[HN Gopher] Crypto Crashed So Hard It May No Longer Be Profitabl...
___________________________________________________________________
Crypto Crashed So Hard It May No Longer Be Profitable to Mine
Ethereum
Author : thunderbong
Score : 31 points
Date : 2022-06-17 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hothardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hothardware.com)
| rapjr9 wrote:
| If you have a use for the heat generated (like heating a home or
| business) then running a miner means getting free heat, even if
| the cryptocoin generated does not pay for the electricity.
| Current cryptominers are generally too noisy for home heating
| though (although GPU's might be quieter).
| lxgr wrote:
| Electric heating is extremely inefficient, compared to almost
| all alternatives.
| LegitShady wrote:
| electrical heating is 100% efficient - heat pumps, though,
| have higher efficiency since they're just moving heat instead
| of generating it.
| anonymousab wrote:
| 100% efficient at the home, but not necessarily overall.
| Power generation itself and transmission to the home can be
| much less efficient (and much more expensive!) than, say,
| home natural gas heating.
|
| Depends on the area and many other factors, e.g. how the
| electricity is generated. In much of the northern US/south
| eastern Canada, electric heating is much more expensive and
| less efficient overall.
| ipspam wrote:
| Heating a single room as opposed to a house can allow
| electrically generated heat to make sense.
|
| Keep the house at 66, heat one room at a time to 70.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My previous house had resistive electrical heating, and I
| seriously considered building a mining rig to only run in the
| winter.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Such an uninformed post. POW has difficulty adjustments.
| jasonlaramburu wrote:
| How does the recent decision by the ETH devs to delay a
| significant change to the difficulty algorithm factory in? This
| 'difficulty bomb' would have made mining significantly less
| profitable.
|
| https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/22/06/276653...
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| The article you linked isn't quite inaccurate- the difficulty
| bomb is a mechanism to force the network to upgrade
| periodically.
|
| Better explanation from https://docs.ethhub.io/questions-
| about-ethereum/what-is-the-...
|
| >The Difficulty Bomb was originally put in place for a
| variety of reasons:
|
| >- To act as a deterrant for miners who wish to continue
| mining the Ethereum 1.0 (Proof of Work) chain once the
| network moved fully to the Ethereum 2.0 (Proof of Stake)
| chain
|
| >- To ensure that the core developers of Ethereum 1.0 are
| "forced" to upgrade the network via a hard fork (if only to
| delay the effects of the bomb) so that the network does not
| stagnate innovation-wise
| nubb wrote:
| just in time for the upcoming switch to pos. a lot of drama in
| the mining world around the merge.
|
| the running meme is the miners will move to etc and call that the
| real eth.
| dontbenebby wrote:
| The gamers will be happy they can get a GPU again.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| for real, I don't need a GPU at all but if we start seeing
| cards around MSRP I might bite.
| cbozeman wrote:
| I'm hoping the crypto crash lasts for about six months or so
| and a lot of these miners who were taking my precious gaming
| cards start to struggle and have to sell all their old 3080s
| / 3090s / 6800 XTs / 6900 XTs for around half of what they
| paid. If I can pick up a 6900 XT for $499 or so, especially
| used from a miner who's had it undervolted and likely running
| at 80% or less all day, I'll bite.
|
| I want the pain to really hurt. They deserve it. I would
| blame NVIDIA and AMD for not ramping up production, but the
| sad fact is, there's only so many foundries capable of
| producing GPU chips and those are TSMC and Samsung, so it's
| really a matter of not having enough capacity.
| tsp wrote:
| You probably don't want to buy a used mining card. There
| were reports about drastic performance decreases after a
| certain time of mining with them. I don't find the link any
| more, but it was on HN as well.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Even if you _only_ intend to do ML stuff with it, the price-
| to-performance ratio of Nvidia 's next-gen GPUs are going to
| be insane. Just the jump from 8nm to 5nm alone will be pretty
| crazy.
| LegitShady wrote:
| nobody knows what the prices will be, so until then I'm not
| sure we can declare price to performance anything.
|
| As it stands, the previous generation shows that prices can
| become arbitrarily high if supply is low. Two years and a
| crypto crash later the cards are getting close to their
| MSRP from two years ago.
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| 1. Price goes down
|
| 2. Miners become disincentivized to mine
|
| 3. Some miners shut off machinery
|
| 4. Network mining difficulty adjusts to new equilibrium
|
| Same action occurs in the opposite direction when the price rises
| cowvin wrote:
| How long does it take for the difficulty to adjust to the
| current prices? Something like weeks, right?
| viraptor wrote:
| It already happened https://2miners.com/eth-network-
| difficulty the adjustment happens continuously with new
| blocks every ~14s, so the response is pretty quick.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I remember reading that it's hypothetically possible for
| Bitcoin to get caught in a trap if the price falls extremely
| precipitously. The difficulty only gets adjusted after a
| certain number of blocks, and if the profitability of mining
| drops fast enough, you could find a situation where it is
| impractical to mine enough blocks to trigger the difficulty
| adjustment.
|
| My impression was that this was mostly just a problem in
| theory, and would not be triggered by the sort of decline in
| prices we're seeing in recent days. I assume the same is true
| for Ethereum?
| nly wrote:
| Surely miners would just take the short term loss to be the
| last man standing at the other side?
| pedrocr wrote:
| I'll just wait for you to take that short term loss and
| restart the mining when it's profitable again. Since that's
| what everyone thinks there's an incentive trap there. And
| now someone that actually does decide to take the loss has
| an incentive to make a 50%+ attack on the network to double
| spend their way into profitability.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Not a crypto fan but regarding the 51%+ attack that is
| sort of covered by game theory. By performing the double
| spend they doom the network itself so it will either be
| forked so it may continue or entirely die out.
|
| Either way the party carrying out the attack is unlikely
| to be able to benefit from it, especially if a
| prerequisite of the viability of the attack is the
| network already being incredibly week.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I don't follow. In what sense would they be the last man
| standing?
| bdhcuidbebe wrote:
| Yes please yes! stop wasting energy on this nonsense
| RGamma wrote:
| Cheap GPUs here I come!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-06-17 23:01 UTC)