[HN Gopher] SEC charges Nvidia with inadequate disclosures about...
___________________________________________________________________
SEC charges Nvidia with inadequate disclosures about impact of
cryptomining
Author : taubek
Score : 386 points
Date : 2022-05-17 08:12 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sec.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sec.gov)
| Havoc wrote:
| This is a non story. They missed something in the laundry list of
| legal disclosures that goes in the financials. Nobody ever looks
| at those since they're a useless shotgun approach covering
| everything short of zombie apocalypse.
| freemint wrote:
| This is very much not just missing a laundry list of legal
| disclosures. They actively lied to investors said increased
| sales of consumer graphic cards was due to a "Fortnite Boom"
| when it obvious to industry observers that is was a mining
| boom. Miners and Fortnite players have very different life-time
| revenue expectation, miners tend flood the used market with
| used cards dropping the prices that can be asked for future
| products, gamers tend to keep their cards and buy new cards
| when they want to play more demanding games. This leads to less
| of oversupply on the used market. The last mining bust had a
| huge negative influence on Nvidia.
| senko wrote:
| duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284952
| twirlock wrote:
| Traster wrote:
| This is kind of funny because the SEC is basically saying Nvidia
| held their share price artificially high by doing this, but
| Nvidia also bought back billions of their own shares, by this
| logic they were overpaying.
| Slartie wrote:
| The most successful fraudsters eventually start to fully
| believe their own fraudulent story. This of course entails to
| do things that make sense in the fraudulent narrative, but are
| actually disadvantageous when judging them from a viewpoint
| outside of the fraud.
| projektfu wrote:
| That is a separate issue. Stock buybacks can be done to reward
| insiders. A dividend would be distributed equally and has the
| effect of directly cutting the share price. A buyback
| distributes cash unequally and puts upward pressure on share
| prices. Only insiders know for sure if the action is being done
| to buy back shares on sale or to distribute profits.
| 99_00 wrote:
| Stock buy backs and dividends benefit or harm all
| shareholders in proportion to how much stock they own
| regardless of being an insider or not.
|
| Unless the insiders act illegally. If an insider wants to act
| illegally they can do so in any number of ways other than
| knowing that a buy back is coming.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| > and puts upward pressure on share prices
|
| I am curious if there is evidence for this. I don't see how
| distributing capital that could be used for growth pressures
| share prices up.
|
| People not selling back the shares are trading the current
| profits for a bigger share of future profits, which may never
| exist. So I am not sure on a risk adjusted discounted cash
| flow model there is any justification for increased price
| pressure.
|
| I always presumed that the main benefit of buybacks v
| dividends was being able to time capital gains for tax
| purposes.
|
| But this is all speculation too, no evidence behind my post.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| > I am curious if there is evidence for this. I don't see
| how distributing capital that could be used for growth
| pressures share prices up.
|
| Say I have a company worth a $1,000,000 dollars that has a
| 1,000 shares each worth $1,000. Company comes into a giant
| one off windfall. They use that windfall to buyback half
| the shares. There are now there are only 500 shares that
| own a $1,000,000 dollar company so each share is worth
| $2,000. Or put another way .2% of future profits is worth
| more than .1% of future profits.
|
| > I always presumed that the main benefit of buybacks v
| dividends was being able to time capital gains for tax
| purposes.
|
| It's not about timing, it's simpler. Buybacks are taxed as
| capital gains, and dividends as income.
| projektfu wrote:
| There are two reasons in my mind why buybacks are
| different. The first is that buybacks are reported after
| the fact and do not directly alter the share price, rather
| they increase competition for the available shares and
| reduce dilution. Dividends immediately reduce the share
| price by the dividend although the price often moves up a
| little before the ex-dividend rate.
|
| The other reason is that there are very few stocks that are
| being valued by the market on any sort of model. That goes
| for cash flow models as well as other things like PE
| ratios, etc. We are in the tinkerbell regime, prices went
| up over the last 10 years because people are clapping
| louder. Obviously that is a controversial take but I am not
| predicting a reversal, just saying that the market overall
| is in a weird place.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > buybacks are reported after the fact and do not
| directly alter the share price
|
| But the fact itself adds demand for the shares on the
| market, affecting the share price.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| There's also an open market buyback. And multiple ways of
| doing it off the open market, often known as a tender
| offer for a popular method where you get shareholders to
| bid on the lowest price they would accept within a range
| of premium buyback prices.
|
| Off the market, an offer does become public immediately,
| that is a necessary component of doing it at all. The
| sales do not. Directly is the wrong word, there's no more
| direct way to affect price than a bid/ask/sale of a
| share. The key is that the information about how much of
| the stock will actually get bought at what price is
| delayed on its way to becoming a price signal in the
| market.
|
| Here's an old-ish but good paper about it, showing how
| this delay can be exploited by those with inside
| information. Not a loophole but rather another thing to
| watch out for. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/vi
| ewcontent.cgi?arti...
| Msw242 wrote:
| A buyback increases EPS and makes the shares worth more. Same
| pie, fewer slices.
|
| It is just a more tax efficient way to distribute earnings.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Buybacks should be banned.
|
| It's bad for society to have companies spend money on their
| own shares, and dividends have the appealing property that
| they allow a holder to both continue to hold, and bank some
| gains for further investments.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Most holders own enough stock that if they wanted to both
| bank some gain and hold they could sell some stock and
| hold on to some other stock.
|
| I think we should get rid of the tax advantage for
| capital gains though, the mechanism through which a
| company distributes capital shouldn't determine tax rate.
| Also I think dividends make it psychologically easier for
| people to live off the interest.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| You think wrong, if they commit, it's to push their agenda even
| further, they knew what they were doing, maybe they did in
| preparation for such charges
| indemnity wrote:
| Buybacks increase prices, a large part of compensation is
| linked to share price, executives don't care if the company is
| overpaying, they see more in their pocket.
| spupe wrote:
| Stock buybacks also increase stock prices, and a lot of
| companies are doing it lately.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Securities fraud squared!
| YedrickTheYeti wrote:
| Wouldn't this have been obvious to anyone trading in nvidia
| shares though?
| [deleted]
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| I don't see how it's Nvidia's job to track how their products are
| used exactly.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| It is their job not to mislead investors about how their
| products are used.
|
| This is not a fine for "You didn't know how your product was
| being used" but "you knew it was being used for crypto but
| reported to investors that it being was gaming"
| colonelxc wrote:
| They don't have to. The problem is that they said to investors
| repeatedly, "Sales are up due to increase in gaming demand",
| when they actually knew that a signficant portion of the
| increase was due to cryptomining.
|
| So what the SEC is fining them for is lying to investors. If
| nvidia didn't know how much of their sales were to
| cryptomining, then there would be no fine. If they did know,
| and did share that in their reports, there would be no fine.
| _jab wrote:
| I'm confused about why this matters. From anecdotal experience,
| Nvidia seems to be struggling to meet demand for its products
| right now anyways. It's hard to tell, but I assume that even if
| crypto took a major hit, Nvidia could still sell a good chunk of
| its newfound supply to genuine gamers instead. Alternatively,
| they could invest more into their ML-focused chips instead, which
| are also supply constrained.
|
| Granted, this might not have been true in 2018, which appears to
| be what the SEC's charge is focused on. Nonetheless, I don't
| think the huge amount of demand from crypto for Nvidia's products
| should be construed as a bad thing; there's plenty of other
| demand.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Companies are not allowed to lie to their investors. Part of
| the deal of being a public company is that all communication is
| communication with their investors. If they told their
| investors that they were selling GPUs to gamers, while in fact
| selling most of them to miners, they violated the law. The
| principle of it being that said investors might have had a
| different outlook on the company depending on who they were
| selling to.
|
| Besides, there is a difference. Because whenever crypto
| collapses (and it has twice already in the past), a lot of the
| existing mining GPUs end up on the secondary market. If this
| happens now, it will have a material impact on the prices of
| GPUs going forwards.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| On the other hand, NVIDIA does not have legal authority to
| control where its GPUs actually end up being used (nasty
| things like drivers shutting down when detecting
| virtualizations aside). How can _anyone_ prove or disprove
| that a specific percentage of GPUs end up in a specific
| market, as long as NVIDIA can prove they have kept their
| usual delivery targets towards wholesale distributors?
| dematz wrote:
| This is a good question. I remember having to give my
| identity before walking out of a store with a computer with
| a GPU in it, and if someone really wanted to buy multiple
| GPUs for mining that wouldn't stop them.
|
| The SEC lists some facts suggesting nvidia thought they
| were ending up mining
| (https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2022/33-11060.pdf):
|
| "NVIDIA launched a product line of cryptomining processors,
| known as "CMP," which the company marketed to large
| cryptomining operations ... Based on known CMP sales, the
| company identified cryptomining as a significant element of
| the OEM GPU sales"
|
| "NVIDIA also received information indicating that
| cryptomining was a significant factor in year-over-year
| growth in NVIDIA's Gaming GPUs revenue. Some of the
| company's sales personnel, in particular in China, reported
| what they believed to be significant increases in demand
| for Gaming GPUs as a result of cryptomining"
|
| These were the 2 most concrete points to me - management
| was aware miners drove up GPU prices for gamers and saw it
| as another big market to capture, and sales attributed
| increased demand to miners. The rest of it basically says
| crypto grew, nvidia sales grew, and nvidia thought sales
| grwe because of crypto.
|
| Honestly, I'm not sure it's possible even knowing these
| factors to know who really bought the GPUs or where they
| really ended up, but idk all the SEC probably cares about
| is nvidia not disclosing material seeming information.
| simiones wrote:
| That is irrelevant. The SEC also didn't go and check what
| people were using their NVIDIA GPUs for.
|
| The problem is that NVIDIA leadership knew/believed that a
| proportion X of their GPUs were being bought for crypto
| mining (thus tying demand with crypto prices), while they
| reported to investors a different number, Y, with Y < X.
| This is material information that they simply lied about,
| which is illegal for a publicly traded company. In fact,
| the lawsuit could have happened even if Y > X.
|
| If NVIDIA had reported the same numbers they did, and
| people had been in fact using them at the same rate that
| they did, but NVIDIA hadn't known about it, then nothing
| illegal would have happened. If NVIDIA had later found out
| and disclosed this to investors, again no lawsuit (though
| perhaps share prices would have changed, one way or
| another).
| dangerface wrote:
| > they told their investors that they were selling GPUs to
| gamers, while in fact selling most of them to miners
|
| I don't think nvidia even did this, they marketed to gamers
| and reported the correct number of sales. What people do with
| the card once its sold is not up to nvidia its not
| information that an investor can reasonable assume nvidia
| will report on.
|
| If I invest in a steel mine they market their steel to car
| manufactures and report the correct number of sales. If they
| also happen to sell to gun manufactures I can't then sue said
| company for not reporting that.
| runeks wrote:
| > I don't think nvidia even did this, they marketed to
| gamers and reported the correct number of sales.
|
| It's not about that. It's about:
|
| " _NVIDIA had information, however, that this increase in
| gaming sales was driven in significant part by
| cryptomining._ "
|
| Which they did not disclose.
| davedx wrote:
| > "NVIDIA had information, however, that this increase in
| gaming sales was driven in significant part by
| cryptomining."
|
| > Which they did not disclose.
|
| What's annoying to me as an NVDA investor is that I
| _still don 't have that information_. Or maybe it can be
| found somewhere else?
| ajdegol wrote:
| I certainly wouldn't want a second hand GPU that'd been used
| for mining; it'd be ragged.
| latchkey wrote:
| Totally untrue. I've run many many tens of thousands of
| GPUs for years, in the worst of conditions (directly
| exposed to seasonal temperatures and environment)... they
| keep on ticking.
|
| Power supplies on the other hand... those don't seem to
| last as long, but we open those up and they are hand
| soldered by someone in China.
| w1nk wrote:
| It's boggling to me that everyone is so entirely
| convinced of this fact. Check out this paper from google
| where they observe this exact process occurring in their
| CPUs at scale: https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/202
| 1/papers/hotos21-s...
|
| Given their conclusion that this is the result of
| manufacturing tiny process transistors, it follows that
| this can occur in GPUs as well.
| viraptor wrote:
| Often repeated, but wherever you actually see someone
| testing that theory, they can't spot any issues.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Is there any evidence that running a GPU/CPU at 100% for X
| years degrades the product vs average use over the same
| period?
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| No; there's been many tests. The mistake seems to come
| from thinking GPUs "wear out" like cars. The cooler
| might, but the silicon is fine.
|
| Some even suspect that crypto mining is _better_ for the
| card than gaming as it avoids the constant ramp-up /ramp-
| down of the clock/activity by keeping it pegged at 100%.
| In turn, that would lower thermal stress.
| remram wrote:
| > GPUs aren't cars
|
| I think another comparison is with hard drives, which are
| also used by some cryptocurrency schemes, and do degrade
| faster with intensive use.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Yes, because hard drives, like cars, have moving parts
| that can wear out.[a] The silicon of a GPU doesn't have
| moving parts and is therefore more resilient.
|
| [a]: It's (hopefully) common knowledge in the tech
| community that purchasing used hard drives is a Bad
| Idea(TM)
| the_gastropod wrote:
| SSD's have no moving parts, and wear out too, right?
| w1nk wrote:
| Yes, but for different reasons. The grandparent is
| probably incorrect though, there is emerging evidence
| that silicon is actually changing/failing over time. See
| this paper from google on their CPU cores where they have
| practical evidence of this occuring: https://sigops.org/s
| /conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s...
|
| If their data is correct, it should follow that these
| exact issues will happen on the small transistor process
| GPUs as well.
| w1nk wrote:
| Actually there's reasonable evidence to believe this
| isn't true. This paper from google: https://sigops.org/s/
| conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s... outlines
| specific scenarios where CPUs fail over time. Given the
| evidence that these are silicon defects that are actually
| worsening over time, there's no reason to imagine these
| failures don't extend to GPUs as well.
|
| The difference in data here is obviously scale, google
| has -way- more CPUs than GPUs so the absolute counts of
| failures will be different.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| I'll concede that silicon can wear out over time; it's
| impossible for it to be immune from happening, and I
| wasn't speaking in absolutes. But as you mention, it's
| one of scale. I'm curious how likely a second hand GPU
| from a cryptominer is affected.
| w1nk wrote:
| So that's actually one of the awful implications of this
| paper. It's probably actually happening at a rate higher
| than would be noticed by humans.
|
| If a given piece of silicon is hosing up a GEMM (matrix
| multiply), in graphics scenarios this may be invisible to
| the human eye as it could potentially just introduce
| artifacts in a scene rendering that could be entirely
| ephemeral to the frame.
|
| In the case of crypto mining though, it's completely
| possible (probable?) that there are GPUs that can't
| possibly ever calculate a proper SHA3 hash (see the paper
| on AES instructions that fail in symmetric ways).
| Melatonic wrote:
| Actually it can be the opposite - if the miner is using it
| properly and not overheating them regularly they can be in
| good shape. If they run at a high percentage but the
| temperature stays constant then theres not a lot of wear
| going on vs suddenly heating and cooling all the time.
|
| I imagine the bearings in the fan might have more wear,
| however, but that might be more easily fixed.
| babypuncher wrote:
| A better question to ask is "why did Nvidia feel it was
| necessary to lie to their investors?". Lying to your investors
| is illegal, regardless of whether or not you profited from it.
| paxys wrote:
| What about a year or so later when supply chains are back to
| normal and crypto demand dries up? Suddenly investors are
| wondering why their revenues are falling 50% instead of 5% that
| they predicted.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| GPU mining was consuming much more of the supply than you
| suggest (that's literally the basis of this lawsuit)
|
| When the GPU mining bubble pops, there's a secondary effect as
| miners unload their used GPUs at fire sale prices on the
| secondary market. This means that the demand reduction is even
| worse than it might seem.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| It matters because people asked the question about how much of
| the business was crypto based and they lied.
| aj7 wrote:
| Now I know how gun manufacturers feel, although I'm not on their
| side.
| t_mann wrote:
| It's kind of strange/funny how much trouble _too much_ demand can
| cause for a company.
| mcv wrote:
| I don't quite get this. Was it not blatantly obvious to everybody
| that Nvidia's sales were largely driven by cryptominers? Did they
| specifically market to cryptominers and lie about that or
| something? I don't quite get what they did wrong.
|
| What's also baffling to me is how their share price is taking a
| nosedive because of this news. Any investor should know about
| this. And $5 million fine doesn't sound like enough to hurt the
| company that much.
|
| But if it's true that they misled investors, does that mean that
| investors can get their money back or something? It seems like
| any investor who wasn't aware of this is now screwed twice.
| bionsystem wrote:
| If you have a publicly-listed company you have to disclose all
| macro, market, and sector/industry risks (as well as company-
| specific risk) that might impact investors. The mere fact that
| they didn't disclose it (in 2018) is blamable.
|
| Their stock price doesn't tank on this news, it's trending down
| along with BTC and other crypto assets. The market isn't
| stupid, it's pricing into NVDA price the risk of cryptos going
| into a prolonged bear market.
|
| Investors will probably never get their money back. First of
| all, NVDA stock is up a ton since 2018, and second of all,
| shareholders are considered full risk-on and should diversify.
| Class actions are possible but highly improbable to work. The
| company has been buying their stock back too which show their
| commitment to reward shareholders as well.
| Slartie wrote:
| It was obvious to the gamers who tried to buy a GPU for a
| reasonable price. If you put some time into this endeavor, you
| were bound to see all those cards coming in to retailers
| immediately being bought, with a few appearing on secondary
| markets at higher price tags but being bought away very quickly
| there as well. This occurring in parallel with a huge bunch of
| "looking for GPUs A, B, C, D, offering $ridiculous_price in
| cash, will take any number of cards" offerings on Craigslist
| and similar platforms speaks a clear language: nobody is trying
| to secure various different GPUs despite high prices in
| basically unlimited numbers for GAMING! Nor do gamers buy up
| all those overpriced secondary market offerings within minutes
| of them being posted.
|
| But: the stock market investors that are moving the really big
| bags of cash rarely have hours and days to spend trying to hunt
| down GPUs for their gaming rigs. So they wouldn't see these
| obvious hints.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| And it's _still_ not over - early 2022 prices for RX 580 (and
| the like) were still 4 (FOUR !) times higher than in 2020 !
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220126135425if_/https://cdna.p.
| ..
|
| EDIT : Never mind, still 2x prices, but seems to start coming
| down ?
|
| https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Asus-
| RX-...
| latchkey wrote:
| This is because RX480/580 are the most ROI efficient. ETH
| mining doesn't require latest fastest hardware because it
| is memory bound [1].
|
| [1] https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-
| memor...
| MrFoof wrote:
| I managed to get some GPUs at MSRP over that period and as I
| got something a bit faster over that period, I would sell to
| defray my upgrade cost.
|
| I tried to restrict to US buyers to try to get it in the
| hands of someone who just wanted to play games.
|
| They went to US addresses as my shipping restrictions and
| other exclusions required, but I unexpectedly got dinged for
| "International Fees" by eBay.
|
| So I dug in as to why. When I checked the shipping address in
| Google Maps, they were warehouses. Googling again, known
| freight forwarders.
|
| From what I can ascertain, one likely went to Qatar, and the
| other ended up in Uzbekistan. The accounts that bought them
| were quite old, not new, and had extremely high quantities of
| feedback. Based on the absolutely extreme auction end prices
| ($1540 for a 3070!), I wasn't surprised in the end. The
| buyers were clearly extremely well organized and had
| exceptionally professional communication.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| Not putting "blatantly obvious" things in the disclosure
| documents is WORSE than omitting obscure things. The market for
| Nvidia stock is not made up of the same people who buy their
| graphics cards. Maybe even almost no crossover. The prospectus
| regime for public companies is there to protect ordinary
| investors who do not know this stuff. The overall effect is to
| increase the "smartness of money" by avoiding people investing
| who do not know this basic stuff. And yes there is a robust
| regime for investors to sue for defrauding them in this
| fashion.
| Jon_Lowtek wrote:
| People suing nvidia about their 2018 quarterly reports is
| actually what happened, the SEC fining them years later is
| just the cherry on top.
|
| See for example case 18-cv-7669 by the "Ironworkers Local 580
| Joint Fund" from late 2018, which was later merged with a
| class action lawsuit.
|
| Nvidia talked about crypto in their 2018 quarterly filings
| but they allegedly downplayed the effect on the company.
|
| Analysts upgraded their rating, growth prediction of 17%,
| shares trading at record price. _(for the time, not
| comparable to today)_
|
| In the last quarter of 2018 crypto crashed, nvidia revenue
| dropped by 7%, and the share price by 29%
| dangerface wrote:
| > The market for Nvidia stock is not made up of the same
| people who buy their graphics cards. Maybe even almost no
| crossover.
|
| I think this is the problem you have investors buying stock
| in a company they have no concept what that company does they
| just know its a hot stock because the price is currently
| pumping. They go all in with no due diligence assuming the
| price will continue to pump for no reason and when it doesn't
| and the supply demand level out they act like they where
| scammed like the company should have told them when to buy
| and sell.
| dhzhzjsbevs wrote:
| The more I learn about finance the more I'm confused how 2008
| actually happened. We actually have some pretty good
| regulations in place.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > We actually have some pretty good regulations in place.
|
| That's only if your basic view of the financial markets is
| of something legitimate and socially beneficial. I would
| say that is mostly not the case; and in the past, the US
| government at times needed to recognize this at least
| partly, on pain of mass upheaval and system collapse,
| putting stronger regulation in place, e.g.:
|
| https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/glass-
| steagall-...
|
| (which isn't that strong either)
|
| This is all before the complex derivative markets formed
| which gave rise to the 2008 crash. The housing situation in
| the US even now seems rather tenuous and volatile, whether
| through some financial crash or a different form of crisis:
|
| https://slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-
| hous...
| cormacrelf wrote:
| A lot of it is designed really well but squashing human
| stupidity on the scale of trillion dollar economies is a
| perpetual game of whack-a-mole. The message a lot of people
| got from 2008 that it was the bankers and the system that
| hurt the little guy and therefore we should no longer trust
| any of it. And create a new financial parallel universe in
| which to rediscover why regulation is needed in the first
| place. Vitalik Buterin today literally suggested an
| analogue of FDIC insurance for cryptocurrency banks.
|
| My view is that the banks did hugely mess up and did not
| face enough consequences -- and the correct approach is to
| massively enhance enforcement. (In many ways that actually
| has happened.) But moreover they preyed on stupidity, just
| massive massive stupidity that will always be there to
| contend with. Fraud always looks better than real
| investments to the marks. People have to overlook the shady
| parts, and to make them do that a product must offer
| unrealistic returns. Millions and millions of people are
| not smart enough to tell when that's happening to them. As
| long as the SEC and its ilk let these run, people get hurt
| and everyone suffers, either personally, or from the
| inefficiency of fraud generally or the collapse of
| interlinked financial systems when the fraud gets big
| enough. Dealing with this is a huge task and often
| unpopular. If you tell millions of Americans they can't
| invest in crypto scams, many of them will be royally pissed
| off, because they were promised riches! That's even worse
| than whack-a-mole -- letting frauds off the leash for one
| minute leaves your hands tied unless you are top of your
| game and have a lot of built up trust.
|
| That's why people keep pointing to the lack of arrests as a
| huge failure of 2008. As mistakes by government go it was
| much worse than the bailout, which was rather necessary to
| limit the damage. It meant people thought the government
| was in on it, or that they didn't care. Frankly I think
| Bitcoin would never have taken off if there were a slew of
| high profile arrests. It would not have seemed necessary.
| rfw300 wrote:
| It's worth noting many of these regulations came into
| existence (or became stringently enforced) _because_ of
| 2008.
| dangerface wrote:
| The regulations in this case are both very old, I don't
| think the regulators care about 2008.
|
| Securities Exchange Act of 1934 Securities Act of 1933
| zmmmmm wrote:
| While this seems like something the SEC should indeed be paying
| attention to, it pales into comparison with Elon Musk openly
| breaking every rule in the book on Twitter while they do
| absolutely nothing (up to and including directly pumping and
| dumping stock ...)
| elevenoh wrote:
| What actual rules did elon break?
| lvl102 wrote:
| I remember I was short the stock via puts quite a bit and they
| kept saying crypto was 5% of the business which I knew was a lie.
| It turned out great for me. Fast forward to 2022, you see how
| much of the GPU "shortage" was due to crypto mining especially in
| Russia (there are enough anecdotes of people in Siberia heating
| their kitchens with GPUs).
| paganel wrote:
| > due to crypto mining especially in Russia
|
| When the war started in neighbouring Ukraine (I live in
| Romania) the local market started seeing graphics cards again
| which, previously, had been marked by local official resellers
| as "not in stock for the near future". This is for business
| procurement, so not even retail.
| vkou wrote:
| Card supply/demand delta has already been slowly easing up
| over the months leading up to the war.
| thesausageking wrote:
| If, at the time, you had bought the stock instead of shorting
| and held onto it, you'd be up 64% today.
| lvl102 wrote:
| I made something like 100x on that trade so I think I did OK.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Right so using waste heat that way is more ecological.
| xxs wrote:
| Except using heat pumps is a lot more efficient than
| resistive heating... and/or adding a proper insulation.
| lkbm wrote:
| Sure, but what % of heating is just natural gas furnaces?
|
| We should evaluate things against what the actual, real
| world alternative would be, not just against the best
| possible world.
|
| (That said, I should acknowledge that a large part of that
| electricity comes from burning natural gas at an efficiency
| loss, so resistive heating is still worse than the natural
| gas furnace.)
| freemint wrote:
| Heat pump based heating from burned natural gas is better
| than burning natural gas for heating though.
| lkbm wrote:
| Yes, and that's very nice if you have a heat pump. I
| suspect people with heat pumps use them for heat. It'd be
| weird if they didn't.
|
| But, to restate my previous comment: if you have a
| natural gas furnace and a GPU, but no heat pump, and are
| deciding which to use for heat, it doesn't matter how
| efficient the heat pump you don't have is.
|
| If you own your own home and have the capital to get a
| heat pump, great, do it. But a lot of people rent. They
| can't just swap out their furnace for a heat pump.
| nkurz wrote:
| Here in the US, I don't think these are in common use. At
| least, I've never seen one in person. Are they used much
| wherever you are? They do seem like an interesting idea.
| Here's a US Dept of Energy page about them:
| https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/absorption-heat-pumps
| freemint wrote:
| From what i have heard it varies a lot on a state by
| state basis. I suppressed my urge to look up heat pump
| statistics because frankly i should work on more
| important things. Just uhhmmm please don't act like i am
| supposed to research for you unpaid. I might fall for it
| and hate myself for it later.
| Loughla wrote:
| Depends on where you live. The rural area where I am have
| a nearly 100% install of heat pump or geothermal units on
| any and all new builds.
| kimburgess wrote:
| See: https://blog.qarnot.com/introducing-the-qc-1-crypto-
| heater/ (2018)
|
| Such a beautiful idea, if only the computation was actually
| useful.
| px43 wrote:
| It's useful for the millions of people who participate
| every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy,
| but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't
| directly benefit you personally must be "useless".
|
| Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work,
| especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating
| large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS,
| etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out
| that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form of
| democracy we can build that doesn't require some global
| registry of every human on earth. Anyone with access to
| electricity can participate in ensuring the global security
| of the network, and be fairly compensated for it.
|
| Proof of Stake can work alright in certain market
| conditions, but those didn't exist on any blockchain until
| relatively recently. Look at the utter chaos going on with
| Terra validators. The validating token goes to
| approximately zero, so bad actors can cheaply buy up the
| staking asset and hijack validation, further destabilizing
| the network, allowing the next attackers to buy in even
| cheaper.
|
| It's a hard problem, and Satoshi's solution is an
| incredibly elegant one. If you've got a better idea than
| PoW, then do share. Whoever figures it out stands to make
| billions of dollars. You should know that it's mostly
| considered to be a solved problem at this point, and nearly
| everyone has moved on to other hard problems in the space.
| kimburgess wrote:
| PoW is not useless. Hashcash in its original form is a
| prime example. It's good design/engineering that solves a
| problem.
|
| Blockchains are not useless. Append only, verifiable data
| structures have countless applications that again, can be
| used to solve actual problems.
|
| Systems which combine these to create a "trillion+
| economy" that's sole external affect appears to be
| inducing an obsessive overuse of the word "fiat" while
| consuming incomprehensible amounts of the worlds
| resources--not just power, but hardware, and importantly,
| the focus of many intelligent people--that is a venture
| of questionable use.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| > It's useful for the millions of people who participate
| every day in the trillion+ dollar cryptocurrency economy,
| but sure, continue to claim that anything that doesn't
| directly benefit you personally must be "useless".
|
| The calculation itself, once removed from bitcoin
| ecosystem, is quite useless.
|
| > Literally hundreds of alternatives to Proof of Work,
| especially PoW with some enhanced utility (calculating
| large twin primes, folding proteins, file storage, GIS,
| etc) have been tested in the real world, but it turns out
| that a straight up "find the nonce" PoW is the best form
| of democracy we can build that doesn't require some
| global registry of every human on earth.
|
| How is "find the nonce" PoW better for democracy than
| "fold proteins" or "find a chain of primes" PoW? In what
| way does calculating primes or folding proteins require
| global registry of every human on earth?
|
| > Anyone with access to electricity can participate in
| ensuring the global security of the network, and be
| fairly compensated for it.
|
| What about internet and expensive hardware, don't you
| need those also? What would you need besides those to do
| "fold protein" or "find chain of primes" PoW.
| beardog wrote:
| See gridcoin, it is a proof of stake currency where you
| can additionally earn coins via mostly useful scientific
| computing. It's a neat project, but it gives effective
| control to the boinc server managers. The users have to
| sign up to earn that way
| Jon_Lowtek wrote:
| my understanding is that gridcoin "rewards" people
| participating in boinc by incrementing numbers on a
| blockchain that uses proof of stake. It doesn't use
| scientific computing, like protein folding, as a proof of
| work for the chain itself, which is what the parent
| comment was all about.
|
| I would love to be proven wrong, to see any reference
| that grc provides algorithmic benefit to boinc, as in
| "getting rewarded with grc is proof the provided solution
| for the requested scientific computation is correct", or
| even a little thing like storing the boinc participation
| statistics, but those are features of the boinc network
| independently from grc.
|
| What grc provides to the scientific community is a weird
| incentive for monkey-brains: monkey brain sees grc number
| go up, monkey brain releases happy hormones. It is a
| mirror of the participation statistic on the blockchain,
| not because that makes sense, but because blockchain.
| Sure there is some theory that some monkey may give a
| monkey a banana for making their number go down and its
| number go up, but that transaction involves no scientific
| computation and is purely speculative.
| Feritiuuu wrote:
| For most people the affects of climate change costs more
| and have higher impact than what crypto provides.
|
| Better solution: PoS.
|
| Do you know who is using already a highly tuned modern
| fast currency system based on PoS?
|
| You do. I do. Everyone else does.
|
| It's called us dollar, euro and other stable fiats.
|
| And yes inflation problem doesn't go away just because
| you use Bitcoin.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > PoW is the best form of democracy we can build that
| doesn't require some global registry of every human on
| earth. Anyone with access to electricity can participate
| in ensuring the global security of the network, and be
| fairly compensated for it.
|
| This is a complete, steaming, and self-serving pile of
| bullshit. It isn't at all democratic and you need far
| more than just "electricity" to participate.
| wffurr wrote:
| If only the computing hardware generating that waste heat was
| doing something _useful_ like serving funny cat pictures.
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| I have some doubts that any significant amount of
| cryptomining is actually done in Siberia. Part of that would
| include a few questions of the definition of "Siberia", a
| deep examination (i. e. a suggestion to google) people's
| ideas of the weather condition at that hypothetical place,
| and maybe a comparison of efficiency of heating a typical
| rural Russian home with coal vs. burning coal to generate
| electricity to run GPUs, after transmission over sowjet-era
| grids.
|
| Considering how cryptocurrencies seem to attract the get-
| rich-quick crowd, it's impressive to see the levels of
| motivated reasoning they are capable of, since neither
| motivation nor reasoning alone seem to be among their usual
| strengths.
| varenc wrote:
| _If and only if_ you would have used electrical heating
| anyway, then using a GPU 's waste heat for heating your home
| is one of the best things you can do with it and it's "100%
| efficient". That is, 100% of all the energy your GPU consumes
| also ends up as heat in your house and it's thermodynamically
| equivalent to any other type of resistive electric heater.
|
| Of course, the energy consumed by any even semi-serious
| mining operation far exceeds a home's heating needs.
| the8472 wrote:
| Not necessarily, a FIR heater (which is also resistive)
| deposits a larger fraction of its input energy in humans
| than a GPU cooler which heats the air which then indirectly
| warms the human and also everything else.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| However, resistive heating is 3-4 times less efficient then
| ground/air source heating, so if your actual aim is to heat
| the house, you can do a lot better[1]. It's just better, if
| you're generating heat anyway, to _also_ use the waste heat
| than to dump it outside.
|
| [1] YMMV in permafrost regions, and the hardware is too
| expensive for many people.
| vehementi wrote:
| Not really a "however", that was the origin of the "If
| and only if"
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| They do use little electric heaters some of the time.
|
| And there's smaller mining operations, the economies of
| scale aren't that great, more the difficulty of finding
| GPUs. You can lend it to neighbors and give them a cut of
| the proceeds, you could do the whole town. So in fact
| ordinary mining operations waste the heat, this would not.
|
| Plus power there is cheap, I would guess nuclear.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| I want to answer the other poster who shows up dead: how
| can you lend a miner? Like lending a little heater. Like
| lending a cow, one guy needs milk the other wants the
| meat and hide. So if you already have all the electrical
| heat you really need for your house but want to mine
| more, you won't benefit from more heat for your own
| house. Whereas maybe across the street a neighbor is
| still using little electrical heaters a lot, doesn't
| understand crypto very well. So they work something out,
| the neighbor gets heat, pays the electric bill, and gets
| a cut of the mining, and the original miner provides the
| GPU through his contacts and gets a share too. So that
| way the heat doesn't go to waste, and the miner can
| scale.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Clarifying for alisonkisk, lend means 20 cards instead of
| 10 you need for heating, lending the other 10 out to a
| neighbor for his heating. Economies of scale, for
| instance by buying more cards at a time at a better unit
| price.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| How can you lend your miner to a neighbor for heat? You
| all need heat at exactly the same time. Are you going to
| move the rig to a different home every hour?
| px43 wrote:
| Do you think it's more than 5%? Maybe it is, but it seems like
| every place that offers GPU rental services (Amazon, Vast, etc)
| they are being used almost exclusively for machine learning
| applications. The rate they can be rented out is 3-4 times
| higher than would be profitable for any cryptocurrency mining,
| which should be a pretty solid indicator of where the demand is
| actually coming from.
|
| I know I'm in the minority, but my GPUs are used almost
| exclusively for password cracking. I've got ASICs for the
| crypto mining.
| muttled wrote:
| I had a rig on Vast. It wasn't 100% utilized. It mined crypto
| when it wasn't rented for ML applications.
| rytill wrote:
| What software do you use for GPU password cracking? Custom?
| And for what purpose?
| gaspard234 wrote:
| I worked at a security consulting firm that had an 8 GPU
| password cracking rig. Teams would be able to send it
| hashes obtained during assessments/red teams and try to
| discover passwords.
|
| I was not doing that type of work so I'm not sure what type
| of software was used but I think it had multiple open
| source programs available.
| h4waii wrote:
| hashcat.
| lvl102 wrote:
| I think the overall impact of crypto is 30-35% of their
| business.
| legutierr wrote:
| > there are enough anecdotes of people in Siberia heating their
| kitchens with GPUs
|
| Hey, all you blockchain skeptics, here's what you are always
| asking about: a practical use for blockchain tech.
| co_dh wrote:
| Is this the reason of global warming?
| H8crilA wrote:
| As much as you living in a steel reinforced concrete house.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Cryptocurrency is not even 1% of global energy consumption.
| The environment is being destroyed by China, western
| nations, fossil fuels. If anything cryptocurrency is just a
| very small drop in their bucket.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| There are those that day global warming is caused by
| politicians talking crap about global warming. My theory is
| global warming is caused by the people that vote for the
| politicians that talk crap about global warming.
| Y-bar wrote:
| The Russian energy grid doesn't really have a reputation
| for being carbon neutral...
| peterpost2 wrote:
| Don't they have more nuclear poweplants than most places
| in the west?
| lkbm wrote:
| Might be more, but it's still a minority of their grid.
| Wikipedia has a graph for 2016: 18.1% nuclear, 47.9%
| natural gas, and 15.7% coal.[0]
|
| "Energy Matters" says that EU energy production was 26%
| nuclear in 2015, but only 12% for consumption[1], so I'm
| not sure how to look at that comparison. Either way,
| that's probably mostly France (~80%[2]). US around
| 8-9%[1].
|
| TL;DR: Yes, most western countries probably have less
| nuclear, but it's a low bar.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_R
| ussia#M...
|
| [1] http://euanmearns.com/primary-energy-in-the-european-
| union-a...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_F
| rance#M...
| hwillis wrote:
| Russian nuclear is ~17% (compare US at 19%). Overall it
| is slightly less CO2-intensive than the US, as it uses
| less coal. They have almost as much hydroelectric power
| as the entire US renewable sector.
| Y-bar wrote:
| They have a sizeable nuclear electricity production, and
| in energy use overall they are behind USA, but still
| worse than many other places:
|
| https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?end=2
| 018...
| driverdan wrote:
| This is pretty common. I've been using my gaming rig for
| cryptomining in cold weather for years. I make money and keep
| my office warm, win win.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Resistive heating will generally be less efficient than heat
| pumps, although potentially Siberia is cold enough to
| mitigate that?
| orangepurple wrote:
| The Mitsubishi Mr Slim heat pumps that we install are able
| to warm your home in temperatures as low as -15degC and
| -25degC
|
| When temperatures drop below zero degrees, ice will build
| up on the outdoor unit of any heat pump. How the heat pump
| reacts to this determines how effective it will be in
| providing heat to your home. To remove the ice build-up the
| heat pump will need to go into Defrost Mode. During this
| time the heat pump will not be delivering heat into your
| home. HyperCore's Defrost Logic has been fine-tuned to
| extend the period in-between defrost periods and optimise
| its heating performance.
|
| Mitsubishi Electric offers heat pump systems with Hyper-
| Heating INVERTER(r) (H2i(r)) technology which can provide
| up to 100 percent of heating capacity at 5deg F and
| continue operation down to -13deg F even wiThe Mitsubishi
| Mr Slim heat pumps that we install are able to warm your
| home in temperatures as low as -15degC and -25degC thout
| auxiliary heat.
|
| https://www.mitsubishicomfort.com/articles/what-is-a-heat-
| pu...
|
| https://www.mitsubishi-
| electric.co.nz/materials/aircon/broch...
| wccrawford wrote:
| I couldn't actually find anything about this in a search,
| but I think the point is that they're already using the
| GPUs for something else, and heating their kitchen with the
| excess heat just makes sense at that point.
|
| The only thing I did find was that apparently Russians are
| taking the components from kitchen appliances to use for
| other things, which seems entirely unrelated.
| InitialBP wrote:
| This isn't really a "practical use for blockchain tech".
| Rather it's just a positive way to use the side-effect
| that blockchain tech requires computing components that
| generate a lot of heat.
|
| Ultimately the heat output has nothing to do with how the
| tech is used (like bitcoin). If Bitcoin (or other
| cryptocurrencies) stopped holding value people wouldn't
| heat their homes like this because it would cost more
| than traditional heating methods (as someone pointed out
| above about heat pumps.)
| Aunche wrote:
| Until 100% of our electricity is provided by renewables or
| nuclear, resistive heating is just turning converting
| fossil fuels into heat, which we convert into electricity,
| which we convert back into heat. It would be more efficient
| to just burn the fossil fuels on site.
| klodolph wrote:
| Burning fossil fuels on-site means transporting fossil
| fuels to people's houses. Natural gas has a GWP which is
| 21 times that of CO2, and residential natural gas
| distribution systems are responsible for massive
| emissions just due to the leaks.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> more efficient to just burn the fossil fuels on site.
|
| You forget exactly how efficient a coal-fired powerplant
| actually is. Love or hate them, they have 100+ years of
| technological innovation to squeeze every watt out of
| coal. Your fireplace at home is not nearly as efficient.
| So an electric heater powered by the grid is almost
| certainly more efficient than burning your own coal at
| home in an inefficient stove.
| [deleted]
| fpoling wrote:
| A good oil-burning heater has over 90% efficiency. Even
| no so good and cheap one can get over 70%. The best
| industrial electricity-generating plants that runs on oil
| has efficiency bellow 60%.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Does that oil-burning heater need oxygen? If it does then
| it needs ventilation, air movement in/out of the house,
| pushing that 90% efficiency number way down.
| 8note wrote:
| Tech connections has what you're looking for:
| https://youtu.be/lBVvnDfW2Xo
|
| Efficiency wise, the comparison between a heat pump and a
| furnace depends on the outside temperature. Heat pumps
| lose their efficiency for high [?]T, so for winter in a
| Russia, a furnace is likely the better option
| pimlottc wrote:
| You're ignoring heat pump technology, which can result in
| greater overall efficiency than converting energy
| directly to heat.
| Aunche wrote:
| The parent comment already addresses heat pumps. I'm
| explaining that there is virtually 0 practical use case
| for using mining to heat people's homes.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| that assumes the use/utility of the computation is 0. We
| can all debate if that's true or not about cryptomining.
|
| One day we may heat our homes with distributed computing
| like BOINC.
|
| Consider the house that marginally has electrical
| resistive wall heaters (Like the bay area) and an excess
| of spare computers sitting around (also like the bay
| area) ... It's marginally better for the house nerd to
| leave their PCs on using BOINC than run the wall heater.
| Aunche wrote:
| If by mining, you mean cryptocurrency creation, the
| utility is effectively 0. You can achieve the same
| utility if a cryptocurrency simply credited all new coins
| to my wallet. If by mining, you mean validating
| transactions, then that's something you have to do all
| year round, even if it's warm. That makes about as much
| sense as asking VISA to send me a rack that does
| computations for them only when my home is under 20 C.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| yes, which is why the rest of my comment was about BOINC
| namibj wrote:
| Unless you assume CCS for the fossil plant, which is not
| a setup that would work well for a typical residential
| forced-induction gas-fired central hot water heater
| (combined with passive radiators in rooms or underfloor
| heating).
| daeken wrote:
| I've been doing a lot of ML training, particularly when my
| office is cold. Kills two birds with one stone.
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| You can still use a heat pump that takes the heat from the
| exhaust air to warm the fresh air. That way you can get the
| same amount of heat as if you were using three+ times as
| many graphics cards.
|
| I usually use GPUs for heating during winter as the power
| has to be used anyway, so why not get ethereum for it.
| stouset wrote:
| > You can still use a heat pump that takes the heat from
| the exhaust air to warm the fresh air.
|
| I don't think you understand how heat pumps work. Heat
| pumps have significantly greater than 100% "efficiency".
| They don't turn electricity into heat. They use
| electricity to move preexisting heat, and it turns out
| that's far more efficient in terms of Joules of heat
| delivered to your home per Joule of energy spent. In
| fact, for any given Joule of energy spent, you can
| generally move two to three Joules from outside your home
| to inside of your home.
|
| If the source of heat you're pumping is coming from
| resistive heating you're using electricity for, you're
| only getting 1 Joule of heat for every Joule of
| electricity. Adding heat pumps to this system doesn't
| help you.
|
| > I usually use GPUs for heating during winter as the
| power has to be used anyway, so why not get ethereum for
| it.
|
| Because owning and operating a heat pump is almost
| certainly cheaper than the costs of owning and operating
| a mining rig, even offset by the value of the
| cryptocurrency you generate. You'd almost certainly be
| better off by heating your home with a heat pump and
| using the energy savings to buy that same cryptocurrency.
|
| The exceptions to this are if you are in a location where
| energy is _extremely_ cheap, or perhaps if you generate
| more than your household usage of electricity (including
| resistive heating) through solar or wind but aren 't able
| to sell that electricity back to the grid.
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| I know very well how heat pumps work, and I find it
| ironic that you assumes others don't know because you
| don't understand it or haven't heard of it.
|
| A heat pump doesn't have to take heat from the outside.
| By using heat from the extracted air, you can use
| whatever you want to generate heat inside and get
| multiple times the effective heating as it's reused. Use
| wood, electrical floor heating or GPUs. It doesn't
| matter. The energy from the extracted air is transferred
| to the fresh supply air. The exhaust air will be
| freezing.
|
| Also, electricity has been expensive the last two years,
| but mining has still been profitable, considering I
| already have some GPUs in my workstation and home server.
|
| You don't earn money by using a heat pump, you do(or at
| least did) by mining. By mining and using a heat pump on
| that energy I increase the usage of that energy. Win win
| win.
| blagie wrote:
| There was a comment on another web site a while back:
| "The words you're using - it's like you know what a
| microwave is, but you keep calling it a fridge, and you
| want that fridge to do an oil change on your cat."
|
| You insist you know about heat pumps, but your comments
| indicate you don't understand the fundamental principles.
|
| It's an interesting topic, if you find the time.
| stouset wrote:
| > I know very well how heat pumps work, and I find it
| ironic that you assumes others don't know because you
| don't understand it or haven't heard of it. > > A heat
| pump doesn't have to take heat from the outside.
|
| If you're already spending 1J of energy to get 1J of
| heat, a heat pump is not going to turn that 1J of heat
| into 2-3J of heat, nor is it going to recover any of the
| Joules you've spent to generate that heat. So sure, you
| can use a heat pump to move that heat around a space. But
| doing so just spends more energy and decreases the
| overall efficiency of the system.
|
| The principle of a heat pump getting such efficiency
| numbers is _entirely predicated_ upon the notion that you
| 're able to move that heat from somewhere it already
| exists "for free" in sufficient bulk.
|
| > You don't earn money by using a heat pump, you do(or at
| least did) by mining. By mining and using a heat pump on
| that energy I increase the usage of that energy. Win win
| win.
|
| You fundamentally misunderstand the economics of this
| situation. Mining costs money in the form of hardware and
| electricity. In exchange you can potentially extract some
| amount of revenue. If your alternative was to use that
| energy to generate one Joule of heat for every Joule of
| energy spent, you might as well mine to get a rebate.
|
| But the sum of mining revenue minus mining costs are
| almost certainly _less_ than the costs of simply
| operating a heat pump instead. Again, you 'd be better
| off using a heat pump to heat your home and using the
| money saved on energy to simply buy $CRYPTO at market
| prices.
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| As I said, I already have GPUs. If you don't think mining
| has been profitable for me and others during e.g. the
| last year then you need a reality check, cause it has
| been profitable.
|
| > If you're already spending 1J of energy to get 1J of
| heat, a heat pump is not going to turn that 1J of heat
| into 2-3J of heat, nor is it going to recover any of the
| Joules you've spent to generate that heat.
|
| It's not magic, or complicated. The energy spent is used
| multiple times, as I said. You can save energy using a
| heat pump both by using it for initial heating, or
| transferring existing heat that would otherwise be thrown
| away.
|
| So no, I'm not misunderstanding anything. If you think
| it's not possible then you too can get this "magic" using
| e.g. Nibe F750 + SAM40. Check their documentation, it
| even has charts for everything!
| delecti wrote:
| > You can still use a heat pump that takes the heat from
| the exhaust air to warm the fresh air
|
| Unless I'm misunderstanding part of this proposed setup,
| I'm pretty sure this doesn't work. The higher efficiency
| of heat pumps comes from the fact that the outdoors is an
| effectively infinite (for the purposes of a house) source
| of temperature differential. You can only move as much
| heat as exists, so you can't use a heat pump to multiply
| a finite heat source.
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| I'm not sure what there is to misunderstand. Heat is
| taken for the outgoing hot air, and transferred to the
| fresh air coming in. So instead of hot air going out, the
| air going out will usually be freezing.
| mook wrote:
| That sounds like heat recovery ventilation; while useful,
| it serves a different purpose than heat pumps (which
| heats up enclosed spaces without the ventilation). Also
| HRVs normally work with whatever existing air and don't
| use extra heated air...
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| You are recovering the heat from the ventilation, yes.
| But you're doing so using a heat pump.
|
| Check out e.g. Nibe F750 with SAM40.
|
| I'm using the heat pump to heat water using the extracted
| air. That water is then used for floor heating,
| ventilation air heating and ofc. hot water.
| delecti wrote:
| In my experience, people usually try to avoid exchanging
| air with the outdoors when they're concerned about
| significantly heating/cooling their homes. If you're
| exchanging air then a heat pump could super heat/cool the
| outgoing air, and that's the piece I was missing from
| your proposal.
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| A house must exchange air. Better insulated houses are
| basically air tight, so you must have ventilation to get
| fresh air.
|
| A pro with that solution is that the extracted air has a
| high temperature all year, making it more efficient that
| using a heat pump to extract heat from outside that might
| be -30 celcius. A downside is that the amount of air is
| limited, so if you need more heat then you have to
| supplement it with something else.
|
| You get it, but it seems there are a few others that
| don't realize that a heat pump can also be used to
| increase efficiency by reducing the heat lost. While I do
| get that it's unknown to most people, some people here
| perfectly illustrates the Dunning-Kruger effect...
| bluGill wrote:
| But with bitcoin mining your heat pays for itself, while if
| you use a heat pump you have to buy power to run the heat
| pump. So while heat pumps are more energy effient, bitcoin
| miners are far more economically efficient.
| stouset wrote:
| This is only true if the value of the Bitcoin you mine is
| higher than the difference in cost between buying and
| operating a heat pump and buying and operating a mining
| rig.
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't agree with a lot of things in CAPEX vs OPEX, but
| this is one that is clearly right:
|
| Having equipment sitting around unused is way more
| expensive than most people care to think about.
|
| A heating coil might not be terribly valuable in July,
| but come November it will have roughly the same value it
| had the previous February. Bitcoin mining hardware that's
| switched off for five months is losing value at an
| alarming rate, and very quickly _won 't_ be a net
| reduction in costs.
|
| Very quickly a heat pump becomes cheaper to operate, and
| cheaper to purchase. And if you amortize the cost over
| the life expectancy, that threshold is very, very low.
| People who have recent memory of living paycheck to
| paycheck are constantly screwed by the latter, and that
| Venn diagram overlaps heavily with several other circles
| that make crypto super attractive to some people and
| super ridiculous to others.
|
| I went down this avenue of compute as radiator long ago,
| and I could never get the math to work, unless I moved
| somewhere that was cold most of the year, and that sure
| as fuck is not going to happen.
| mwint wrote:
| Curious, what things in "CAPEX vs OPEX" do you not agree
| with? I'm no economist, but this sounds interesting.
| hinkley wrote:
| In a very brief nutshell, the ways in which buying a
| little hardware or a tool to save thousands of hours of
| frustrating development work is not a slam dunk because
| of colors of money.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Heat pumps are not cheap, $10-$15k installed for a small
| one.
| [deleted]
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Neither are GPUs that are run 24/7 at full speed
| [deleted]
| stefanfisk wrote:
| the one in my cabin cost me $800 including installation.
| pvarangot wrote:
| A split AC unit that can also run backwards is less than
| 1000 and basically a heat pump. Not all split units that
| heat will do that, but a bunch do.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Are you talking about something that fits in a window and
| warms a single room?
|
| I recently replaced the 3 ton hvac unit on my small 1500
| sq ft single family home with a heat pump and all the
| bids were in that range.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| 2/3rds of that cost is labor. 3 ton multi-zone heatpump
| kit is $2500-3500, another $250-500 for an electrician to
| pull #6s and a ground to a 60A disconnect outside and
| sealtite whip into the heatpump, and 60-80 hrs at $125/hr
| to install the heat pump and air handlers, including all
| the exterior wall penetrations and sealing, running
| glycol lines, installing thermostats, wiring air
| handlers, etc.
| pvarangot wrote:
| Yeah single room. There's dual room splits that run a
| bigger compressor with two heads too. They are usually
| way cheaper than bigger units even when you account how
| much juice they eat up but you should do your own math
| because it depends on the house and the setup.
|
| Also if you want to control every single room including
| bathrooms and walk in closets it gets tricky.
| 8note wrote:
| In either case, you still have to compare against using
| the fossil fuels to heat your house instead of turning
| them to electricity first, to heat your house via the
| heat pump or the resistive heater
| hunter2_ wrote:
| This video does a great job at considering that aspect:
| https://youtu.be/MFEHFsO-XSI
| namibj wrote:
| In that case you would still have an absorption
| refrigerator that "cools" the outside and dumps to the
| inside as an alternative. They are usually either gas-
| fired or running off of district heating (well, 50-120C
| seems usual).
| bouncycastle wrote:
| For bitcoin mining to pay for itself, you need to leave
| it running to the max 24/7. Each miner is a noisy ~3000w
| machine. So that's a 3000w heater. You would normally
| turn down the heater during the day, but if you turn off
| your miner during the day, you won't break even.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Apparently you haven't heard of immersion cooling. It's
| essentially silent, and many people are using DIY setups
| to augment a heat pump or hot water heater.
|
| Commercial solutions have been in development for a few
| years. Here's one example: https://www.wisemining.io/
|
| Edit: after re-reading your comment I realize you also
| aren't aware that miners can be throttled. Powering it
| down is not the only alternative to consuming 3kW.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| It pays for itself in dollars but what about the carbon
| emissions?
| lazide wrote:
| A lot of places that do electric resistive heat have
| cheap electrical sources - often hydro or nuclear.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Do you really think anyone in Siberia, one if the poorest
| places in the world, cares about carbon emissions?
| fpoling wrote:
| For a guy in Siberia various climate models show that the
| global warming will improve life. Winters will be much
| milder, agriculture will be less risky.
| [deleted]
| sobkas wrote:
| > Do you really think anyone in Siberia, one if the
| poorest places in the world, cares about carbon
| emissions?
|
| Unfortunately they care. For now only poor face real
| consequences of climate change. They are to poor to
| mitigate its effects.
| [deleted]
| dsizzle wrote:
| It seems Siberia is one of the places where living
| conditions might actually improve
| https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-could-make-
| siberia-a... (the "big bog" scenario does cast doubt on
| that -- e.g. existing structures may collapse).
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The problem is almost noone there can afford a heatpump
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| My point is that when we as outsiders look at this
| practice and evaluate its merits, _we_ should care about
| the carbon emissions even if the people there don't.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| If you live in Siberia you presumably want the planet to
| warm up more. ;)
| sobkas wrote:
| > If you live in Siberia you presumably want the planet
| to warm up more. ;)
|
| No you don't, when permafrost melts it causes ground to
| move. It is really bad for everything build on or in it.
| Something like houses sinking and falling apart. In some
| cases it cause big holes in the ground and they got even
| bigger over time.
| qwytw wrote:
| Most of Siberia does not have permafrost, though.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I'd assume that they were going to use carbon-generating
| fuel, and that someone somewhere would already run a
| mining rig. IE: It's murky.
|
| If they were going to heat using an electric space
| heater, it's a wash.
|
| If they were going to heat using natural gas, but the
| electricity comes from nuclear, it's lower carbon.
|
| If they were going to heat using natural gas, and the
| emissions are higher. BUT, if they were going to run the
| mining rig anyway, and they've merely turned off the gas
| heat, the emissions are overall lower.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| They could heat with an electric heat pump with can be
| 2.5x more efficient than an electric heater.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| But heat pumps don't pay you to run them! (I wish mine
| did.)
| l33t2328 wrote:
| Which is really interesting because electric space
| heaters are 100% efficient.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| (Apologies if you already know this.)
|
| Heat pumps work by moving heat, they usually move more
| heat than input energy.
|
| Basically, a refrigerator is a heat pump. The input
| energy runs the heat pump, which it uses to move heat out
| of the refrigerator. Typically, for every watt of
| electricity, more than a watt of electricity is moved out
| of the refrigerator.
|
| They work by compressing gasses into fluids, and then
| letting the fluid expand back into a gas. Basically, when
| a fluid evaporates, it absorbs heat as potential energy.
| The energy can be harvested by compressing the gas at a
| high enough pressure that it condenses into a fluid. Do
| this in a loop, and you can move heat.
|
| No laws of physics violated!
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Or an example that might be more readily acceptable,
| being something that a person without any domain
| knowledge could simply test* to prove it to themselves:
|
| Suppose you built a shed around the outdoor unit of a
| central air conditioning system and let it come up to max
| ambient temperature. Then right next to it you built a
| shed with a resistive heater which consumes the exact
| same wattage as the air conditioner. The first shed will
| be much warmer because you're not _creating_ heat so much
| as you 're _moving_ heat. If you increase the resistive
| heater 's wattage by about 2.5x then the sheds will be
| about the same temperature.
|
| * Don't actually do this and expect the system to
| survive.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Yes, heat pumps use 1 watt to apply 2.5 watts of heat to
| a room (by using the outdoor ambient air as an energy
| source).
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| Why would we assume they are (I'm not sure that the
| "someone somewhere" part of that is material either)
| going to use a mining rig already to assess the merits of
| mining rigs for heating? That's tautological.
| tenthirtyam wrote:
| This was the best blog I ever noticed on this topic,an
| Australian using exhaust air from their miners to pre-heat
| incoming air to their heat pump. TL;DR - it's worth it.
|
| https://blog.haschek.at/2021/how-i-heat-my-home-by-
| mining.ht...
| peri wrote:
| Ah, money laundering, the international past-time-space-
| crime.
| dangerface wrote:
| Is the sec concern trolling nvidia? What do they mean by impact?
|
| > the sale of its graphics processing units (GPUs) designed and
| marketed for gaming
|
| SEC recognises that these cards where marketed to gamers and even
| recognise that the parts of NVIDIA marketed toward crypto mining
| was reported as crypto mining.
|
| It seems like nvidia did business as usual and the real problem
| is those filthy gamers that aren't gaming.
|
| If NVIDIA reported its gaming cards to SEC as crypto cards, now
| that the crypto market is dead and those cards are being used for
| gaming would SEC still consider NVIDIA to be in the wrong for
| their undisclosed impact on gaming?
|
| Seems like SEC is mad at gamers for making money instead of
| gaming and they are taking it out on NVIDIA. Im just glad some
| one is standing up to these filthy gamers.
| ideamotor wrote:
| You sound like Elon Musk. Rule of law and fair play is what
| makes the US economy work and grow.
| Sakos wrote:
| > Seems like SEC is mad at gamers for making money instead of
| gaming and they are taking it out on NVIDIA. Im just glad some
| one is standing up to these filthy gamers.
|
| 1) Weird of you to add everything after your first sentence
| without indicating you edited your comment.
|
| 2) I have no idea what you're talking about. This isn't about
| nVidia reporting their cards as crypto cards. This is about
| nVidia not reporting what portion of their revenue is subject
| to volatility in the cryptomarket. SEC isn't mad about
| anything. It sounds like you're mad, tbh, and I'm not sure why.
| dangerface wrote:
| > This is about nVidia not reporting what portion of their
| revenue is subject to volatility in the cryptomarket.
|
| Nvidia doesn't know what customers use their cards for and it
| especially doesn't know the volatility of the market, no one
| does. If nvidia knew market volatility before hand they
| wouldn't need to make gpu they could just trade the market
| more efficiently than every one else.
|
| You and SEC are talking about pure speculation as if it was
| fact, nvidia didn't speculate in their reporting they gave
| accurate numbers as they should. Until you can show otherwise
| its all just speculation.
| Sakos wrote:
| > NVIDIA had information, however, that this increase in
| gaming sales was driven in significant part by
| cryptomining. Despite this, NVIDIA did not disclose in its
| Forms 10-Q, as it was required to do, these significant
| earnings and cash flow fluctuations related to a volatile
| business for investors to ascertain the likelihood that
| past performance was indicative of future performance.
|
| What proof do you have that the SEC is speculating about
| NVIDIA having this information?
| someweirdperson wrote:
| Speculation? It is well-known that their drivers contain
| extensive telemetry functions. This removes any shadow of
| a doubt that they know what the cards they sold are being
| used for.
| Sakos wrote:
| > In two of its Forms 10-Q for its fiscal year 2018, NVIDIA
| reported material growth in revenue within its gaming business.
| NVIDIA had information, however, that this increase in gaming
| sales was driven in significant part by cryptomining. Despite
| this, NVIDIA did not disclose in its Forms 10-Q, as it was
| required to do, these significant earnings and cash flow
| fluctuations related to a volatile business for investors to
| ascertain the likelihood that past performance was indicative
| of future performance. The SEC's order also finds that NVIDIA's
| omissions of material information about the growth of its
| gaming business were misleading given that NVIDIA did make
| statements about how other parts of the company's business were
| driven by demand for crypto, creating the impression that the
| company's gaming business was not significantly affected by
| cryptomining.
|
| > "NVIDIA's disclosure failures deprived investors of critical
| information to evaluate the company's business in a key market,
| Aissen wrote:
| The settled charged which Nvidia agreed to pay: $5.5M. What they
| will pay for failing to buy ARM with all this inflated stock
| cash: $2B.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| This is true. I met a prince once, named Mikhail von und Zu
| Lichtenstein Oyarzun. Weird fucking guy, but that's how princes
| are, I didn't judge.
|
| But then lo and behold he traveled to Spain, a country which
| recognizes nobility, and tried arrogancing his way into a party
| (like "what do you mean I'm not on the list!?"). The press asked
| who the fuck is he, asked his parents, his parents weren't his
| parents, his parents had no idea who the fuck he was. Said as
| much publicly. "I have no fucking idea who this asshole is" said
| his father.
|
| And then he was on TV in 2017 or 2018 as the world-class
| bullshitter of all time, but with much contempt. He had hours of
| talk-shows just for him, his law school professor going in front
| of the camera saying what he did was illegal because he pretended
| to have authority. He was a scammer, in particular he posed as a
| human-rights lawyer targeting victims of torture to get their
| secrets and extort them. Tried to do it to me, but you can't con
| an honest John.
|
| So what happened, going back to your point? He brainwashed
| himself, told himself he was a prince 10 million times. But lied
| to himself literally 10 million times.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31408429.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| > He was a scammer, in particular he posed as a human-rights
| lawyer targeting victims of torture to get their secrets and
| extort them. Tried to do it to me, but you can't con an honest
| John.
|
| You are calling victims of tortures liars?
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| EDIT: You're right I did in fact say victims of torture are
| liars, at least it can be read that way! Wow, didn't
| realize it, didn't intend it. So I don't know what he was
| saying to the others, but he set up many many scams like
| talking really loud on his cell about "an opportunity going
| to waste" when we met at Metro el Golf staircase, trying to
| get me to ask on my own accord what that opportunity was,
| but I had no curiosity for it. So helping me with torture,
| I fell for it a bit, but it was something I could not fail
| to want.
|
| So honest John means many things, but basically it's hard
| to get someone to engage in a scam without engaging greed.
| Now with the tortured that's disgusting, it's not greed but
| he verbally claimed a government payout to the tortured--a
| pension--ten times higher than the real amount. It's like
| 230.000 CLP whereas he claimed like 2.200.000[1]. And
| that's designed to get them to pay him something, very
| difficult money for a torture victim to earn because their
| careers are ruined as part of the torture, to keep them
| down. The torturers advise to steal and impoverish them,
| never pay back debts. Torture involves bankrupting the
| victim, it's property crime too. Coerce signatures of
| course, give up deeds, give up property, give up a car in
| one case, betray people, betray yourself.
|
| But then the torturer tells you the solution is to get a
| job. Try to get one with that ruined resume though! "Where
| did you work in April 2009? No good answer? No hire!"
|
| [1] Morally that's 10x as much, so he didn't actually quote
| 10x as much because that's too disgusting, too easy to put
| that in a newspaper headline, it burns too much. But that's
| how he got the number, multiply it by ten, and then
| subtract a meaningless amount strictly in order to reduce
| hatred against him, which he also did with a nonprofit
| called Sin Odio, Without Hatred, which was linked to his
| claims of being a human rights lawyer.
|
| My torturers did this too: I was under amnestic drugs from
| March 29, with a few days on at the beginning, but in total
| 29 days under amnestics, meaning they give you pills as
| soon as you awake, all day long, and then you think
| tomorrow is today, next week is this week, next month is
| this month. Literally motivating the question, "what year
| is it?!" Like in time travel movies. But it was less than a
| month because that's bad PR, saying you tortured someone
| for a whole month, so they say 29 days, so that I have to
| say "almost a month" when morally the intention was a full
| month, minus some meaningless amount to take away the PR
| sting. Water down the accusation, but if it weren't for the
| intent to water down the accusation, it would have
| absolutely been a month! A lunar month, though. And so the
| reason is they do this to women too, but they menstruate so
| they know if they've gotten roofied for weeks, unless you
| shoot the moon, 24/7 amnestics for an entire menstrual
| period, 29 days, they end up at the same part of their
| cycle as before the amnestics started, then it's not as
| obvious.
| isthisbothigh wrote:
| Which drug is this bot on? Seems to be high.
| ask_b123 wrote:
| I looked Mikhail von und Zu Lichtenstein Oyarzun up and it
| seems like the story might be true to some extent. Seems like
| a person that was impersonating a prince.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Well looking up the name is difficult, and you'll have
| better luck in Spanish.
|
| I think it's Miguel von und zu Liechtenstein, I misspelled
| it earlier, it's a tricky one. Said his name was Mikhail
| legally but when he flashed both copies of his Chilean ID
| it was Miguel, not Mikhail.
|
| https://www.gamba.cl/2018/05/la-decadente-historia-de-
| miguel...
|
| It was also in the papers, like Publimetro, and El
| Mercurio. Also on a morning show, https://www.youtube.com/r
| esults?search_query=miguel+de+liech..., TVN I remember. 30
| minute show about him, which I have no problem with it's
| righteous justice and juicy gossip at the exact same time,
| win-win. If only all television were that good in every
| sense.
|
| That's how I found out he was full of shit, I saw his face
| on a television at a cornershop and it all made sense. But
| stayed in character to a literally insane degree, and was
| very consistent about it. He even convinced high-ranking
| politicians, the President, he went all out. Shot the moon.
| And it sort of worked out, hey! Isn't that remarkable,
| actually pulled it off haha, good one.
|
| He did his damndest to get everyone's hatred, too,
| particularly with that foundation trying to outlaw hate
| speech and instigation of violence, as a front to commit
| extortion and virtue signaling. Yeah because then he got to
| talk to people giving him early warning of pitchforks,
| could do man-in-the-middle attacks by plagiarizing his
| victims pleas to elicit the pity that was not rightfully
| his, and gating access to government help to clean his
| victims out.
|
| Human-rights corruption, like stealing candy from a baby!
| [deleted]
| omega3 wrote:
| I think the gist is that they've intentionally misled investors
| by misclassification of sales from more violative, unpredictable
| crypto into stable pc gaming market.
| voxic11 wrote:
| There is nothing in this Press Release which indicates the SEC
| thought nvidia's failures were intentional.
| elevenoh wrote:
| What a perverse incentive racket the SEC is
| dean177 wrote:
| "The SEC's order also finds that NVIDIA's omissions of material
| information about the growth of its gaming business were
| misleading given that NVIDIA did make statements about how other
| parts of the company's business were driven by demand for crypto,
| creating the impression that the company's gaming business was
| not significantly affected by cryptomining.
|
| The SEC's order finds that NVIDIA violated Section 17(a)(2) and
| (3) of the Securities Act of 1933 and the disclosure provisions
| of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The order also finds that
| NVIDIA failed to maintain adequate disclosure controls and
| procedures. Without admitting or denying the SEC's findings,
| NVIDIA agreed to a cease-and-desist order and to pay a $5.5
| million penalty."
| Lukineus wrote:
| > "NVIDIA agreed to a cease-and-desist order and to pay a $5.5
| million penalty."
|
| Cost of doing business.
| H8crilA wrote:
| More like the SEC lacked evidence that this was intentional.
|
| Remember about the SEC whistleblower program, if you had
| inside proof of intent the fine would be a lot higher, and
| you'd get a share of the fine!
| Melatonic wrote:
| Wait seriously? What kind of percentage do you get? That
| is.....both interesting and terrifying in a way
| smnrchrds wrote:
| 10% to 30%.
|
| https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| This sets the stage for shareholder lawsuits, which are
| better equipped to assess actual damages.
| ekianjo wrote:
| thats pocket money for nvidia
| hef19898 wrote:
| Yes, on the other hand not being called out by the SEC for
| insufficient disclosures helps with investor trust.
| nullc wrote:
| Many of these actions are specifically geared to tee off
| civil lawsuits, so the total cost can be significantly
| greater.
| whatever1 wrote:
| I was always wondering why the big players don't just make ASICS
| for crypto mining that would make happy both the miners (with
| their faster speeds) and the gamers (who would not have to
| compete to get a gaming card).
|
| But now it is obvious to me. It is better to have in your
| earnings gpu sales because you can always claim that you expect a
| steady source of income. If they had 60% of their revenue
| explicitly from a volatile market like crypto mining, then their
| stock would not look attractive.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Nvidia has a GPU for crypto. I don't think it helped.
|
| https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
| whatever1 wrote:
| It was just paper released less than a year ago during chip
| shortage, I doubt that they produced any significant amount
| of them.
|
| Their performance was also luck luster compared to the
| consumer rtx cards.
| t0suj4 wrote:
| So is this basically failure of disclosure that they made a quick
| buck off the crypto craze and attributed that to the gaming
| market?
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Which is material to investors like me who think that crypto is
| a house of cards and gaming has long term growth potential
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| FYI 5.5 M$ is 1 hour 47 min of Nvidia's revenue and 16 hours
| worth of net income.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| I think the amount is far too low but charging them is
| reasonable. Maybe they won't do it again. I suspect with such a
| low fine they don't care really and they'll just pay it.
| jijji wrote:
| How would Nvidia even know what people are doing with the cards
| they purchase? Thats like saying that Intel should disclose that
| a large portion of its chips are being used to siphon porn off
| the network.
| sedeki wrote:
| What's the rationale behind this omission on NVIDIA's part?
| rcxdude wrote:
| Two things: (GPU) cryptomining is extremely unpopular with PC
| gamers, especially those who DIY build PCs, because the demand
| for GPUs for mining is substantially worsening the general GPU
| shortage, pushing prices even higher. NVIDIA has made a lot of
| noise about how they are on the 'side of gamers' (such as with
| their Low Hash Rate cards which have a software lock designed
| to reduce mining efficiency which held for about a year or so),
| but in general seems to have been happy in practice to make as
| much money as they can off of it. So NVIDIA has a marketing
| interest in downplaying the impact of cryptomining on the
| shortage while selling as much as they can into the high demand
| and high prices at the moment. (And tech journalists
| communicating to these gamers do read these reports and tell
| the consumers about this stuff)
|
| Secondly, from an investors point of view, GPU cryptomining
| demand is seen as a lot more volatile than PC gaming demand. A
| crypto crash or the planned ethereum switch to proof of stake
| could reduce this demand substantially. If a larger fraction of
| NVIDIA's sales (and thus revenue) is due to cryptomining, it's
| less likely to be similar next year (not only because
| cryptomining might buy less new cards, but also because they
| might flood the market with used cards, reducing demand for new
| cards from PC gamers, which happened during the last big crypto
| crash). This is the main reason the SEC is not happy about it.
| When reporting to investors NVIDIA also has an incentive to
| downplay crypto-related demand.
| synu wrote:
| Presumably that the fine will be much, much less than whatever
| the value of the benefit is that they earned from the omission.
| infinityio wrote:
| The fine was ~$5M, nvidia made ~$10B last year - It's
| approximately equivalent to the amount of money they make in
| 4 hours
| blihp wrote:
| Minimizing the perception of downside risk in sales when it
| dries up to keep share prices higher than they otherwise would
| be. Had they come out and said approximately X% of a given
| quarter's sales were mining related, it would have most likely
| been priced into the stock as cyclical sales with a lower
| resulting multiple.
|
| edit: this is an old story see previous discussion
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284952
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| Thats still strange as the lowered gaming sales are partly
| due to increasing prices from crypto miners and higher
| material costs. Their profit margin and sales only grew
| larger during this time
| Sakos wrote:
| The point is that it's unreliable income. The cryptomarket
| can crash, which will have an effect on future earnings. If
| nVidia isn't open about how much of their revenue is at
| risk, investors can't make informed decisions about
| investing in nVidia.
| peri wrote:
| About damn time, IMO. But as I fix nVidia's bugs, I'm obviously
| ignorant of anything impacting Serious Cryptographic Engineering.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| The punishment should be proportional with the sales for
| cryptomining which they lied about. Investors can be seriously
| affected by this.
|
| A few million is not a punishment it is encouraging Nvidia to do
| nasty things in the future since they know they can get away with
| it.
| thathndude wrote:
| Agreed. I was invested in NVDA during this period. Should look
| back and see how the stock performed during the relevant
| period.
| runeks wrote:
| I'm curious: how difficult would it be to win a suit against
| Nvidia with this SEC charge in hand?
| mbesto wrote:
| > Investors can be seriously affected by this.
|
| > A few million is not a punishment it is encouraging Nvidia to
| do nasty things in the future since they know they can get away
| with it.
|
| Ok so tell me precisely how much NVDA benefited by not
| disclosing how much sales were to crypto?
|
| I'm a NVDA stock holder and I just don't see what the fuss is.
| It's been impossible to buy a Nvidia card over the last 3 years
| due to scalpers and crypto farmers. I guess I thought everyone
| kinda knew that?
| birracerveza wrote:
| The problem seems from stem from the fact that if NVDA
| disclosed that crypto amounted to 5% of their market when
| instead it's 5 times as much (random numbers for the sake of
| the example), investors are bound to suffer more in case of a
| crypto market crash, because the crypto exposure is much
| higher than what was disclosed by the company.
| mbesto wrote:
| > investors are bound to suffer more in case of a crypto
| market crash
|
| Do we know that actually? There was already outsized demand
| (demand > supply) for Nvdia GPUs to the extent that
| consumers literally couldn't buy GPUs for ~2 years (still
| is a problem) without buying from a scalper. A few things
| to consider:
|
| (1) In most markets where demand outpaces supply, new
| entrants emerge. That is almost impossible to do in GPUs
| due to compatibility/support. So we've had pent up demand
| in that market.
|
| (2) Consumers waited for supply to catch up to make the
| purchase even though they were ready to purchase.
|
| (3) AFAIK there was no surcharge implemented by NVDA and
| this value was captured by scalpers. In fact, the price for
| performance ratio for the latest series of NVDA GPUs was so
| good that even if crypto wasn't a thing many consumers were
| ready to replace their old GPU.
|
| (4) Crypto focused demand is a leading indicator of sales
| for that channel. With the shift to PoS, the overall demand
| for crypto rigs could shutter overnight.
|
| My theory (as an NVDA investor) is that sales wouldn't
| falter because they were already selling products as fast
| as physically possible due to supply constraints. The
| question then therefore is what is the forecast 2-5 years
| out? NVDA is IMO heavily diversified in markets that have
| long term plays that easily could substitute any dip in
| consumer GPUs due to less demand from crypto.
|
| TL;DR - I think people are overthinking this and if you
| don't have any idea of how to calculate what a meaningful
| penalty should be (i.e. "well the company was set to gain X
| amount of profit due to their infraction") then it's hard
| for me to take the argument seriously that $5M "isn't
| enough".
| flerchin wrote:
| If I were the SEC, I'd say that they lied about it to avoid a
| risk discount on their stock. The volatility of crypto
| currencies exposes their business to more risk. Whether
| that's true, or provable, IDK. However, it is motive for
| Nvidia to lie, and they did lie.
| remram wrote:
| Punishing the company just hurts investors further. The board
| members or CEO should be fined personally if they lied.
| techwiz137 wrote:
| It's interesting to note that their stock started to take off
| somewhere in 2014 and exploded in 2017, correlation doesn't mean
| causation, but it's fits so perfectly with the rise of mining.
|
| Well rise of mining is somewhat a misunderstanding, because since
| I've been a frequent user of cryptocurrency since early 2011,
| from my point of view that's when GPU mining started but I
| digress.
| tiku wrote:
| So a GPU made for gaming is used for computing something, and
| then it is their fault? Would they rule the same if you sell
| knives for Bushcrafting, but they are using the knives in
| kitchens?
|
| And one could argue that gaming is also rendering / computing /
| solving problems.
| tehbeard wrote:
| It's not about how the customer used them.
|
| It's about what NVidia told their stockholders in reports.
|
| Rather than: "This years growth is fueled by sales to the
| cryptominer market" (which is a pretty dang volatile market to
| sell to as a crash will floor nvidia's market with cheap used
| cards rather than selling overinflated new ones...)
|
| They lied and said: "oh yeah no, totes all those gamers buying
| cards for sick rigs", and the pc gamer market is much more
| stable, it's predictable, you know roughly when / how much of
| the market will be buying new to replace a card that's now too
| old/limited.
|
| tl;dr they lied about who they were selling to, because the
| volatility (no guarantee of that market still existing in a
| year or two's time) would make shareholders understandably
| nervous.
| dangerface wrote:
| I have seen several people claim nvidia lied and was telling
| investors that their increase in sales was because of a
| fortnight boom but I can't find where nvidia allegedly said
| that.
|
| It seems like they didn't lie they sold gpu and reported the
| correct number of gpu sold. The only claim nVidia made was
| that it marketed these cards to gamers which the SEC
| acknowledges they did, this isn't a lie.
| Linda703 wrote:
| hexo wrote:
| SEC charges company for not disclosing trade secret. What a
| shame.
| freemint wrote:
| As a publicly traded company you have to disclose certain trade
| secrets. Tough Luck.
| duxup wrote:
| Didn't they settle this already?
|
| https://www.engadget.com/nvidia-sec-settlement-crypto-mining...
| vmception wrote:
| Yes the dates match up with this article
|
| Its old news by a week or week and a half
| alangibson wrote:
| I'm pretty content to buy Nvidia on the way down. Their position
| in the type of silicon that is essential to the future of
| computing would be very hard to assault.
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