama wrote:
| This is a very false premise. Water is no reason to not
| have a fab, just like Japan builds semiconductor & nuclear
| plants in a seismically active zone. So does Israel in a
| dessert.
|
| India receives way more rain than it requires even in the
| drier parts, the problem with soil degradation and
| deforestation that came with unchecked "modern"
| agriculture.
|
| The productivity & economic benefits from a FAB and
| semiconductor ecosystem in India will far outweigh any
| negative, putting a plant close to a nuclear plant and a
| massive desalination plant to ensure both power, water as
| well as security will do the job.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > And while I wholeheartedly agree with the crypto/GPU issue,
| all in all, the GPU market is overall fairly tiny compared to
| TSMC's total output.
|
| From an economics perspective, it doesn't really matter. The
| price of a market-rate good is the marginal price of
| producing one more unit. As long as cryptocurrency is
| financially incentivizing people to consume 100% of the
| marginal production, prices will continue to go up.
|
| This also cascades down their lineup: Vendors who would like
| to use 7nm for their chip will instead choose 10nm, which
| will bump some of the customers who wanted to use 10nm back
| to the 12nm or 16nm nodes and so on.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| GPU's are market-rate goods?
| bluGill wrote:
| Crypto mining is a market rate good.
| nightski wrote:
| Nvidia already added in a hardware crypto mining block to
| it's latest models and they are still having massive
| supply issues. It's not about crypto even though everyone
| likes to make a big deal out of it to feel better.
| parineum wrote:
| They don't block all mining, just specific algorithms.
| It's easy enough to mine some other coin and convert to
| the one you want. In fact, that's often more profitable.
| samvher wrote:
| The latter does not follow from the former (even if it
| might be true). The mining block only affects the latest
| batches of a few models, but profitability of mining also
| affects demand for the other models, for AMD GPUs, and in
| the second-hand market. Unless the supply of mining-
| blocked GPUs is sufficient to cover all displaced demand
| from these other segments, it doesn't necessarily help
| much.
| mastax wrote:
| Yes. We've seen chipmaker MSRPs inflated, especially in
| the most recent releases like the 6600XT. Chipmakers are
| constrained by contractual obligations and PR though.
| AIBs have also inflated _their_ MSRPs for cards. They
| seem to have contractual agreements with the chipmakers
| to sell some portion of their cards at Chipmaker MSRP, at
| least around the launch. However, to their best ability
| they are putting their die allocation into their highest
| end card variants that have the highest MSRPs. Then
| distributors, retailers, and PC builders mark up the
| cards over the AIB MSRP. Again, these are often limited
| to some extent by agreements with their suppliers. If all
| of these markups don 't reach the market rate the cards
| are bought up by scalpers with bots and sold at the true
| market rate on eBay.
| cwizou wrote:
| I think you may be massively underestimating the lead times
| on those decisions. We're talking years.
|
| Also, you can't simply choose another node last minute,
| your design is intimately linked to the PDK of the node.
| Porting to another node is far from trivial.
| another_story wrote:
| Drought has been over for awhile now and it never really
| slowed chip production.
| BogdanPetre wrote:
| https://archive.ph/7bGOO article link
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| A recent Typhoon (one of the half dozen that hammered China)
| refilled all their reservoirs about a month or so ago.
|
| The one thing that complicates economics is that it's not a
| linear equation like they teach in Macroeconomics. The
| equations are more or less "true" in a vague sense but each
| term is actually a differential equation term in both time
| and other quantities.
|
| If you are familiar with simple one variable ODEs per STEM
| undergrad courses, imagine the 2nd order forms but now those
| exist across many variables and time spans. It makes you
| realize that CNBC is just pulling causes/effects and making
| predictions out of their asses.
| cwizou wrote:
| > A recent Typhoon (one of the half dozen that hammered
| China) refilled all their reservoirs about a month or so
| ago.
|
| Yes I should have phrased that better, sorry. The thing is,
| making one wafer of chips takes roughly 3 months, and
| everything else has even more terrible lead times. So
| there's a delay in the impact of events.
| [deleted]
| drcode wrote:
| Cryptocurrency miners are handing TSMCs boatloads of money that
| they are using to grow their R&D efforts. Cryptocurrency, in
| the long term, will be amazing for the advancement of GPU
| technology.
|
| (though we should still move crypto away from GPU mining for
| environmental and security reasons)
| beiller wrote:
| Are they also raising prices of CPUs? Arm chips? Your argument
| is based on an assertion that sounds like it could be right,
| but is it? Hasn't every country in the world been injecting
| cash stimulus into people's hands in an epic attempt to boost
| demand across all industries? Also why are miners the target
| here. Are there not deep learning, gamers, anything else who
| also want to use these monsterous compute units? (GPUs
| specifically). Raising the price is temporary because someday
| another chip maker can be born. Every day the lithography tech
| is getting cheaper and cheaper is just a matter of time till
| this resolves itself. And let me ask, are chips a human right
| like water and food? We're getting close but honestly life can
| go on without GPUs can't it?
| [deleted]
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Miners are the target of anger not (necessarily) because it's
| wasted energy,[a] but because them using GPUs creates a self
| serving cycle: Difficulty goes up, more GPUs are bought to
| counteract that, repeat. This isn't helped my the monetary
| reward for doing so.[b]
|
| Deep learning, gaming, etc. are different in that someone
| doing 2 way SLI doesn't make others need to do the same. If
| my online opponents are playing on RTX 3090s, I'm not forced
| to upgrade to play with them.
|
| [a]: The energy usage is a byproduct of the proof-of-work
| system
|
| [b]: hence why things like Folding@home, SETI@home, etc.
| never gained massive popularity like coins did; they don't
| reward you except in feel-good thoughts
| qeternity wrote:
| > using GPUs creates a self serving cycle: Difficulty goes
| up, more GPUs are bought to counteract that, repeat. This
| isn't helped my the monetary reward for doing so.
|
| Not quite. Price continues to go up, courtesy of Tether,
| which makes the mining rewards more valuable. This
| encourages new miners to join the network which pushes
| difficulty higher, until the difficulty level rises such
| that every unit of output costs more to produce than its
| worth. Then it's no longer profitable to mine.
|
| But again, Tether has no choice but to keep things pumping.
| Taek wrote:
| Cryptocurrency chips are less than 5% of TSMCs total
| production, it's not the major driving force in the shortage.
| makotech222 wrote:
| Yeah this is literally capitalism. Apply the same logic to
| housing:
|
| Its so sad that we are all paying the price for the
| commodification of housing; We have 10x homes for every single
| homeless person, and rent continues to skyrocket upward, all
| because we have a system where people are incentivized to buy
| houses so that they can rent them out for a profit. If only we
| decommodified housing, we could end homelessness and reduce
| cost of housing for everyone else.
| jonathanpeterwu wrote:
| I highly doubt the chip shortage a la increased chip demand
| from a company perspective has to do with gaming/mining GPU
| demand.
|
| Much of the supply demand can be traced to increased car chip
| demand (Toyota cutting production by 40%) as well as general
| device chip demand across many sectors.
| cle wrote:
| According to TSMC's chairman, the shortages are mainly due to:
|
| - Covid-19 effects on production
|
| - US-China trade war
|
| - Increased demand due to the pandemic
|
| - Increased 5G demand
|
| - Increased HPC demand
|
| https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/TSMC-he...
|
| https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2021/05/26/tsmcs-chair...
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| "Shortage" is a technical term to describe a situation where
| outside influence is preventing supply from meeting demand at
| the market clearing price. I do think crypto falls into this
| category, as well as numerous government policies (every tax
| creates a shortage).
| nivenkos wrote:
| I wish some governments would start shutting down the fiat
| exchanges.
| neb_b wrote:
| If they shut those down you can still purchase through
| decentralized exchanges. https://bisq.network/
| nivenkos wrote:
| Sure, but 99% of people will sell, and the price will
| crash.
| neb_b wrote:
| The people that need it won't sell. Bitcoin is most
| useful in countries already living under authoritarian
| rule with no access to traditional banking.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Almost none of bitcoins usage is by the people that need
| it.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| What makes you say this? Nigeria, a country with a
| currency that loses purchasing parity power every year,
| has the highest per capita usage of Bitcoin in the world.
|
| Sounds like the people that need it ARE using it...
| babypuncher wrote:
| Are you suggesting that most Bitcoin users live in
| Nigeria (or a place like it)?
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| No?
|
| I'm saying that Nigeria has per capita the largest
| Bitcoin using population on Earth compared to other
| countries, which is a counterpoint to the argument that
| people that need it (escaping local currency controls +
| inflation) are not using it. I am arguing that people
| that need it ARE using it.
| neb_b wrote:
| Do you have a source for that?
| p_j_w wrote:
| That is a point in favor of this particular policy idea,
| though, isn't it?
| neb_b wrote:
| How so?
| p_j_w wrote:
| If one of the biggest upsides to crypto is that it can be
| used as an end-run around authoritarian regimes, then a
| policy proposal that doesn't hurt this while curtailing
| some of the bigger downsides gets some points in its
| favor.
| anabis wrote:
| I am hoping that someone comes up with a semi-reusable proof-
| of-work system , like chess board positions, Mersenne primes,
| or protein folding. Kind of like Re-captcha.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| Honest question: is it possible to make a cryptocurrency that
| does not rely on some real-world scarce resource (e.g. chips,
| electricity, drive space)?
|
| This seems to be a cornerstone of what makes any crypto
| valuable in the first place (scarcity), and as long as that
| scarcity has real-world consequences, it seems like it would
| have the same result.
|
| Chia claimed to "Save the world from proof-of-work wastage",
| but it would just turn a GPU crunch into a HDD crunch.
| JackC wrote:
| Decentralized currencies rely on proof of economic waste.
|
| It's possible to imagine forms of economic waste that have
| different externalities, e.g. different environmental
| impacts.
|
| But we don't have evidence yet (that I know of?) that
| introducing one decentralized currency reduces waste in
| another one -- if you did introduce a new currency that
| wasted economic value in a new way, there's no evidence that
| crypto as a whole would waste less of the existing things, it
| would just start wasting that thing too.
|
| In this model crypto is like ... an emergent antipattern of
| networked civilization, where the network starts to waste
| every economic resource that it can "see" and provably waste.
| rjbwork wrote:
| >In this model crypto is like ... an emergent antipattern
| of networked civilization, where the network starts to
| waste every economic resource that it can "see" and
| provably waste.
|
| Exactly. As I've said to a number of people I've discussed
| crypto with, I'm happy to advocate for making PoW systems
| illegal. They'll happily gobble up a Dyson sphere of energy
| and a solar system of hardware in service of running a
| payment system with a tiny fraction of the throughput of
| any credit card company or bank.
|
| They are a complete waste of resources, energy, and human
| endeavor and society would be better off without them. I'll
| reserve judgement on PoS and other non-PoW systems until
| they're more widespread and I actually understand them
| better.
| xxs wrote:
| Isn't PoS just limiting the amount of work done based on
| the share of the total 'wealth'?
| Nullabillity wrote:
| > Decentralized currencies rely on proof of economic waste.
|
| See also: the gold standard.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The underlying problem is that you need to prevent sybil
| attacks, i.e. group X creates many peers in the network and
| so gets much more voting power than they "ought to" have.
|
| The only known way to do so is through attaching a real-world
| cost to ~votes. The way PoW does so is through equating votes
| and hashrate, so votes cost real money because hashrate
| requires real hardware. PoS works in mysterious ways, but the
| basic idea is that votes are equal to prior balance by
| essentially putting some of that balance "into escrow" in
| order to vote.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The real question is how do you create a pool of voters who
| is 'representative' of the users.
|
| One way is you could look to some historic list of people
| (like for example, everyone who had a US passport issued in
| 1992), and say they are the voters.
|
| An evil actor subverting more than half of those people
| would be very hard.
| dkersten wrote:
| > so votes cost real money
|
| So it doesn't actually fix the problem, it just means only
| the richest have any real power, just like the financial
| industries outside of crypto.
| malaya_zemlya wrote:
| that's what being rich means - being able to control a
| large share of resources.
| dkersten wrote:
| Sure, but a lot of the pro-cryptocurrency people say (or
| used to, at least) that cryptocurrencies will liberate us
| from the existing power structures. But it doesn't
| really, because the people with pre-existing power can
| just as easily buy their way into power over
| cryptocurrencies too.
| solveit wrote:
| You're still not printing over 21 million bitcoin though.
| And you're still not deanonymizing transactions (for
| properly designed privacy coins). I think monetary policy
| and privacy were the two main arguments for crypto in the
| early days before we started funding every startup with a
| half-baked "XXX on The Blockchain" idea.
| xxs wrote:
| the short version is: "NO", if there is no barrier to
| enter/mine/plot/whatever - then it'll be abused to no end.
| akircher wrote:
| "Work" doesn't have to be wasteful. It could be based on the
| number of pieces of litter that were collected, the number of
| meals to the homeless that were served. It's just easier to
| measure when work is something wasteful.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| Let's hope someone comes up with a coin staked on the
| removal of CO2 from the atmosphere!
| xxs wrote:
| how would you prove that it has happened?
| Hjfrf wrote:
| Atmospheric data, pay an average to each person in the
| country.
| nrp wrote:
| Kim Stanley Robinson proposes this in his recent novel,
| The Ministry for the Future. He mostly skips the details
| around how it would actually work though, beyond needing
| an enormous amount of human labor for verification. In
| real life, that would break the decentralization of it.
| FairlyInvolved wrote:
| It does if the reward is sufficiently large.
|
| If BTC mining relied on pieces of litter being collected
| you'd get people spending $millions on factories to produce
| litter and vehicles to distribute it just so more could be
| collected. That sounds crazy to type out, but it's no
| stranger than the situation we currently find ourselves in.
| The most advanced tools man has ever created are being used
| to create chips with no practical value, but that are good
| for converting energy into tokens through pointless
| calculations.
|
| I don't believe it is possible to create a proof of work
| system that is not a "proof of waste" once the reward is
| high.
|
| Spare CPU cycles felt like a waste, that becomes dedicated
| processing, that becomes dedicated hardware, that
| eventually became designing custom hardware.
| gbaygon wrote:
| It exists and it's called "proof of stake", see Cardano and
| ETH2 for example.
|
| The pros and cons are debatable but the technology is
| interesting. If you want to know more I recommend the
| Ouroboros whitepapers by IOHK.
| bitcurious wrote:
| >Chia claimed to "Save the world from proof-of-work wastage",
| but it would just turn a GPU crunch into a HDD crunch.
|
| Chia actually hasn't resulted in an HDD crunch. The economics
| of it are such that further investing in HDD storage isn't
| profitable, yet already Chia is the most decentralized and
| resilient crypto. I say resilient because price collapsed but
| allocated storage hasn't.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| This could be a possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
| Advanced civilizations almost become space faring, but at
| around the same time they discover cryptocurrencies and funnel
| all their planets resources into it, until they become stranded
| and die out.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > As long as GPUs are profitable for mining
|
| What crypto currencies are still profitable to mine with GPUs?
| Not bitcoin - mining btc went to ASICs long ago. Not Ether
| which is now POS.
| polux33 wrote:
| Ether is not POS yet.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > This is yet another way we're all forced to pay the price for
| cryptocurrency.
|
| Bitcoin has existed for more than a decade. This is yet another
| way we're all forced to pay the price for COVID-19.
|
| When everybody started working from home, companies whose
| employees had desktops had to buy them all laptops. People with
| old home computers bought newer ones once they started using
| them 14 hours a day instead of two. Demand went up.
|
| A bunch of car manufacturers thought the pandemic was going to
| crush demand for cars, so they canceled all their chip
| contracts. Then it didn't and they bid up the price of chips
| trying to source all the ones they canceled the contracts on.
|
| The primary cost of Bitcoin mining is the electricity, not the
| hardware. If there is more demand for hardware, the world can
| build more fabs. Assuming we're given some advance notice,
| which this year we haven't had because COVID-19.
|
| And the reason the electricity consumption is bad is that we
| don't have a carbon tax, so people are burning coal to mine
| Bitcoin, which is Very Bad. But it's also Very Bad that people
| are burning coal to power electric heaters or elevators or
| anything else, because the problem is burning coal.
|
| If people were mining Bitcoin by building wind turbines, nobody
| would care. It might even improve the world by increasing the
| economies of scale for renewable energy production.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Cryptomining incentivizes green energy investment
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Honestly the effect is probably not very large.
|
| People like come up with "Bitcoin uses more electricity
| than <small country>!" as a shock headline, but that's just
| statistical chicanery. A very small percentage multiplied
| by the whole world is a large absolute number. It's like
| saying "the global paper industry uses more electricity
| than all of Australia!" People think of Australia as being
| big, but as a percentage of the whole world, not that big.
|
| The primary advantage is that cryptocurrency mining is
| highly price sensitive, so if you have something like wind
| turbines that produce more at night even though there is
| more demand during the day, it can be profitable to only
| mine cryptocurrency at night. Which increases the revenue
| for the wind farm and makes it more profitable, which means
| we can have more wind farms and fewer coal power plants.
| But only by like a half a percent of the power grid,
| because that's how much is going into Bitcoin.
| f6v wrote:
| > Bitcoin has existed for more than a decade.
|
| But I haven't seen "buy bitcoin here" signs in the
| cities(that aren't tech hubs) until recently. Now people are
| randomly asking "what's the next big crypto?" trying to make
| quick money.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| People have been trying to make quick money since the
| invention of money.
|
| "The easiest way to make a small fortune is to start with a
| large one."
|
| It has nothing to do with Bitcoin energy consumption, which
| is only a real problem because we're not pricing carbon as
| we ought to be.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Is there any evidence for this claim?
| [deleted]
| officialchicken wrote:
| I love how crypto has become easy-to-blame, when in fact
| datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed to the brim with
| chips for ML workloads. It's important to recognize when
| consumers are being squeezed by multiple market forces.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The issue is that crypto mining is the only system designed
| to have negative marginal utility for each GPU consumed. It
| literally pays people to take energy and GPUs away from the
| open market for zero incremental gain to the network.
|
| The difference is that each additional iPhone or ML
| accelerator or cloud server CPU provides incrementally more
| utility. More ML accelerators means more ML processing.
|
| Proof-of-work mining is the only system designed to get less
| efficient with each additional unit of compute power. Add
| another GPU to the mining network and the network will
| automatically become less efficient. More GPUs doesn't mean
| more transactions, but the system pays people to essentially
| burn these GPUs.
|
| That's the complaint. Not that chips are being used, but that
| the marginal output of each additional GPU is _negative_.
| tippytippytango wrote:
| The network gets more efficient, but harder to attack. Each
| incremental spend on a miner incrementally increases the
| network security.
| officialchicken wrote:
| I have capital I want to deploy. Zero/Negative interest
| rates are a reality. Traditional broker managed investments
| are a hot zone for fees. Newer tools for access to markets
| is covered by reddit day traders; real estate is also
| highly competitive due to airbnb businesses and other
| forces.
|
| Capital will always find the easiest path, and right now
| that's crypto and no one on HN is complaining about micro-
| VC activity.
| Taek wrote:
| The amount of value extracted by the person mining reduces
| as more compute power starts mining, but that's actually a
| negative feedback loop that will reduce the total spending
| on chips for crypto mining.
|
| The amount of security provided to the network is constant
| in the number of GPUs. As you add more GPUs, the network
| gets harder to attack. Does the network need as much
| security as it's paying for? Nobody is really sure, it's an
| open debate in the crypto industry.
| FairlyInvolved wrote:
| I really don't see how the current hashrate is required
| to prevent a 51% attack, that seems way beyond what is
| necessary.
|
| These Proof of Waste systems aren't really a negative
| feedback loop, ultimately asset prices determine mining
| yield. Capacity will keep being added to the network
| until the difficulty rises such that you are required to
| destroy $99.99 of resources for $100 of crypto. Until
| that point it's worth buying more hardware and energy as
| you get a positive expected return.
| dkersten wrote:
| > more ML processing
|
| I would argue that most ML processing by most "big data"
| companies also has marginal negative output for each
| additional GPU. Certainly anything to do with social media
| or adtech and a lot of analytics in general is a net
| negative for the world, while consuming electricity and
| processing hardware.
| EpicEng wrote:
| Even those things you have decided provide marginal value
| employ people, and you never know where innovation will
| come from. Crypto is comparable to a ponzi scheme and is
| an asset with almost no real value, trading only on the
| greater fool theory.
| thehappypm wrote:
| If you are this reductionist you can argue all
| electricity consumption is net negative.
| yholio wrote:
| They are not being reductionist. Each additional hashing
| unit cancels out at the next difficulty adjustment,
| having a net effect of zero on the overall working of the
| network.
|
| Yes, the hash rate of the network increases, thus the
| difficulty for an attacker to perform a double spend.
| But, arguably, that's an already insane level of
| resources, many orders of magnitude higher than what a
| bitcoin-like payment system would reasonably require.
|
| So even if you consider the network socially useful,
| pouring thousands of times more hashing power that the
| network actually requires to perform its task securely is
| still a waste of resources.
| mountainb wrote:
| Right, the ML processing is competitive in nature, just
| like the crypto mining is. Much of it also rests on
| illegal activity that just hasn't been discovered yet,
| whether overtly illegal (like botnets sloshing around ad
| money under fraudulent pretenses) or just mild to
| moderately illegal, like prima facie unauthorized
| database usage or use of scraped data. There are also
| uses of data that are illegal if it comes from US
| citizens and ?? if they are non-US citizens. Just because
| the government is collectively a fat slug when it comes
| to law enforcement in these areas doesn't mean the laws
| aren't on the books.
| skohan wrote:
| You can't seriously be conflating all the money
| laundering and ransomware attacks enabled by crypto with
| a tiny bit of crime which happens at the margins of ML
| (like it might in any industry) can you?
| skohan wrote:
| That's a value judgement, which is different than the
| case with POW which _structurally_ devalues the output of
| each additional GPU.
| Taek wrote:
| It structurally pays less per GPU as you add more GPUs,
| because the security budget is a zero-sum budget.
| (though, that's only if you ignore extrinsic effects, and
| some people argue that more security = higher coin price
| = higher security budget).
|
| Even if the security budget is zero-sum, the amount of
| actual security added to the network with each additional
| GPU is constant.
| skohan wrote:
| It seems like your argument is that cryptocurrency needs
| to use over half of the computing power on earth at any
| given time to consider it secure. That's a very bad
| standard. Visa and MasterCard don't need this much
| computing power for security.
|
| Security is an easy argument to reach for when you want
| to justify something stupid.
| starfallg wrote:
| >The issue is that crypto mining is the only system
| designed to have negative marginal utility for each GPU
| consumed. It literally pays people to take energy and GPUs
| away from the open market for zero incremental gain to the
| network.
|
| That's because the utility is not in processing
| transactions but the 'security' of the blockchain, which is
| funny considering the most of these blockchains are still
| looking for a use case that justifies their market cap and
| yet still run into performance limitations processing
| transactions.
| Taek wrote:
| It's mostly not ML either. There were production hiccups do
| to covid, increased consumer demand for chips due to covid,
| increased demand of mobile chips because the mobile industry
| is still massively growing, among other issues.
|
| Crypto and ML are each rather small aspects of the issue at
| hand.
| zpeti wrote:
| Not just ML, with everything moving to cloud services, while
| consumers still use phones plus laptops, the number of chips
| used per person more and more.
| HanaShiratori wrote:
| I'm not an advocate for cloud services by all means, but
| aren't they generally much more efficient in using their
| resources than traditional on premise solutions due to the
| sharing of the underlying infrastructure?
| Leader2light wrote:
| It's being blamed because cryptocurrency is pointless trash.
|
| How can governments print money with a entire new currency in
| existence outside their control. They can't, the system would
| collapse upon which we all depend.
|
| Thankfully cryptocurrency simply does not function as a
| currency and is a tool to get rich in normal currency.
| qeternity wrote:
| Datacenters are not deploying consumer GPUs.
| skohan wrote:
| It's still mediated by the same bottlenecks right? NVidia
| would be able to produce more consumer GPU's if they
| weren't competing for capacity at TSMC and Samsung
| positr0n wrote:
| But datacenter CPU/GPUs take the same wafers, machines, and
| factory time slots as consumer GPUs. Which that is the
| price increase this article is about.
| qeternity wrote:
| Ok - I wasn't replying to the article - I was replying to
| a comment about crypto-induced price increases of
| consumer gear being blamed on datacenters, which just
| isn't true. It's not that OEM prices are going up, it's
| that retail prices are. Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU
| which is immediately resold on the retail market at 100%
| markup.
|
| This is driven by crypto, not DL.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > Nvidia might sell a consumer GPU which is immediately
| resold on the retail market at 100% markup.
|
| The same might be said of event ticket resellers making a
| big markup.
|
| But the reality is that, in the case of event tickets at
| least, it's very common for the original sellers and the
| resellers either to be secretly the same party, or at
| least have some kind of profit sharing agreement.
|
| It's simply that the original seller doesn't want to be
| seen to be price gouging, so doesn't want to put the list
| price of an item up, but still wants to gain. That's
| frequently done by it being very expensive to become an
| 'approved seller' or similar.
| qeternity wrote:
| Agreed. I actually don't have a problem with ticket
| resellers for the very reason that if there is an active
| resale market the tickets were too cheap to begin with
| (or more likely, as you note, were never really available
| at those prices anyway as the promoters are selling at 2x
| face through the back door).
|
| If someone is willing to pay 2x MSRP for a GPU then the
| MSRP is wrong (or rather, it's just a "suggestion" as the
| S indicates). My only point is that up until recently,
| there was not a long-term secondary market for GPUs. That
| is a new phenomenon that has been driven by crypto (as
| opposed to a big reduction in supply or huge increase in
| PC gamers).
| baybal2 wrote:
| > when in fact datacenter after datacenter is being stuffed
| to the brim with chips for ML workloads.
|
| I don't see this at all. All these GPUs for non gaming use
| are a tiny drop in the ocean in comparison to the mainstream
| market.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| Don't forget the main advantage of mining over buying coin is
| to avoid all fiat associated regulations. So it's not just
| about slightly cheaper tokens, it's really about distributing
| the cost of tax evasion and money laundering.
| Haga wrote:
| We do not talk about the offerings to the paperclip optimizer
| aka the crypto cracker aka rokos basilisk in this house in this
| way young man.
| dcow wrote:
| Is it tragedy of the commons, then? Once things settle, won't
| people learn that adding 1 additional GPU only increases my
| cost by 1 and doesn't increase my reward? Can't we design a
| system where the number of transactions processed scales with
| the compute power of the system rather than striving to always
| keeping block time constant?
| Tenoke wrote:
| BTC GPU mining hasn't been profitable for years. ETH GPU mining
| (the main one) has gotten way less profitable recently and is
| scheduled to not be a thing in 6 months to a year. The GPU
| demand for mining has already lessened in the last months and
| you can see decreased 2nd hand prices..
|
| Every comment that blames BTC for chip shortages is likely
| largely incorrect and looking in the wrong place.
| Hjfrf wrote:
| What do you think ASICs are made of?
| serg_chernata wrote:
| But is TSMC producing these ASIC chips?
| Hjfrf wrote:
| Yes, but more generally they use the same raw materials.
| Tenoke wrote:
| TSMC has Bitmain as a low-priority client, and the first
| one to be cut when demand is high like earlier this
| year[0]. Bitmain itself is having even bigger reduction in
| orders to TSMC currently[1] so again, that's the wrong
| place to look for increased chip demand.
|
| At any rate, I was mostly responding to claims about 'GPUs
| are profitable for mining' in the parent.
|
| 0. https://www.chinamoneynetwork.com/2021/03/05/tsmc-
| reportedly...
|
| 1. https://techtaiwan.com/20210628/bitcoin-mining-rig-
| bitmain-t...
| [deleted]
| ayngg wrote:
| The state of cryptocurrencies is nothing more than a visible
| symptom of larger systemic issues that have clearly gotten out
| of control. It would be much more beneficial to try and
| understand why the market has decided to consider it valuable
| in spite of everything you have said rather than just blame and
| dismiss it based on its impact. We aren't paying the price for
| cryptocurrency, we are paying the price for policy that has
| made cryptocurrency attractive.
| polux33 wrote:
| What ?
|
| Those GPUs are being useful for securing a network hosting
| close to $100B of stablecoins.
| https://stablecoinindex.com/marketcap
|
| Not talking about other more volatile crypto as you'd be
| tempted to assert their values should be 0 in a perfect world.
|
| You can argue all day that's wasting energy, the crypto-
| ecosystem, chip manufacturers, miners, energy providers, users,
| developers, traders, bankers and companies driving billion of
| dollars of revenue (Aka value for human beings who will produce
| and consume goods in the real World with this revenue ) out of
| it are proving that you're missing the bigger picture.
|
| I've never understood HN's concerns with crypto. Following the
| same logic, people are literally burning petrol in their cars
| while it could be used for <insert supposedly better use case>
|
| Is it for ecological reasons ? You're still moving 2 tons of
| metal everywhere you go, and eating meat.
|
| Cryptos are not less moral or valuable than plenty of things
| you do or cherish. Let people mine crypto, eat meat at Wendy's
| driving their F150, because the world is not black and white.
| zabatuvajdka wrote:
| Well Bitcoin will die anyway because Ethereum actually does
| something useful and they're onto Proof of stake.
|
| Honestly folks should pull their money out and invest in
| something tangible like starting a business that ACTUALLY
| CREATES VALUE.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| GPUs are not used to mine Bitcoin, they are used to mine
| Ethereum. Bitcoin is mined by different chips, also made by
| TSMC, but in far smaller quantities.
| cletus wrote:
| I agree with this but it's even worse than that.
|
| Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I
| believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of
| Argentina.
|
| Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is
| renewable. This conjures the image of someone with a bunch of
| solar panels but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power
| because that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap
| hydro power, the miners can use so much power they end up
| making power more expensive for everyone.
|
| I'd be more OK with this if crypto in fact solved a problem for
| most people. We should start by stopping calling them
| "currencies". They're not. They're assets. They lack all the
| useful properties of a currency (eg being massively
| deflationary)
|
| The only thing cryptos really do is allow a temporary medium of
| exchange for traditional currencies. Some uses of this are
| entirely legitimate (eg escaping capital controls in certain
| currencies). Some are not (ie all the illegal usages).
|
| I really wonder what happens to Bitcoin (or any PoW coin) when
| it no longer becomes economical to mine new coins. Does all the
| computing power just move on to the next coin? If so, won't
| this make the network vulnerable to attack? What is the
| incentive for people to contribute computing power without the
| prospect of economical new coins?
| jeffe wrote:
| Let's not commit the fallacy of comparing unrelated big
| numbers. How does the energy and time per usd transferred
| compare between btc and the traditional banking system?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I did a quick calculation. If you assume all of the U.S.
| energy consumption goes into stocks and forex trading (the
| only numbers that were easy to google quickly), dollar
| trades are about the same dollars traded per kWh as
| bitcoin, maybe a tad worse.
|
| In actuality, there are more dollar transactions that
| doesn't include, so the numerator is bigger. It also uses
| much much less than the total U.S. energy consumption, so
| the denominator is much much smaller.
|
| A bigger numerator and much much smaller denominator tells
| me that bitcoin is much much less efficient than
| traditional systems in dollars traded per kWh.
| skohan wrote:
| It's much, much less efficient if you measure the utility
| of the banking system vs. the utility of cryptocurrency.
| jeffe wrote:
| Okay, so if we're using energy consumption per unit
| 'utility' as a metric, how much energy _should_ bitcoin
| consume to be in line with its utility?
| skohan wrote:
| Off the top of my head, I could see it as reasonable to
| pay a 5-10% cost in energy efficiency comparing with
| traditional transaction systems to enable a truly
| decentralized model. Bitcoin is nowhere near that in
| terms of cost/transaction.
| imtringued wrote:
| I was going to do a very fancy calculation but 136 TWh
| would be perfectly ok if Bitcoin did at at least 5k
| transactions per second with a transaction fee of $0.10.
| kragen wrote:
| No, https://cbeci.org/ says Bitcoin uses 0.00176 TW, not 1TW.
| You can take a deep breath of relief! The real energy use of
| Bitcoin is only 2% of what you thought it was!
|
| So, if you thought Bitcoin energy usage was a pretty bad
| problem but not world-endingly dire, you should now think
| it's insignificant. If that isn't what you think, it probably
| means that your opinions are not based on careful cost-
| benefit analysis, just partisanship, and should therefore be
| disregarded.
| unlikelymordant wrote:
| Energy consumption is measured in terawatt hours, not TW,
| and page you linked to says annualised consumption is 90TWh
| , which is on par with the netherlands annual consumption.
| This is hardly partisanship, its an enormous amout of
| power.
| zsmi wrote:
| > Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I
| believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of
| Argentina.
|
| Looks like Argentina generates 131TWh annually as of 2016.
| The US was estimated to generate 4K TWh (a.k.a. 4PWh) in
| 2020.
|
| "Argentina generates 131,910,280 MWh of electricity as of
| 2016 (covering 109% of its annual consumption needs)."
|
| https://www.worldometers.info/electricity/argentina-
| electric...
|
| Bitcoin energy usage is estimated at 100TWh annual, but the
| upper bound estimate is nearly 350TWh so it could be more
| than Argentina.
|
| https://cbeci.org
| baxuz wrote:
| I'm gonna voice a rather unpopular opinion.
|
| The only thing crypto is good for:
|
| - earning money by spinning up GPU fans
|
| - playing the crypto stock market
|
| - money laundering
|
| - buying weapons
|
| - buying drugs
|
| - buying humans
|
| I'm glad that the EU is at least trying to put an end to
| this: https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/07/21/eu-will-make-
| bitcoi...
| grkvlt wrote:
| > Some uses of this are entirely legitimate (eg escaping
| capital controls in certain currencies). Some are not (ie all
| the illegal usages).
|
| but wouldn't evading capital controls for a countries
| currency be illegal, too?
| nootropicat wrote:
| Mining is definitely renewable UNfriendly. Hardware is too
| expensive to turn it down at night, or when winds are weak.
| It's 24/7 constant demand, the worst possible for solar/wind.
|
| It's indeed location independent, but that's more compatible
| with previously uneconomical fossil fuels (eg. methane in
| locations where transferring it out isn't economical).
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Actually Bitcoin and a lot of other coins have a coin limit
| (to prevent hyperinflation) and once the limit is set than
| the miners would make money on the transaction fee.
| imtringued wrote:
| You can have hyperinflation in a currency with limited
| supply. Lots of cryptocurrencies went to zero.
| reviews-chat wrote:
| agreed
| tromp wrote:
| Even a pure linear emission of 1 coin per second forever is
| disinflationary. A supply limit only serves to create FOMO.
| [deleted]
| ConcernedCoder wrote:
| > I'd be more OK with this if crypto in fact solved a problem
| for most people.
|
| see: https://foldingathome.org/
| Kye wrote:
| What does this have to do with
| cryptocurrencies/cryptoassets? It's almost a decade older
| than Bitcoin. The inspiration (SETI@Home) is even older.
| Snitch-Thursday wrote:
| I think parent is advocating doing folding@home over
| stuff like PoW crypto since the former advances science
| and the latter (handwaves vaguely) doesn't.
| nneonneo wrote:
| Unless someone manages to turn out a hash collision or an
| all-zeros hash (spoiler: they won't), there is absolutely
| no scientific value in the PoW process itself. (Whether
| the resulting cryptocurrency has scientific value is left
| as an exercise to the reader).
| [deleted]
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| These "assets" are usually just participation trophies in
| decentralized Ponzi schemes. Bitcoin is propped up by the
| ongoing tether scandal that is now larger than Bernie Madoff
| ever was.
| epylar wrote:
| What estimate puts it at 1TW? I'm seeing an estimate of
| 148.77 TWh per year, which is about 17GW.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > entirely legitimate (eg escaping capital controls in
| certain currencies). Some are not (ie all the illegal
| usages).
|
| NB: You just listed only illegal usages and split them into
| two categories.
| Salgat wrote:
| People need to remember that using up the available renewable
| energy on crypto just means there's less available for other
| consumers to use. The idea is to reduce electrical demand
| which makes it easier to shift towards 100% renewable. Adding
| all that electrical demand just keeps around non-renewable
| energy longer since few countries are able to go 100%
| renewable on their current demand.
| louloulou wrote:
| I doesn't, at all. Energy production and energy
| distribution are entirely different things. There is enough
| unused (i.e. wasted) hydro power in Quebec to power the
| entire Bitcoin network. If energy is produced too far from
| where it is demanded such that transmission is
| prohibitively expensive, there is no downside to having
| highly mobile miners to make use of it. In fact the extra
| revenue generated can be used to subsidise the rest of the
| grid.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > but the reality is that it's primarily hydro power because
| that's the cheapest. Thing is, in regions with cheap hydro
| power, the miners can use so much power they end up making
| power more expensive for everyone.
|
| Err that depends.
|
| The thing with dams is that the water can never rise above a
| certain level, else the structural stability of the dam is
| compromised. So often they have to run the dam with turbines
| disconnected to lower the water level since there's nobody on
| the receiving end.
|
| That's also why some blocks of hydro power are very cheap
| (and time sensitive).
| yarky wrote:
| > in regions with cheap hydro power, the miners can use so
| much power they end up making power more expensive for
| everyone.
|
| Not if there are laws to keep electricity price within a
| range. In places like Canada electricity is not necessarily
| traded in public for-profit markets, and must by law stay
| below inflation. I agree that in can be a problem in (most
| of?) the US.
|
| > I really wonder what happens to Bitcoin (or any PoW coin)
| when it no longer becomes economical to mine new coins.
|
| That might be the equilibrium price, the
| electricity/production cost. Isn't the pow algorithm smart
| enough to keep rewarding at least above electricity cost?
| yholio wrote:
| If you force the energy price to a certain subsidized
| level, then bitcoin farms will buy it all, masquerading as
| homes and small businesses, until you will be forced to
| shut down some large industrial consumers, putting real
| people out of work and making everyone poorer.
|
| There is simply no way to waste valuable energy that's
| somehow imune to social and ecological effects.
| opportune wrote:
| Ironically your "legitimate" example of escaping capital
| controls is illegal, which also makes it illegitimate
| according to your criteria.
| jdprgm wrote:
| > I really wonder what happens to Bitcoin (or any PoW coin)
| when it no longer becomes economical to mine new coins. Does
| all the computing power just move on to the next coin?
|
| We will find out exactly this relatively soon when Ethereum
| moves to Eth2 and Proof of Stake.
| nanidin wrote:
| > Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I
| believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of
| Argentina.
|
| I'm not sure this factoid is germane to GPU shortages, since
| no one is using GPU's to mine bitcoin these days.
|
| It would be more relevant to cite the energy usage of
| Ethereum or Dogecoin.
| tromp wrote:
| Transaction fees will always make it economical to mine. They
| currently make up a small fraction of the block reward, but
| within a decade or two (5 block subsidy halvings), we can
| expect them to dominate. Btw, not all cryptocurrencies are
| deflationary [1].
|
| [1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-
| total-su...
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| That's only true if people are actually willing to pay that
| much in fees though. If the amount from fees doesn't keep
| up then eventually some miners will have to stop mining.
| menzoic wrote:
| A good example of non deflationary cryptocurrency is
| ethereum
| yholio wrote:
| That's certainly not a good example. The price has grown
| much faster than inflation in the western world, while
| the issuance of new currency has trended down, not only
| as a percentage of total money supply, but in nominal
| terms: https://www.wisdomtree.com/-/media/us-media-
| files/blog/blog-...
|
| While in theory the community can elect to inflate the
| money supply, in practice the people who get to vote on
| the issue are holders of currency, who have strong
| incentives to restrict the supply and deflate the
| currency. If an inflationary EIP is proposed, these
| people will simply ignore it and stick to the
| deflationary chain.
| wuliwong wrote:
| There is always confusion when discussing deflation and
| inflation because there are multiple definitions. There
| is a inflation/deflation which refers to the size of
| supply and then price inflation which refers to the cost
| in some other fiat currency. The former is simple and
| clear, the latter depends on other variables.
| yholio wrote:
| Ethereum is deflationary by both definitions, the market
| value increases while the rate of disbursement decreases
| with time.
| tromp wrote:
| Regarding supply behaviour, you're confusing deflationary
| with disinflationary (yearly inflation rate going down
| toward 0).
| brianwawok wrote:
| It won't if people realize that BTC is not a useful
| product, and the price falls to $1k or $100. At that point
| no one except someone stealing electricity can afford to
| mine, so the entire monetary system collapses and becomes
| worth the same as US Civil War dollars (can maybe buy a
| loaf of bread with a wheelbarrow full?)
| snapcaster wrote:
| Given that bitcoin has been around for 2008, at what
| point will you personally concede that it's not likely to
| happen? Why would it happen now if it didn't in the first
| 13 years?
| bluecalm wrote:
| Madoff's scam lasted for 17 years and only collapsed
| because of sharp economic downturn. It could have lasted
| for much longer if people suddenly didn't need the cash.
|
| Bitcoin is often described as distributed Ponzi. There is
| little value (skipping over regulations is about the only
| thing it's useful for) and a lot artificial pumping. It
| will collapse when people need money for something else
| so either economic downturn (exactly the thing crypto
| believers think they are hedging against) or when it
| slowly goes out of fashion (probably either due to
| regulation catching up or something much better coming
| about). Till then the show goes on. Even if there is just
| 10% of real dollars behind those valuations it will not
| matter until there is a bit of a run to cash out.
| caoilte wrote:
| Yup. And, "It will happen slowly at first. Then all at
| once."
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| The reality is everything is a Ponzi. Equities. Real
| Estate. Economies.
|
| The thing that Bitcoiners have realized, that I think you
| may not have quite understood yet, is that there is no
| 'cash run out'. Brrrrr...
|
| Cash is infinite. Bitcoin is not. That is part of its
| fundamental value proposition.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Stocks are not Ponzi wtf? Even today you can get
| something like Apple making 3% per year while also having
| big chance of making more in the future. It has nothing
| to do with a Ponzi scheme at all while artificially
| propped up producing absolutely nothing crypto currencies
| have a lot of similarities.
|
| The argument that scarcity is a fundamental value
| proposition for an asset is just nonsense. I can make my
| own crypto even more limited than BTC overnight and it
| will worth about 0. It's not scarcity that makes stuff
| valuable. In case of BTC 3 things make it valuable:
| adoption, ability to make transaction while skipping over
| regulations (which requires adoption) and artificial
| propping by scams like Tether.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Stocks are a ponzi by definition. All growth in stock
| prices are dependent on extracting money from future
| investors. It gets a little more complex with corporate
| stock buybacks, but ignoring this, the price of a stock
| _tracks_ a companies success, but is ultimately a product
| of the market buy /sells. Without injection of funds by
| the corporation, its a Ponzi like anything else. Even
| more so for stock that does not issue dividends. Same
| goes for housing, or anything else with scarcity. Wall
| street has done a great disservice making you believe the
| price of a stock accurately reflects the value added by
| the corporation.
|
| I agree that adoption (network effect, Metcalfs Law),
| censorship resistance and other economic constructs like
| stablecoins all have an influence in value. Folks have
| been saying "I can make my own, scarcity is bunk" for a
| long time now. 10,000 other clones of bitcoin exist today
| that are worth nothin'. Maybe there is something about
| big b Bitcoin and the cryptoeconomic model that Satoshi
| chose.
| evandijk70 wrote:
| The idea of a stock is that it is worth the present value
| of all future dividends. Stocks that do not issue
| dividends and are expected never to issue dividends are
| indeed a Ponzi. I think those are by far the minority of
| stocks.
| bluecalm wrote:
| The idea that stocks that never issue dividends are
| somehow only valuable because other people think they are
| valuable (let alone calling it a Ponzi) is completely
| misguided. I mean if a company builds a pile of cash and
| never distributes it to shareholders it's still very
| valuable to have a say about how that pile of cash should
| be spent. If a company ammased a billion of cash there
| will be many takers to buy it for less than a billion
| just so they can direct that billion somewhere.
|
| Of course there is also an option of closing shop and
| dividing the assets to shareholders or myriad other ways
| of making the assets valuable without paying dividends.
|
| Those kinds of basic misconceptions about financial
| markets is what crypto evangelist prey on. It sounds
| pretty convincing to the ignorant but is just nonsense
| under scrutiny.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Man, companies make money or have good prospects of
| making money in the future. You own part of the profits.
| If the company pays dividends doesn't matter at all. It's
| econ 101 or not even that.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Real estate does something. If everything else goes to
| crap, I have a place to build my home. My home has a
| pretty high base value. If full banking collapse and we
| go back to trading, I would trade my house for a LOT of
| apples.
|
| What does BTC do for me? It's a number on a screen. Much
| like a NFT.. it has no actual value on it's own. In a
| zombie apoc, no one is trading you food for BTC.
| skohan wrote:
| I think it's a bit disingenuous to use 2008 as the point
| of reference. Bitcoin didn't really reach the point of
| public consciousness before the 2017 boom (which was
| largely attributable to price manipulation. Prior to that
| the main use-case was buying drugs online, and prior to
| that it was a niche hobby for libertarian futurists.
|
| Given the increasing prevalence of ransomeware attacks,
| and the fact that they have touched higher and higher
| profile targets, it's not impossible to imagine the
| regulatory hammer coming down on cryptocurrency at some
| point in the near-ish future.
| brianwawok wrote:
| It's going to be a flash and a poof though. I don't think
| it's going to go down 10% a year for 10 years or
| something. I do think it may drop 50-70% in one day/week,
| which makes miners shut down, which causes a full
| collapse.
| quantumBerry wrote:
| The problem crypto solves is you can memorize a seed phrase
| and the government has nothing to seize, no bank account to
| freeze, no physical object to take. It's value that resides
| completely in your mind, but is recognized by others willing
| to pay a market rate for it.
|
| You're joking yourself if you think government seizures are
| just; in the US asset forfeiture does not require even a
| criminal conviction. This is a problem for all people. Crypto
| solves a problem for all people.
| adamc wrote:
| https://qz.com/2023032/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-use/
|
| Thanks for making me look at this. We should ban
| cryptocurrencies.
| dcow wrote:
| Not all crypto is proof of work based. People have and are
| inventing better systems that reduce energy costs and
| provide more utility. "crypto" does not deserve a
| unilateral ban.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| What you are proposing is an authoritarian regime that can
| control what software is permitted to be run.
|
| This is madness, and will doom humanity. There is a reason
| that free speech is such a critical component of free
| societies.
| monocasa wrote:
| We already live in a world where the government controls
| what software can run, and have been for at least 20
| years.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Yes, in authoritarian regimes. Which is something we need
| to resist in the free world.
|
| Can you give an example of software (not data...) that is
| illegal to run in the US?
| monocasa wrote:
| Tools for circumvention of copyright.
|
| > (2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the
| public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology,
| product, service, device, component, or part thereof,
| that--
|
| > (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose
| of circumventing a technological measure that effectively
| controls access to a work protected under this title;
|
| > (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose
| or use other than to circumvent a technological measure
| that effectively controls access to a work protected
| under this title; or
|
| > (C) is marketed by that person or another acting in
| concert with that person with that person's knowledge for
| use in circumventing a technological measure that
| effectively controls access to a work protected under
| this title.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| I think you can make a valid argument against me with
| this. DCMA is a hell of a law.
|
| To my defense, I would argue that this speaks to
| production and sale of circumvention tools, and does not
| actually criminalize the execution of this code. But I
| weaken my original position about outlawing software.
| Thank you.
| yoavm wrote:
| You don't have to control what software is permitted to
| run: you can just ban changing USD to Bitcoin and vice
| versa. Stop the exchanges. Most people aren't mining
| their own coins anyway.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| You can ban a lot of things in life. Theft. Drugs. Crime
| in general.
|
| You may not understand how the OTC market works in
| jurisdictions like China that do indeed ban
| cryptocurrency exchanges and prevent
| fiat<->cryptocurrency exchanges. A fist full of RMB can
| be swapped for USDT, which can be swapped for BTC from
| OTC brokers.
|
| What you are proposing can only be stopped by breaking
| computers, breaking arms/legs and breaking economies.
| Violence is never the solution to problems.
| yoavm wrote:
| I never suggested that it will completely erase
| cryptocurrencies. I do think that it will help making it
| less popular, which would be great. I sure think that
| while making theft illegal didn't stop it, it reduced the
| number of theft cases.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| I agree that the externalities are still overwhelmingly
| negative, but one part you're missing is that
| cryptocurrencies act as a global reserve asset. Crypto is
| still tiny compared to other financial markets, but the
| existence of cryptocurrencies has probably reduced the
| volatility of other assets somewhat.
|
| In the future, this effect will likely be more pronounced.
| It's an asset class that has some degree of independence from
| other asset classes, so it decreases the overall risk of the
| financial system.
| imtringued wrote:
| The only good quality of Bitcoin is that it is completely
| decoupled from the economy. A bursting Bitcoin bubble
| doesn't take the rest of the economy with it. However, that
| only holds if countries don't use it as legal tender.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| This isn't true. There are Bitcoin collateralized loans
| already, and there are Bitcoin backed ETFs. Companies
| have issued bonds underwritten with valuations that
| include BTC in the company treasure.
|
| Bitcoin is small compared to the rest of the economy, and
| it's less integrated than many other asset classes, but
| it is very much coupled to other financial markets.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Pandora's box has been opened. There will always be another
| coin to pump and dump and thus there will always be another
| coin to mine.
| skohan wrote:
| Don't you think it could be aggressively regulated against?
| I doubt it could be completely stopped, but demand could be
| sharply reduced if using and mining cryptocurrency carried
| sharp legal penalties.
| quantumBerry wrote:
| It could, but governments have a hard enough time sharply
| reducing drug use, and that has something tangible to
| search for and find. Trying to find some bits in the
| ether or even worse guess whether someone is memorizing a
| seed phrase is nigh impossible to prove or extinguish.
|
| Mining will be carried out wherever someone could get
| away with it, which is basically any western country
| where it is legal and any 3rd world country with internet
| access and power. It would be like trying to stomp out
| coronavirus in the entire world -- when you apply the
| "vaccine" somewhere, the reservoir just lives somewhere
| else.
|
| The issue is while the legal demand will drop, the
| illegal demand will remain, which is the only one you're
| trying to stomp out. As a deflationary currency much
| value will be lost, but it will retain pricely enough
| market cap to sustain the black market.
| spdionis wrote:
| I'd assume some of these massive energy-hungry mining
| facilities would be fairly hard to hide.
| Ekaros wrote:
| The renewable argument never made any sense to me.
| Electricity is mostly fungible if crypto wasn't using it
| something else would or it would be used instead fossil or it
| wouldn't be produced in first place. Every single one of
| those options much better than spending it on fairly useless
| speculative bubble asset...
| bingohbangoh wrote:
| What about the environmental practices of banking?
|
| What about the cost of building all those buildings?
|
| What about the cost of AC?
|
| What about the cost of mining all those precious materials?
| unsui wrote:
| the whataboutism is strong with this one...
| mrRandomGuy wrote:
| The Bitcoin gang doesn't like it when people point out
| that the entire thing is fucking useless.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| I'm sorry you don't find it useful. I do find it useful,
| in fact millions more like me do. Usefulness is a
| subjective measurement.
|
| If you think we are crazy, that's OK. Bitcoin is opt-in.
| You can choose to ignore it, you can think its fucking
| useless, but in my opinion, you are wrong.
| quantumBerry wrote:
| If this person had 1 BTC, I suddenly think they would not
| find it so useless. I think they would find a use for it
| rather quickly.
| bodyfour wrote:
| That's great news... so how do I opt-out of the CO2 that
| BTC is generating?
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| How do I opt-out of the CO2 exhaled by the 7 billion
| other humans on the planet, or the CO2 from Facebook or
| TikTok data centers (as IMHO both are very harmful for
| the planet)?
|
| Same way?
| bigfudge wrote:
| Whatahoutism doesn't make Bitcoin useful.
| bodyfour wrote:
| What a non sequitur.
|
| The claim being put forth is that crypto's environmental
| cost FAR outweighs its utility.
|
| Your counterargument is that such concerns are unraisable
| simply because one can avoid personally using BTC. Or to
| put another way "if WE destroy the environment it's none
| of YOUR business"
|
| And that is wrong -- the atmosphere is shared by all.
| Changes to its composition are everybody's shared
| concern.
|
| If you want to argue that some other business's activity
| are too damaging to the environment to be allowed to
| continue... fine, make those arguments. But don't bat
| away concerns about crypto's absurd environmental cost as
| "none of your darn business"
| bigfudge wrote:
| What problem is it solving for people? Especially people
| who are going to disproportionately suffer the impact of
| climate change (ie poor people)?
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| * Escaping inflationary fiat currencies * Avoiding
| capital controls * Avoiding financial censorship * Not
| growing poor slowly
| supertrope wrote:
| Bitcoin is a force multiplier for ransomware.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Unpatched vulnerabilities, Network Access Brokers and
| Ransomware as a Service are all force multipliers too.
|
| "Money is a force multiplier for crime".
| plekter wrote:
| Are the consequences of the massive energy usage also
| opt-in?
| quickthrowman wrote:
| The banking system finances civilization, BTC .. doesn't.
| The utility of banking v Bitcoin should be obvious, but
| here we are..
| empraptor wrote:
| Difficulty of the work needed is lowered if it takes too long
| for miners to find the solution. I'm sure there is a point at
| which mining becomes not worth doing financially. But that
| may not happen anytime soon.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > Advocates will defend this by saying most energy usage is
| renewable.
|
| Even if true (iirc there is a lot of doubt whether it is, see
| Iran), it's still moronic, because consuming renewable energy
| for shits and giggles obviously means that other energy
| demands are being met with your usual energy mix instead of
| that renewable energy that went into shits and giggles as
| assumed. In terms of net emissions it simply doesn't really
| matter whether you A) use non-renewable energy for BS or B)
| use renewable energy for BS, displacing other energy users to
| non-renewables.
|
| The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch
| and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.
| xnx wrote:
| I think Bitcoin is ridiculous and wasteful, but I'm also
| conflicted because I think similarly about many physical
| products: jewelry, mansions, oversized personal vehicles.
| There's a lot of embedded energy in all of those goods. Who
| am I to judge which ones are worthwhile. It all makes me
| dearly wish there was a global tax on taking the resources
| out of the ground.
| vmception wrote:
| The energy use is of captured energy that would be lost in
| transport to other energy users, because it uses just as
| much energy or more to transport it.
|
| This means that "renewable energy more than the output of
| Argentina was _always_ being wasted for over a century
| every day because it was uneconomical to transport it"
|
| Crypto mining has been unique in that it only needs power
| and housing to stay dry, low infrastructure, and doesn't
| need very good internet, compared to other large
| computational projects, or any other sector.
|
| Okay, so we got the "ah it uses a lot of energy!" argument
| over to "ah okay its a relatively green sector compared to
| literally everything else but I don't respect the use in
| favor of literally everything else and this must be taking
| away from that" which is also not true so I'm curious how
| the goal post moves after this - assuming you are able to
| corroborate what I've told you at face value.
|
| It would be more productive to advocate for specific sites
| to not raise prices for others if they did, or specific
| sites to use cleaner energy sources. I can understand how
| that could cause some consternation if your whole cause is
| not liking crypto mining at all. But it is important to
| remain vigilante on how these mining operations run, as it
| is possible for nation states to operate these
| uneconomically and actually do things that you imagine is
| happening now.
|
| (Renewable and captured are not synonymous but usually its
| the same)
| formerly_proven wrote:
| If your first paragraph is about rejected energy, then
| there's not a lot to say here except that rejected energy
| doesn't mean what you think it does.
|
| If not, then I don't know what it is supposed to be
| about. No one builds power plants in places where there
| is no demand for power. Electric power can be carried
| over pretty large distances though with very low losses,
| so having say a few hundred km between a hydro-dam and a
| large consumer is not a major problem.
|
| According to your post the best result would be that
| Bitcoin farms are powered by renewable energy plants
| build in places where nobody would have any use for that
| power anyway, because they're too remote to connect to
| any consumer. Even if this happens (and from what we're
| able to tell, it is not, instead we see coal and natural
| gas plants being ramped up to power bitcoin farms), it's
| still a net negative because building renewable energy
| power plants (as well as bitcoin farms) causes a
| significant amount of emissions. In _normal_ use of e.g.
| a solar panel, this makes sense because it displaces non-
| renewable energy sources with higher emissions, so net
| emissions are reduced. In your scenario, there 's a bunch
| of solar farms in the middle of the Saharan desert mining
| bitcoins, which - at this point - yes would not be able
| to displace non-renewable energy, but still represents a
| net-negative regardless because of the effort required to
| put all that shit there in the first place.
|
| The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free
| lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting
| energy.
| vmception wrote:
| > (and from what we're able to tell, it is not, instead
| we see coal and natural gas plants being ramped up to
| power bitcoin farms)
|
| like I said, advocate against those specific mining
| sites. those made headlines in your world, while others
| did not.
|
| A lot of captured energy mining occurs at remote flare
| gas sites, where those sites are in the business of
| pumping oil and flaring off byproducts and not in the
| business of moving power a few hundred km. These are
| highly polluting places, and crypto mining is ironically
| (to you) their sustainability solution, as they provide a
| use for the energy that would have been flared into the
| atmosphere as hydrocarbons instead. As these are also
| fracking sites, the machines can use the polluted water
| for cooling. Those kinds of sites are only captured and
| not necessarily renewable, an important distinction
| because your example was limited to imagining
| uneconomical solar. There is much more energy like this
| able to be tapped while reducing hydrocarbons in the
| atmosphere, and if it was economical for other use cases
| that you respect more to tap into that energy, you and
| others had several decades to do so.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| OK, but those exact same places could power servers
| instead of miners, taking a load off of wherever the
| servers are currently hosted.
| vmception wrote:
| > OK, but those exact same places could power servers
| instead of miners, taking a load off of wherever the
| servers are currently hosted.
|
| They don't have good internet. Which I wrote earlier.
| Crypto mining don't need good internet, it barely needs
| any good internet speed and barely needs decent latency -
| by design (blockchains allow anything from 2 seconds -
| 2000 milliseconds - to 10 minutes - 600000 milliseconds -
| for the majority of miners on the whole planet to reach
| the same state together, under the assumption that some
| nodes will have slow data and low latency. So a 500-900ms
| latency connection in the middle of nowhere is quite
| fine, not optimal but good enough for consistent average
| earnings). Other data heavy computational uses require
| the opposite of that, these remote sites are not going to
| get the plumbing for good internet or prioritize it. The
| main issue is that they won't prioritize it because they
| aren't interested in it, they are technophobic oil guys
| that are slowly being convinced by crypto investors to
| solve their pollution problem. The crypto people don't
| need anything except a little space.
|
| The issue with imagining that everyone else _could_ do
| it, is that everyone else doesn 't _need_ to do it. A
| data center can set up in the middle of the desert along
| any fiber line like they already do. Go ahead and tell
| them "hey instead of using this readily available
| property can you go set up at the oil refinery after
| making an unnecessary partnership with that unrelated
| business because I don't like that crypto people are
| doing it, you also need to invest in laying some pipes
| out there" if you really think that is practical or
| necessary, be my guest.
| kragen wrote:
| It's really depressing to me to see heavy downvoting and
| flagging on the only comments in the thread that explain
| how coin mining really works.
| hackingforfun wrote:
| It's cheaper for them to just flare the gas. The only
| thing that has made economic sense, as an alternative to
| flaring it, is to mine Bitcoin. I understand the energy
| criticism, but flare gas is an example where Bitcoin
| mining actually makes something less polluting.
| vmception wrote:
| Thanks for chiming in! Nice to see a new account
| understanding this issue and joining the fray.
|
| It has been fascinating to me to watch the disbelief
| evolve. One aspect of this is that negative reporting has
| been basically allowed and encouraged by miners because
| they didn't want competition on their cheaper
| renewable/captured energy sources.
|
| So, for years, many investment groups would discourage
| their renewable or captured energy activity to be citable
| source of what is happening with bitcoin mining, because
| they didn't want others with deeper connections to make
| partnerships with sites faster.
|
| Its really funny, to me, watching people have to redo
| their understanding but trying to make that understanding
| conform to the negative energy impact idea that they were
| intentionally led on with.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Three points
|
| - It's approximately a 180deg pivot to go from "unused
| renewable energy" to "flare gas for green bitcoins"
|
| - It doesn't reduce the emissions. Whether you flare it
| or burn it in a gas turbine / engine driving a generator
| to mine bitcoin, the CO2 released is exactly the same, as
| you are burning ~100 % of the hydrocarbons either way.
| The difference is that one generates bitcoins, the other
| does not. This is only valuable to bitcoin stakeholders,
| and as has been pointed out up and down all these threads
| this is either of approximately no value or of negative
| value to society at large. And overall, creating the
| equipment to mine bitcoins with flare gas, and deploying
| that to remote oil fields w/ no use for gas, creates a
| bunch of emissions that simply don't exist if you just
| flare the gas.
|
| - There are non-emissive alternatives, e.g. gas re-
| injection. Note that the great majority of unwanted gas
| is already dealt with this way. This means that mining
| bitcoins using flare gas has a very good likelihood of
| increasing the share of unwanted gas that is effectively
| flared, again, increasing emissions.
|
| Reducing the amount of flared gas (and putting it through
| a turbine to mine bitcoin is the same as flaring it as
| far as emissions go) is in fact an UN IEA goal.
|
| The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free
| lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting
| energy.
| vmception wrote:
| > - It's approximately a 180deg pivot to go from "unused
| renewable energy" to "flare gas for green bitcoins"
|
| I wrote earlier to avoid this specific derailing.
| Renewable and captured are not synonymous but usually the
| same. This is one of the cases where it is not the same.
| To my knowledge, the only other captured sources are at
| hydroelectric plants, while some parties are interested
| in geothermal as well.
|
| Noteworthy is that "captured" seems to be also called
| "rejected" energy in some circles.
|
| > And overall, creating the equipment to mine bitcoins
| with flare gas, and deploying that to remote oil fields
| w/ no use for gas, creates a bunch of emissions that
| simply don't exist if you just flare the gas.
|
| Once. I'm not sure how a one time event is remotely
| comparable to ongoing issues. Please elaborate?
|
| > It doesn't reduce the emissions. Whether you flare it
| or burn it in a gas turbine / engine driving a generator
| to mine bitcoin, the CO2 released is exactly the same, as
| you are burning ~100 % of the hydrocarbons either way.
| The difference is that one generates bitcoins, the other
| does not.
|
| Hmm. Is there anything we can do about that then? Like
| does that format allow for further processing towards
| sustainability? The generating of bitcoin making it
| economical to do more with the CO2 that the oil guys just
| threw their hands up on decades ago? If this issue has
| nothing to do with bitcoin mining and the alternative is
| just business as usual with it going directly to the
| atmosphere like it already was, then why point fingers at
| the bitcoin mining?
| [deleted]
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Ridding the world of centrally planned currency isn't shits
| and giggles. We're in the midst of the largest wealth
| transfer in history. Trillions are being given to the
| wealthy while the poor see their purchasing power wither
| away. I'm not certain we'll successfully escape their
| depraved clutches, but wasting a little electricity is
| worth the chance.
| boudin wrote:
| How are crypto currencies changing that?
| _jal wrote:
| The renewable energy nonsense is just that - bullshit to
| distract.
|
| Knocking a single coal mine offline in China famously cut
| bitcoin mining activity by a third earlier this year.
|
| https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-
| env...
|
| Now, the claim could still theoretically be true, but I
| really want to see some hard numbers with sources from the
| next person trying to defend that claim.
| kragen wrote:
| Subsidized energy can be cheap or even free, and it's
| hard to compete with free. For-profit Bitcoin miners are
| in an intense competition to find the cheapest energy.
| Anyone who can steal their energy or get someone else to
| pay for it via subsidies will win there, but only until
| the free lunch ends. Energy free lunches are ending all
| over the world now; nobody wants to build a coal plant in
| order to give away the energy to bitcoin miners so they
| can retire in Switzerland.
|
| And that's why the Chinese authorities kicked out _all_
| the bitcoin miners a couple months after that, dropping
| the bitcoin hashrate by more than half. It 's on its way
| back up, but it hasn't fully recovered.
|
| https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate
|
| By contrast, especially in tropical regions, you can
| build a solar or wind power plant to mine bitcoin
| profitably without finding someone else to fob the bill
| off on. In much of the world, solar energy is now less
| than half the cost of fossil-fuel energy, though not in
| cloudy polar regions like Germany, the Netherlands, or
| the UK. There's a new record-low PPA price every few
| months, and it's always solar; https://www.pv-
| magazine.com/2021/04/08/saudi-arabias-second-... this
| April seems to be the latest, at US$0.0104/kWh, which is
| about a _quarter_ of what coal energy usually costs.
|
| That's why the Navajo Generating Station has been
| demolished, Peabody Coal has gone bankrupt and may do so
| again, and for the first time in human history, outside
| of PRC, more coal generating capacity was shut down than
| was built last year. This year that'll probably be true
| worldwide. Coal (and nuclear, and oil) just can't compete
| economically with solar anymore, even in temperate
| regions. And, consequently, neither can Bitcoin miners
| who are paying the cost of using coal. Fortunately for
| them, shipping their server racks to a more profitable
| region is a lot cheaper than doing the same with a steel
| mill.
|
| Hopefully this gives you a clearer picture of the whole
| political-economic environment in which Bitcoin mining is
| happening than just a few hard numbers.
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| Proof of work cryptos are a pox on society. That said they
| are some of the most location neutral energy consumers.
| This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro
| dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use
| energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission. 1TW is
| around 20% of global energy production. This is enough of a
| factor to impact manufacturing of renewable energy
| equipment. It allows them to achieve economies of scale
| faster and accelerate the transition to cleaner energy that
| we need.
| zsmi wrote:
| > 1TW is around 20% of global energy production.
|
| It's estimated all of the U.S. is ~17% of global energy.
| [1]
|
| "According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative
| Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110
| Terawatt Hours per year -- 0.55% of global electricity
| production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy
| draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden." [2]
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 [2]
| https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-
| actuall...
| p_j_w wrote:
| >This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro
| dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use
| energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission.
|
| Sure, but there doesn't seem to be to be any indication
| that this is what actually happens. Is there any evidence
| for that?
| kragen wrote:
| Yes, there is a great deal of evidence of Bitcoin farms
| being located adjacent to hydro dams. I'm not sure about
| wind farms.
| kragen wrote:
| As explained above, the real number is closer to 0.002
| TW, so while the impact on the renewable transition is
| probably positive, it's very small, more like 0.1% of
| global energy production.
|
| It's disturbing that nobody in this whole thread thought
| to fact-check those implausibly large numbers; it
| indicates that the whole thread is dominated by herd
| instinct, not rational thought.
| Hjfrf wrote:
| Location-neutral also means sitting directly on top of
| coal mines.
|
| If somebody's mining bitcoin they're clearly not
| interested in ethics in the first place.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| If only we could send a self-replicating machine that
| builds raspberry pis and solar panels to the moon with an
| uplink.
|
| Then the difficulty would jump and we'd need to send one
| to Jupiter.
|
| Then to mercury to set up the dyson swarm.
|
| Suddenly we are a Kardashev civ... but it's all for
| bitcoin mining for rich billionaire paranoia of
| centralized currency control by the US government, and
| the actual bitcoin production rate is constant since the
| difficulty rate on the coins exploded from galaxy-
| spanning miner fleets.
| emn13 wrote:
| The incentives to use renewables are there... where the
| costs of fossil sources are high, and where the energy
| consuming process will be reliably profitable long enough
| to pay for all those renewable energy sources.
|
| That last bit makes me doubt this would push renewables -
| who trusts that mining will remain profitable for years
| or even a decade? In other words, it may well incentivize
| energy sources with low down-payment costs.
|
| Also: all those GPUs are expensive; is a miner really
| going to slow down mining significantly just because it's
| dark or no longer windy? Or will they prefer constant
| power, given the fact that GPU's will become obsolete
| much more quickly than the power source, and thus there's
| pressure to recoup that investment as quickly as
| possible, I'd guess... thus incentivizing baseload power,
| not unreliable but cheap power - conceivably, anyhow?
| kragen wrote:
| The high bit here is that coin mining is not 1 TW; it's
| 0.002 TW, so the overall effect is almost insignificant.
| But it's still interesting to know which direction the
| incentives run.
|
| The cost of fossil-fuel electricity generation is about
| half capex and half opex (including fuel), and in much of
| the world, solar is now cheaper than _either_ fossil-fuel
| capex _or_ fossil-fuel opex. A large part of capex is
| machinery, much of which is so costly that shipping costs
| are insignificant, so the costs are the same anywhere in
| the world.
|
| Bitcoin isn't mined with GPUs, but your comments about
| intermittency and capital costs apply _a fortiori_ to
| ASIC mining.
| elif wrote:
| I'm curious why we don't find a similar backlash to people
| who put their energy into a hot tub or to cool a 5x sized
| home.. as these cases don't even purportedly support a
| valuable economic mechanism.
|
| For instance. I don't cool my home with AC. does it bother
| you that I mine bitcoin overnight when the grid has surplus
| energy?
| gnramires wrote:
| In the case of cryptocurrency, there is a clear better
| alternative that is Proof of Stake. It's caused by
| techological, economical and educational inertia.
| Cryptocurrency is driven by community consensus, and
| that's what we're doing here... discussing an outdated
| consensus (PoW supremacy) in the hope of changing it.
| nanidin wrote:
| Proof of stake changes the game and raises the bar for
| entry. It essentially creates a "rich get richer"
| scenario where the only way to increase the amount of
| coin you have is to either already have enough to
| participate in proof of stake, or to buy the coin from
| someone else. In that light, I wouldn't necessarily say
| that proof of stake is clearly better than proof of work.
|
| As an example, the proposed proof of stake mechanism for
| Ethereum requires 32 ETH, which is around $100k USD
| today. So established parties with capital will be able
| to stake, but your average person will not. I'm not sure
| I like that aspect of it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| People do complain about excessive comforts too. It's one
| of the main complains those less well off make about
| those more well off.
|
| That said, there's a couple of differences between hot
| tubs and AC, and crypto mining:
|
| - Creature comforts don't consume the energy equivalent
| of a small developed country.
|
| - In what they _do_ consume, most of the use is around
| basic human needs; excessive use happens rarely.
|
| - Most importantly, for almost[0] everything other than
| crypto, whether it's hot tubs or ACs or fiat banking
| system, energy use is considered _waste to be minimized_.
| Simply because energy is not free, the market is
| incentivized to reduce marginal energy consumption
| involved across the board[1]. In contrast, PoW considers
| waste _a feature_.
|
| Cryptocurrencies are their own special thing - the
| perfect machine for consuming any surplus energy
| available. That's why they deserve their own special kind
| of backlash.
|
| --
|
| [0] - I can't really think of any thing other than PoW
| cryptocurrencies, where energy waste would be beneficial
| to the thing _by design_.
|
| [1] - That, of course, doesn't mean we're using less
| energy overall - because both population and economic
| growth outpace efficiency improvements. But on the
| margin, it holds true.
| tass wrote:
| To add, this isn't really "surplus" energy that's being
| consumed.
|
| There are fossil burning power plants running only to
| produce PoW, and unless mining operations shut down to
| allow a generator to operate at minimum load, they are
| forcing shared generators to run and dams to drain.
| jupp0r wrote:
| I'd be more onboard if you heated your home by mining in
| the winter.
| Clubber wrote:
| A lot of people are in the habit of complaining about
| what _other_ people do that might possibly but not likely
| indirectly affect them somehow. Of course the powers that
| be are fine with this (and probably promote it) because
| as long as the populace is pointing fingers at each other
| 's lifestyle, they are ignoring the massive use of fossil
| energy (among other things) used to make a few rich
| people richer.
|
| "Penny wise and pound foolsh."
|
| Another example of this is plastic bottles. See it's your
| responsibility to recycle, not the company's
| responsibility to not use plastic. People nanny each
| other's recycling habits but don't say shit about Coca-
| Cola bottlers. Bottler's are too busy laughing their ass
| off on the way to the bank. Recycle, reduce, reuse.
| simonh wrote:
| GPUs are a marginal factor in this. The main factors are
| several impacts from Covid-19, US trade restrictions on SMIC
| chip exports from China (a big supplier of low and mid-range
| chips which this is actually all about), and the Taiwan
| drought.
|
| The Covid-19 impact itself is multi-pronged. Many chip plants
| closed or reduced output due to the lockdowns, but also the
| silicon used in chip production is the same material used to
| manufacture vials so vaccine production also impacts high
| quality silicon availability. Finally early in the epidemic a
| lot of manufacturers that consume chips, such as car makers,
| cut production. This lead to some chip foundries being closed
| as they were non-viable and it's taking a long time for those
| foundries to get re-commissioned or other foundries to expand
| to make up the gap in capacity.
| another_story wrote:
| Taiwan drought has been over for awhile now.
| simonh wrote:
| Nevertheless any impact on production would set them behind
| their production targets which would need to be caught up.
| Even if it didn't impact production, it would certainly
| have impacted costs, hence contributing to the price hike.
| wskish wrote:
| There is an ugly feedback loop scenario where the crypto bubble
| accelerates inflation due to the high demand crypto places on
| energy and semiconductors and the proportion of global GDP
| downstream from energy and semi. Inflation then loops in more
| demand for crypto assets (as an inflation hedge) creating ugly
| feedback loop until governments act to break it.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| Yes, but efficiency is opposite of roboustness/resiliency.
| babypuncher wrote:
| This is just plain untrue
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Goodbye dreams of owning an Nvidia GPU in 2022 - I ain't paying
| cutthroat prices on ebay/amazon. Guess we're buying Intel!
|
| Sidenote: Intel manufacturers their own stuff, and so is Apple
| right? Their new cool chips are all in-house or are they through
| TSMC?
| jdprgm wrote:
| Coming up on a year since product launch and people camping out
| at Best Buys around the country literally last night. It's
| unreal.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Apple's ARM chips are 100% TSMC manufactured. While Intel makes
| its own CPUs in house, some of Intel's forthcoming GPUs (Arc?)
| are from TSMC, too.
|
| https://www.techgadgetguides.com/news/apple-partner-tsmc-wan...
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-alchemist-gpu-tsmc-6nm-process...
| girvo wrote:
| The upcoming Intel Arc discrete GPUs are indeed manufactured by
| TSMC
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| 30xx series Nvidia GPUs were manufactured on Samsung btw.
| girvo wrote:
| Though current talk is that the next generation of Nvidia
| GPUs are TSMC, too:
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-40-series-gpu-
| arc...
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| Intel has their own foundries, but they are using TSMC N6 for
| their announced gaming GPUs, so they are subject to much of the
| same supply constraints. Apple is also using TSMC for their
| A-something chips.
| ksec wrote:
| 1. This is specifically mainstream node, or everything except
| leading edge 3nm / 5nm.
|
| 2. Those price has been like that for sometime since the chip
| shortage. They just make it official now.
|
| 3. The mainstream and social media will and always have been
| blaming it on TSMC.
|
| 4. Everyone wants all the capacity they need, while not paying a
| cent more. This announcement will "somehow" made it fair for
| everyone in the industry.
|
| 5. The current component price has very little to do with wafer
| pricing. As with all commodity pricing, they will only swing back
| once supply catches up.
|
| 6. In general I think this is a good, TSMC has been leaving far
| too much money on the table and benefiting GF and SMIC.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 1. This is specifically mainstream node, or everything except
| leading edge 3nm / 5nm.
|
| Yes, but only because leading edge is contracted out well into
| the future. Prices for those nodes will definitely be higher
| when contracts are written.
| tacobelllover99 wrote:
| Bidenflation
| tyingq wrote:
| The chip shortage is interesting to me. In that it seems to be
| mostly driven by bad forecasting both by clients and the
| foundries. But the foundries seem to get nothing but upside out
| of it. Perhaps it swings next time and there's excess capacity.
| pcurve wrote:
| Yes, and they're stuck in a bad place. new fab takes years and
| costs 10 billion + to build...
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/322695-why-we-cant-bui...
| f6v wrote:
| I wonder if food shortages are possible for the same reasons.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Food availability is driven by weather as much as anything.
| The North American wheat harvest has been poor this year so
| the price of wheat is rising around the world.
| Geee wrote:
| Absolutely. If there's a fear of shortage, shortages will
| happen. There are also chain reactions to whole economy.
| tbihl wrote:
| No. If there's fear of a shortage and prices don't rise
| adequately in response, then shortages happen.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It will swing. It always swings. This isn't the first time this
| has happened.
|
| People see these nice, tasty prices, and bring more capacity
| online. That takes time measured in quarters to years, but when
| it comes online, there are suddenly a lot more chips. Prices
| fall, but nobody will reduce output, because they have to pay
| for all this new capacity they just built.
|
| It will come. It's going to be a rough year or two, though.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I've heard the industry is full of exaggerated orders now to,
| everyone ordering more than they need, to see what they can
| get. Not a great way to have efficient trade.
| tyingq wrote:
| I wonder if TSMC made a trip out to OPEC to talk about
| history :)
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| There are some reports of collapsing lumber prices, when
| everyone was talking about the sky falling and prices
| skyrocketing two months ago.
| https://financialpost.com/commodities/lumber-prices-collapse...
| So your idea that semiconductor prices might fall a lot in the
| future seems reasonable.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I think that lumber storage is much more expensive compared
| to chips
| tyingq wrote:
| Do you mean storing already made chips? I imagine that's
| (often) expensive from a depreciation perspective.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Cheap microcontrollers are not deprecated for a very long
| time. STM sells chips designed 10 years ago, AFAIK.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Indeed. They even have some they guarantee to make for at
| least 20 years.
|
| https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/about/quality-and-
| relia...
| tyingq wrote:
| Agreed, though I suspect the retail price still drops as
| other, newer, chips enter the market.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| > The company has said it will make $100 billion in capital
| investments over three years through 2023.
|
| >At the same time, "it will be very costly to manufacture in the
| U.S. and Japan," a member of the TSMC executive team said. The
| company is building a cutting-edge semiconductor facility in the
| U.S. state of Arizona and is considering opening its first
| Japanese chip plant in Kumamoto.
|
| TSMC heed the call of US to build a new fab in AZ. It seem
| logical to raise their prices to meet this "demand". A fab in the
| US will not generate as much profit as Taiwan or China fab due to
| labor cost/benefits.
| a3n wrote:
| Chip making uses "a lot of water." (Parts of) Arizona is
| experiencing water shortage, particularly aquifer draw down.
|
| I wonder what the effect of chip making in Arizona will be in
| Arizona, relative to other water use.
|
| Parts of Arizona by law don't meter aquifer use, which
| disincentivizes current ag users to conserve, and has
| incentivized corporate ag to relocate there. (From memory, and
| I may have botched that memory)
|
| I wonder if TSMC is locating in an unmetered location, or
| getting a formal water regulation break.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| "Counterintuitively, the famously thirsty industry can even
| improve the local water supply due to a focus on reclamation
| and purification--Intel has funded 15 water restoration
| projects in the Grand Canyon State with a goal of restoring
| 937 million gallons per year, and it expects to reach net
| positive water use once the projects are completed."
|
| Here's arstechnica's article regarding fab in AZ
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/why-do-chip-
| makers-k...
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I keep seeing this number again and again. 20%. Sometimes 25%.
| Sometimes 15%. Usually no lower than any of the three.
| zz865 wrote:
| "up to" makes the article worthless. To be fair I guess most
| chips usually fall in price over time.
| gootler wrote:
| Taiwan is China.
| randomopining wrote:
| At this point it's literally it's own country called Taiwan.
| DanTheManPR wrote:
| The government of Taiwan has been willing to maintain the
| status kayfabe, including maintain the "Republic of China"
| name and holding China's seat at the UN for a couple of
| decades. It all seems quite ridiculous from the outside, but
| a lot of people in the region still get quite pissy about the
| particulars.
| randomopining wrote:
| CCP just wants power. Expand their sphere and grab the
| economic flows that would come from that.
|
| So simple.
| zigradett wrote:
| Bitfinex (which has been outlawed in the USA) keeps printing
| Tether to prop up the price of Bitcoin, graphics cards are
| snatched up as soon as they are manufactured, and they're using
| an Argentina-sized amount of power to keep the whole thing going.
| Yes, it works, but no one on earth will ever use these Bitcoins
| to buy two pizzas ever again. What's the end-game, at this point?
| As many bagholders as possible?
| [deleted]
| floatboth wrote:
| Yes. Someday Tether will implode like all scams do. The results
| will be spectacular.
| drcode wrote:
| The end game is to transition to Proof of Stake, which doesn't
| have these problems and has other security advantages.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Bitcoin will never move to PoS. The community is far to
| fractured, without a leader they'll never agree.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Learning the hard way why having a central authority
| managing your currency is probably a good thing
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Cool, when is Bitcoin moving to Proof of Stake? Before or
| after the FSF release Hurd?
| haakon wrote:
| There are no such plans, and it's extremely unlike there
| ever will be.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Not for Bitcoin. PoS is a broken system that reinvents
| oligarchies. Proof of Work is the only secure protocol that
| works today -- possessing the real, desirable properties like
| decentralization and censorship resistance.
|
| Don't tell me about vaporware ETH2.
|
| The end goal for Bitcoin is Dyson spheres around stars. And
| it can be no other way.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| A Kardashev Type III civilization, but all it does is mine
| bitcoin at the same rate as today.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| You might be joking, but I am not. When put on a
| Kardashev scale, all these energy concerns seem pathetic.
| Terrawatts? Lol. Zettajoules of energy await us in the
| stars!
| kulahan wrote:
| Lol, this got me good
| bpodgursky wrote:
| If you don't want to hear about ETH2 (which is, for the
| record, not vaporware), Cardano has been PoS from the start
| and is the #3 crypto [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if it
| overtook Eth soon.
|
| [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/
| arduinomancer wrote:
| Do you think speculators/retail investors really care about
| the decentralization properties?
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Yes, I think the informed Bitcoin investor is well aware
| of the value that decentralized peer-to-peer censorship
| resistant electronic money brings to the table.
|
| I care. Everyone I know cares. The core developers care.
| The ecosystem cares. I think you are radically
| underestimating the value of such things.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I'm pretty sure most of them just see mining as quick
| easy cash. If people actually valued the decentralization
| aspect then more would be using it for day to day
| transactions rather than just speculative investments.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Miners? Not a chance. They know exactly what they are
| doing for decentralization and censorship resistance. It
| requires large capital investment over many years, and
| often includes long energy contracts with providers. If
| you believe mining Bitcoin is 'quick easy cash' I am
| afraid you are mistaken (in 2021).
|
| Some Retail investors? Sure -- but I'm sure you could
| find misinformed investors in all fields.
|
| The point nocoiners miss is that holding Bitcoin IS using
| it. It is storing value over larger periods, and
| especially through jurisdictions with poor fiscal
| policies. Many like me will not sell their Bitcoin at any
| price -- especially not for dirty fiat.
| gemexe wrote:
| Who is using GPUs for bitcoin nowadays?
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Is TSMC based out of Taiwan? Do they have fabrication plants
| anywhere else? What company will pick up the demand if/when China
| takes control of Taiwan?
| [deleted]
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| _If_ China takes control of Taiwan. And that's a big if.
| sct202 wrote:
| TSMC has a few smaller fabs currently outside of Taiwan, 2 in
| China, 1 in the US (WaferTech not the Arizona plant under-
| construction) and 1 in Singapore.
| xxs wrote:
| T in :TSMC: stands for Taiwan.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Samsung and Intel are the other two closest fabs in terms of
| technical capability. TSMC is clearly in the lead right now.
| And while the gap is very large in technology cycle terms
| (they're between 1 and 2 generations ahead at this point), in
| real world terms (like... considering what a fucking gongshow
| China invading Taiwan would be), it's not -that- big of a deal.
| It'd be a major speedbump, but not world changing (as opposed
| to the other ramifications of an invasion).
| nikkinana wrote:
| Taiwan is China.
| sergiogjr wrote:
| Market forces at play. Good on them. Move along, nothing to see
| here.
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