are ****coin miners buying all the high-end graphics cards?

saw this at PC Whirled 2 days ago:

Both messages should resonate with gamers, who have struggled to find available graphics cards because cryptocurrency speculators have snapped up the available supply. Meanwhile, those same gamers have had to wait while developers rewrote their code to take advantage of the new Ryzen chips.

Are these fools really buying up multiple cards to build
get-rich-quick rigs?

wrote:
saw this at PC Whirled 2 days ago:

Both messages should resonate with gamers, who have struggled to find available graphics cards because cryptocurrency speculators have snapped up the available supply. Meanwhile, those same gamers have had to wait while developers rewrote their code to take advantage of the new Ryzen chips.

Are these fools really buying up multiple cards to build
get-rich-quick rigs?

Yes.

There are a number of alt-coins and not all the
calculation methods will be exactly the same (for Proof of Work).

On one of the popular coins right now, the payback is about
two months. This is better than when Bitcoin was in a slump
and payback was two years or more. At one time, Bitcoin barely
paid for the electricity to make it. (Those same Bitcoins today
are worth more than 100x what they were worth back in the slump.)

One of the reasons they're after video cards now, is because
the algorithm used is memory-dependent. And in fact, you might
see some used cards hit the market that have 2GB of onboard
RAM. Perhaps a 4GB card is sufficient now, for efficient calculation.
But eventually, the size of object they grind up, will pass 4GB
and then the 4GB cards will not be as useful to them. Then they'll
buy up the 6GB cards, and so on.

And that will mean, as time passes, they'll buy the high end cards,
just to get the RAM on them.

The more video cards that go into circulation for this purpose,
the higher the "difficulty" level, and the longer the payback
period. And the payback is only short, when the trading price of
the coin is high. And that is a "volatile" quantity.

A good deal of the activity is in China. And one purpose for
doing this, is any country that has currency controls, the
alt coins offer a chance to ship currency out of the country,
without a bank or government knowing about it.

In my country, if I mine coins, I have to report them on income
tax. But the heat poured out by multiple GPUs, would make
the house a living hell. There's not much chance of me building
a mining rig here. Your video cards are safe.

As for how many video cards they're using, I would think they
would use a warehouse-full, for the dedicated miners. Those are the
people buying all the cards. The "little people" running a single
1080 aren't making a dent.

Paul

Interesting story Paul, I also read somewhat about this.

This could be a good reason to either completely ban these kinds of coins, or least ban this "contention for resources" or "computing something difficult just for coin mining and such" lol.

These coins apperently have the nasty habit of whatever it is that is so rare/difficult to calculate is being bought up.

So if I were to make a coin requiring general computations, they would start buying up all the good/fast processors and such...

Bad situations !

Hmmmmm...

On Friday, July 28, 2017 at 2:17:37 AM UTC+8, wrote:

So if I were to make a coin requiring general computations, they would start buying up all the good/fast processors and such...


I haven't heard of many using a Xeon Phi for mining yet.
Although Intel claims a huge peak teraflops for them, they are perhaps not
optimum for the computations involved.

On Thursday, July 27, 2017 at 6:56:16 AM UTC-4, Paul wrote:


As for how many video cards they're using, I would think they
would use a warehouse-full, for the dedicated miners. Those are the
people buying all the cards. The "little people" running a single
1080 aren't making a dent.

Paul

Good summary, and for a while I had the full Bitcoin deterministic wallet loaded on my machine, but I got out of bitcoin (when it was half of what it is now) since IMO it has no future, too slow (but people don't know that yet) except for as you say China currency evasion. And like you say the pros mine BTC in Iceland, for the obvious natural cooling.

RL