Looks like the crypto collapse has begun

[Astrallionheart]

You can drink wine and appreciate art. Cryptocurrencies aren't even that, you're literally paying someone to waste electricity for nothing.

There is no wine that is inarguably worth more than $1000/bottle. In the end, it's just wine, and the high valuation bottles are speculation.

There is no art that is worth millions of dollars (absent some mega sculptures, I guess) other than some circular definition of "it's worth what people will pay for it" which is equally valid for crypto.

Crypto is largely speculative value, but there is fundamental value in being able to make currency transactions that cannot be stopped by any government -- a large part of that coming from sovereign nations under sanction and criminal organizations. As such, crypto will maintain a value floor of some real currency, because those entities have a vested interest in making sure that you can buy legal goods and services with the currency to maintain its value for when they want to buy/sell large amounts of arms and/or cocaine.

All that said, I would very much like to see crypto plummet to sane levels that make it inviable for high-energy mining.

To me paintings and vases worth billions of dollars are a way for rich people to hide money and easily transport it whereas easily convertible things like fiat, gold, etc can be seized by authorities whereas the dubious value of some of these boutique items are an agreement between rich people that they will value these things at some astronomical value to preserve each other's wealth. Otherwise it's hard to explain how trinkets that were considered garbage in the 1990s and early 2000s are suddenly worth billions of dollars.

Crypto for me is yet another way for the rich, the illicit, and others evading taxes and/or capital controls to store wealth to move around easily as a backup plan. So in that sense, it's a fad of the day like certain types of art or antiques. In that sense name recognition probably will win out in the end--I don't see btc or eth being replaced in terms of market cap any time soon. Doge is purely Elon-meme driven and will probably crash back to irrelevance at some point.

 

[Pont]

It's worth what people will pay for it. You can handwave that away as 100% speculation, but that's just "GET OFF MY LAWN!!"-ism.

To be clear, I don't like cryptocurrency and I wish it would go away and I really wish it would be carbon taxed, at the very least.

However, there is real value in a currency that can facilitate trade in a way that nobody, not even government, can block short of disconnecting a country and everyone who works for it in any other country from the internet. That's a feature that no other currency can boast. That's as valid a "real" value as "if nothing else, you can pay your taxes earned in that currency to its own government". To some, who don't want to risk the speculative value, they will buy BTC, do their trade, and then cash out immediately. That props up the real, non-speculative value of the currency. There are people trading it for goods and service, therefore you can participate in the trade of goods and services with it, therefore it has real value.

Now, if you could successfully carbon tax cryptocurrency, then that would have a nice side-effect of spurring the growth of renewables.

 

[BFG10K]

Iran bans mining for four months: https://www.reuters.com/technology/iran ... 021-05-26/

More evidence crypto is nothing more than a ponzi scheme:
https://crypto-anonymous-2021.medium.co ... dcf78a64d3
https://medium.com/monetary-greed/coinb ... 6cc0ff1735

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

It's worth what people will pay for it. You can handwave that away as 100% speculation, but that's just "GET OFF MY LAWN!!"-ism.

You seem to have entirely missed my point.

 

[GeneralFailureDriveA]

All that said, I would very much like to see crypto plummet to sane levels that make it inviable for high-energy mining.

This would be the ideal long term case for it, certainly. Enough value to maintain that which it is useful for, yet not enough value to justify the restoration of mothballed power plants to operate the hardware.

Crypto coins are just a digital symbol. No more valuable in themselves than the letter F that appears on my screen when I hit the right key combination to produce it. I can do it over and over FFFFFFF and get reliable results. Given enough compute power, electricity and some time, I can produce an infinite number of crypto coins (or near enough that it doesn't make any difference) so really, their value is inherently zero beyond what people are willing to pay for them. Once people start to think about their *cost* versus their lack of uniqueness, hopefully their speculative value will go down.

You appear to fail to understand or appreciate the proof of work algorithms that make cryptocurrencies more than infinitely repeateable "digital symbols." They represent a real world investment in hardware and energy behind each symbol, with limited quantity, and this is the novel work they have represented: That one can have a limited issue digital token, based on actual resources, that people value for its utility. One may argue this ought not be, yet, clearly it is, at least for the current time.

Now, if you could successfully carbon tax cryptocurrency, then that would have a nice side-effect of spurring the growth of renewables.

Beyond your admission of not liking crypto currencies, is there a benefit to a carbon tax specifically applied to crypto currencies as opposed to general energy production? If your concern is the carbon emissions of the industrial economy, a more widespread carbon tax makes more sense, yet, perhaps your goal is that enough people dislike cryptocurrencies to successfully pass a sector-specific tax? Without China agreeing, it matters not.

More evidence crypto is nothing more than a ponzi scheme:

One may certainly call it a speculative bubble, but a ponzi scheme is a particular method of financial fraud paying early "investors" in the scheme from the fees of later entriants who have been lured by the observed returns of the early participants (witting or not).

It is not at all clear that a digital commodity type item fits this definition.

 

[Paladin]

Iran bans mining for four months: https://www.reuters.com/technology/iran ... 021-05-26/

More evidence crypto is nothing more than a ponzi scheme:
https://crypto-anonymous-2021.medium.co ... dcf78a64d3
https://medium.com/monetary-greed/coinb ... 6cc0ff1735

I always wondered about the point of Tether but that makes a lot of sense. Basically it allows coin traders to pretend they have dollars based on the claim that all Tethers should have been issued only when dollars of equal number/value were put into the market.

I don't doubt that it is essentially a ponzi scheme. I can't wait to see it explode once it becomes more clear to more people.

I dipped my toe into Chia to see how it works (and since I had the hardware sitting after being taken out of production use). After almost a month, I have filled up nearly 10TB of disk space, which required my desktop to be running at near 100% CPU all day for the month. I have nothing to show for it but a more worn out SSD and a couple of full disks now. The software projects I have 10 months before I will win a single XCH coin, assuming I keep growing my storage at the same rate (which I won't do), and that I am not unlucky (who knows). Basically, it might be slightly sooner or even much longer than that. The reality is that I will never see a crypto-dime.

I happened to read a bit about it in the last week and realized 2 things:

1: The growth of the Chia network is really fast. If I can't keep up with the overall growth of the network, I will likely never get anything from it and the chance goes down over time. The only way I ever could is if I were to buy a lot of surplus and some new hardware to keep up. Not happening.

2: The initial setup of Chia included the people who designed it and made the software issuing a huge pile of 'seed' coins to themselves and their investors to get the ball rolling for the trading of XCH and to make things feel right for the initial participants.

This is MLM. Similar to a ponzi scheme except that it does have other stuff going on besides just using new money to make it look like the old money is doing something good. The first people at tier 1 get all the benefits and the people who come along later, either buying XCH or plotting and farming Chia, simply burn up CPU and SSD and hard drives in order grow the Chia network and improve the value of the initial coins that were issued when Chia got started. Those seed coins have to have a 90 day warning before being sold but... who knows how they will issue that warning or whether they will even bother. Forgiveness is a lot easier than permission when the ownership of those coins is hard to track.

So yeah, ponzi scheme or MLM, take your pick. They don't even have to ship any sketchy beauty products, it's all profit.

 

[Hat Monster]

It's 100% speculative value. And I'm not making the argument that it's "over-valued," I'm saying it has zero objective value and furthermore the pursuit of it is wasteful out of proportion to any "value" even the speculators assign to it.

You're hitting multiple nails with this hammer.

What DOES have objective value?

Most of the value of gold or other precious metals is speculative. I can't eat it, drink it, or shoot you with it to take your food or water, it is worth nothing other than what I speculate someone else might pay me for it.

So I'm attesting that if I can eat it, drink it, or kill you with it, it has objective value.

This then subdivides value into things I can use to make food, drink, or weapons. Maybe I don't know how to forge steel into gun barrels, so steel wouldn't have objective value to me. This means objective value isn't quite as objective as we'd think it may be.

What about things I can use to stop someone else using their weapons on me? If I don't pay my taxes, the government will use its weapons to put me in jail. So the currency of my government also has objective value.

Objective value isn't as objective as you're attesting, because value itself demands subjectivity. Someone else must agree with a value for that value to even exist!

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

It's 100% speculative value. And I'm not making the argument that it's "over-valued," I'm saying it has zero objective value and furthermore the pursuit of it is wasteful out of proportion to any "value" even the speculators assign to it.

You're hitting multiple nails with this hammer.

What DOES have objective value?

I know something that doesn't.

Most of the value of gold or other precious metals is speculative. I can't eat it, drink it, or shoot you with it to take your food or water, it is worth nothing other than what I speculate someone else might pay me for it.

Gold's status as a prestige metal means it's got an inflated price relative to what it can actually be physically used for, but at the end of it all gold has practical physical uses. Bitcoin doesn't. What's more "producing" Bitcoin has so many serious drawbacks it has to be considered a net negative. The world is literally worse having "bitcoin" in it than not.

Again, I don't give a shit about the textbook Econ 101 definition of "value" and I'm not arguing based on that definition. Mob knee-breakers have "value" in that sense. Doesn't mean the world is better for having them in it.

 

[Pont]

Beyond your admission of not liking crypto currencies, is there a benefit to a carbon tax specifically applied to crypto currencies as opposed to general energy production?

Nope. Only the political reality that there are moneyed interests against carbon taxes on "productivity" that would be aligned with anything that would put damper on crypto currency and might support or at least not oppose carbon taxes on crypto currency.

 

[Pont]

but at the end of it all gold has practical physical uses. Bitcoin doesn't.

You're making the argument that because 1% of the value is real, that totally justifies the other 99% bubble value for things you like and understand, like gold and wine and art.

I've pointed out that Bitcoin has practical, real-world value that no sovereign currency provides. You just don't like what that value is used for, but you're not really countering the argument that it has real value other than vigorous assertion.

 

[Hat Monster]

Gold's status as a prestige metal means it's got an inflated price relative to what it can actually be physically used for, but at the end of it all gold has practical physical uses. Bitcoin doesn't. What's more "producing" Bitcoin has so many serious drawbacks it has to be considered a net negative. The world is literally worse having "bitcoin" in it than not.

If you think the tiny practical value of gold has any meaning at all, then I have this wonder-material "aluminum" to sell you. Pont has already pointed out that blockchain (Bitcoin, etc.) has many advantages worthless, useless, metals like gold do not.

Also if you wish to maintain this definition of "value", I have many bridges and some distilled triglycerides of ophidians you may be interested in.

 

[Astrallionheart]

I think the fascination with gold is it represents some sort of immortality that humans can never reach, being an inert metal of timeless durability.

Beside that, some minor industrial uses and electronics uses, but given its 1 to 16 ratio with silver, the price floor if it loses its monetary metal status could be in the $500 range given the current price of silver (which was de-monetized in the 1960s. If it was still a monetary metal like gold it would probably be priced north of $70/ounce).

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

but at the end of it all gold has practical physical uses. Bitcoin doesn't.

You're making the argument that because 1% of the value is real, that totally justifies the other 99% bubble value for things you like and understand, like gold and wine and art.

No I'm not. I never defended the inflated "value" of that shit. I'm saying that even they have something real at the end of it that Bitcoin just doesn't.

I've pointed out that Bitcoin has practical, real-world value that no sovereign currency provides. You just don't like what that value is used for, but you're not really countering the argument that it has real value other than vigorous assertion.

Yeah, the same value as mob knee-breakers: the technical definition of "value" from econ 101. It does bad things for bad people, but because they're willing to pay for it it has "value" in a strictly economic sense. And to get that "value," you have to tie up consumer tech that's increasingly necessary for our online connected life and wreck the fucking planet. Insert that well-worn New Yorker cartoon here.

If you think the tiny practical value of gold has any meaning at all, then I have this wonder-material "aluminum" to sell you.

Since you can't just substitute aluminum for gold in every use case and get the same chemical or physical characteristics, that's literally a false equivalence. You're better than this.

Pont has already pointed out that blockchain (Bitcoin, etc.) has many advantages worthless, useless, metals like gold do not.

Blockchain doesn't solve any real-world problem better than anything else we already have. It's a solution in search of a problem.
Meanwhile gold's chemical and physical properties mean there are uses for it that cannot practically be subbed out. So again you're wrong. Not even "matter of opinion" wrong. Chemistry is chemistry for a reason, because atoms of one element aren't the same as atoms from another. I can deal with a lot of differences of opinion or "value judgments" but snarkily reducing gold just just overpriced aluminum is not a kind of dishonesty I'm going to tolerate.

 

[Pont]

It does bad things for bad people, but because they're willing to pay for it it has "value" in a strictly economic sense.

So does cocaine have value, or not?

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

As bad as cocaine has become for the world, the thing that cocaine has over bitcoin is that cocaine at least has medicinal utility and is still used as such. And growing it sequesters carbon dioxide instead of emitting it.

 

[Blue Apple]

blockchain (Bitcoin, etc.) has many advantages worthless, useless, metals like gold do not.

Don't confuse the technology with its end products.

Gold, art, wine, drugs all require intensive work to create assets that cannot be duplicated by other means.

But anyone can fork bitcoin and create a new blockchain crypto (see Dogecoin). Now brands or network effect can be valued as intangible assets but it's kind of weird to see value assigned to individual bitcoins rather than the network itself. And having these individual coins rise in value is even weirder, the bitcoin network works the same whether a coin is worth one dollar or one million dollars.

 

[BFG10K]

Another crypto farm busted for stealing power from the grid: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/28/bitcoin ... raid-.html

Police were tipped off because it had all the classic signs of a cannabis farm.

 

[etr]

I could have not been paying enough attention, but was there all that much movement in the yard markets for GPU's after the crypto spike a few years ago?

I'd be surprised if there was no bump there driven by the last crypto crash, but my (less attentive) sense was that there wasn't a huge one. My recollection was that price points on the TTX 20x0 series were a good bit higher than the GTX 10x0 commanded before the last crypto boom. If the used markets had much excess supply, I'd have expected a glut of used GTX 10x0 parts push that pricing down.

In some ways, I could see miners hanging onto their cards. If card supply gets constrained when mining booms, why not hang onto the cards you have in case it booms again? If you do see signs of another boom, you could swap in new cards as you can get them. At that point, the old cards would command more value when the would if sold during a mining crash.

Bottom line, all this leads me to think there will be a notable lag between the crypto crash and generally good video card availability.

 

[IceStorm]

I'd be surprised if there was no bump there driven by the last crypto crash, but my (less attentive) sense was that there wasn't a huge one. My recollection was that price points on the TTX 20x0 series were a good bit higher than the GTX 10x0 commanded before the last crypto boom.

Correct. nVidia saw people willing to pay $500-$700 for a 1070, and more for a 1080 (that was pricing in H2 2017 and early 2018), so they moved Turing prices up to match.

If the used markets had much excess supply, I'd have expected a glut of used GTX 10x0 parts push that pricing down.

They did. The Super cards were a significant correction. Turing also didn't sell as well as Pascal.

In some ways, I could see miners hanging onto their cards. If card supply gets constrained when mining booms, why not hang onto the cards you have in case it booms again?

Efficiency. Newer GPU generations become more efficient than the previous generation.

Bottom line, all this leads me to think there will be a notable lag between the crypto crash and generally good video card availability.

The market sees that people are willing to pay $750 for a 3070, $1050 for a 3080, and $2200 for a 3090 at retail from AIBs. Until someone comes along to disrupt this pricing (Intel), it will continue.

 

[NervousEnergy]

The market sees that people are willing to pay $750 for a 3070, $1050 for a 3080, and $2200 for a 3090 at retail from AIBs. Until someone comes along to disrupt this pricing (Intel), it will continue.

The market should be seeing eBay pricing at $2100-2400 for a 3080. When I got my EVGA queue 3080 FTW3 six weeks ago it went for $2300.

 

[Hat Monster]

Since you can't just substitute aluminum for gold in every use case and get the same chemical or physical characteristics, that's literally a false equivalence. You're better than this.

The only person saying that is you.

You claimed gold has practical value and then linked this to its commodity value. I argued these two things have no relation and offered up aluminium as a material with practical value. I did not say this replaces gold. You did as a strawman. I am not a strawman.

If gold's practical value had any influence, at all, on its commodity value, then you are predicting aluminium would be much more valuable than gold is. The real world does not bear out this prediction.

 

[BFG10K]

They just printed another billion Tethers: https://whale-alert.io/transaction/tron ... d396a2e6e0

1 Tether "equals" 1 USD, because some d00d on the internet said so. Crypto is tanking so the ponzi scheme simply creates more imaginary numbers.

"Fiat currencies are bad because they print money", yo!

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Since you can't just substitute aluminum for gold in every use case and get the same chemical or physical characteristics, that's literally a false equivalence. You're better than this.

The only person saying that is you.

You claimed gold has practical value and then linked this to its commodity value.

No I didn't. Jesus Christ, this isn't hard.
My link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Other_applications Specifically bypassing the "Monetary Use" section above it and saying nothing at all about its use as a commodity.
It's hard to believe you're making this kind of mistake honestly.

If gold's practical value had any influence, at all, on its commodity value, then you are predicting aluminium would be much more valuable than gold is. The real world does not bear out this prediction.

That wasn't my argument, though. Try again?

 

[TigerAway]

Since you can't just substitute aluminum for gold in every use case and get the same chemical or physical characteristics, that's literally a false equivalence. You're better than this.

The only person saying that is you.

You claimed gold has practical value and then linked this to its commodity value.

No I didn't. Jesus Christ, this isn't hard.
My link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Other_applications Specifically bypassing the "Monetary Use" section above it and saying nothing at all about its use as a commodity.
It's hard to believe you're making this kind of mistake honestly.

If gold's practical value had any influence, at all, on its commodity value, then you are predicting aluminium would be much more valuable than gold is. The real world does not bear out this prediction.

That wasn't my argument, though. Try again?

I think we all agree that gold has practical uses.

I would argue that Bitcoin has practical use too. If you’re living in a part of the world where your purchases are being tracked or your local currency is unstable.

The problem with Bitcoin is its energy cost. However, let’s not forget the energy cost of mining, transporting, purifying, processing, and storing gold, including the environmental damage. Even in developed countries the environmental damage of strip mining seems significant.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Right, Bitcoin is a model of price stability. That's why the bitcoin used to buy a pizza in 2010 is "worth" 38 million dollars today while running the same hash that generated them over again wouldn't net you a hundredth of a cent.

 

[ramases]

No, it doesn't, and the first purported use is very troublesome, because it not only may lead to financial losses but endanger people:

Because transaction costs for BTC are so high, it isn't used for purchases of every day life. You wouldn't buy a coffee with BTC, for example, because the TX costs and the inconvenience of having to wait for confirmation make it impractical.

In a highly tracked environment, this lack of every-day activity automatically makes every purchase settled in BTC suspect. In essence, it paints a huge "likely bought something it doesn't want the government to know about" target on the wallet addresses used, helpfully encoding it into the global block chain where it is permanently stored and easily accessible to the trackers.

Now the users of the addresses have a new problem: They need to permanently prevent their adversaries from breaching the pseudonimity of the addresses. Empirically, the success rate of ordinary citizens accomplishing this against nation state actors (a national police *is* a nation state actor) isn't great.

Hence the crypto-evangelists that hawk this angle are endangering people because they flunked Signals Intelligence 101, and really need to shut the fuck up.

As for price stability, eh, using an asset class that basically amounts to "Forex speculation for the impatient", and claim that it hedges against currency volatility is almost as special as ignorance of more than 100 year old (counter)intelligence techniques.

Just using a stable foreign currency works much better for such use-cases, and indeed is what people have been doing for a long time.

 

[TigerAway]

No, it doesn't, and the first purported use is very troublesome, because it not only may lead to financial losses but endanger people:

Because transaction costs for BTC are so high, it isn't used for purchases of every day life. You wouldn't buy a coffee with BTC, for example, because the TX costs and the inconvenience of having to wait for confirmation make it impractical.

In a highly tracked environment, this lack of every-day activity automatically makes every purchase settled in BTC suspect. In essence, it paints a huge "likely bought something it doesn't want the government to know about" target on the wallet addresses used, helpfully encoding it into the global block chain where it is permanently stored and easily accessible to the trackers.

Now the users of the addresses have a new problem: They need to permanently prevent their adversaries from breaching the pseudonimity of the addresses. Empirically, the success rate of ordinary citizens accomplishing this against nation state actors (a national police *is* a nation state actor) isn't great.

Hence the crypto-evangelists that hawk this angle are endangering people because they flunked Signals Intelligence 101, and really need to shut the fuck up.

As for price stability, eh, using an asset class that basically amounts to "Forex speculation for the impatient", and claim that it hedges against currency volatility is almost as special as ignorance of more than 100 year old (counter)intelligence techniques.

Just using a stable foreign currency works much better for such use-cases, and indeed is what people have been doing for a long time.

1. But folks can’t argue that criminals use it because it’s anonymous and then turn around and state that it offers zero anonymity. I agree nation states will always get you, but I’m thinking more of the average Joe wanting to buy something without it being tracked — a good which would be legal in a free country. Like a book or Hollywood movie or PlayStation or something.
2. I’m thinking of extreme local currency mismanagement causing inflation like in Venezuela or Turkey. Going to the bank and paying fees to get USD — if the bank is even open or allows that — and then carrying around foreign cash like USD to buy stuff, or carrying around physical gold, which can both be easily stolen, is much less convenient than a digital solution.

 

[w00key]

1. It is not completely anonymous but you "Can't stop the signal, Mal". Even if a coin is "tainted" and tracked by agencies like all ransom payments or known hacks, you can wash it like IRL money for a % and get back clean(ish) coins. It doesn't hurt criminals much but legit citizen who just want to buy porn can be tracked easily, those too often just send from Coinbase to the weed supplier and get banned, very bad idea but opsec with common users is non existent.

2. If everyone is carrying crypto wallets robbers will just adjust to rob that too. If we are going to pay with crypto, just use a stablecoin pegged to USD. I don't want my wallet to grow / shrink randomly. I just to hold on to dollars and euros and spend it without huge fees and tracking.


First privacy guaranteed (a la Monero) pegged coin with low fees will have my backing. That works for buying things that I don't want tracked, and with a peg, there is no FOMO, no epic payouts for developers / early adopters paid by people joining the pyramid scheme at the bottom. It will be a true usable currency. I won't "invest" or carry a ton of it but put a hundred $/€ of it in a wallet for small payments just like the IRL one, for the rest, I either withdraw on demand (just like IRL) or pay with a card.

Lots of "just like IRL" but that's how you get a usable system in my opinion instead of yet another pyramid scheme.

 

[ramases]

1. But folks can’t argue that criminals use it because it’s anonymous and then turn around and state that it offers zero anonymity.

How reliable and hard to breach a wallets pseudonymity is is wildly misunderstood, perhaps because it is also wildly context-dependent. BTC pseudonimity is stronger for wallets that act entirely within the BTC ecosystem, but considerably lower for wallets that are used at a BTC/fiat boundary. Additionally, most of those boundaries have some sort of connection to a country or regulatory environment, and the owners of that environment get an additional leg up in breaching the pseudonimity.

This doesn't really affect the institutional "pay RMB to mine BTC, sell BTC to USD" pipeline, because their BTC/USD boundary is outside of China, the operator of that boundary would tell any PRC official that wanted to inquire to fuck off, and the owner (the US, an EU member state, ...) of the operator's regulatory environment would respond to request to an official request for legal assistance similarly in content but more polite in form.

I agree nation states will always get you, but I’m thinking more of the average Joe wanting to buy something without it being tracked — a good which would be legal in a free country. Like a book or Hollywood movie or PlayStation or something.

Sure. A poster of the Tiananmen Square Tank Man is entirely legal in free countries, but would be troublesome to buy in China.

That doesn't change the fact that in such a context, and absent a mass of innocent "I am gonna buy a carton of milk" purchases, any BTC-denominated purchase of goods and services is going to send a "bought something the authorities may take a dim view on" signal.

Actually, it is even worse, because the blockchain doesn't forget, and therefore permanently encodes this signal. If five years down the road Chinese goons bust up a Tank Man poster shop in (hypothetical) Beijing, and discover that the owner has the key to for a wallet, the blockchain helpfully will provide them with an immutable record of all past transactions going to that wallet.

2. I’m thinking of extreme local currency mismanagement causing inflation like in Venezuela or Turkey. Going to the bank and paying fees to get USD — if the bank is even open or allows that — and then carrying around foreign cash like USD to buy stuff, or carrying around physical gold, which can both be easily stolen, is much less convenient than a digital solution.

I ... don't think you've accounted for all the difficulties inherent in taking this from abstract theory to practical implementation.

For starters, how are you going to buy that BTC? This is a serious question. Remember, to purchase BTC you have to offer your counterparty something they value, and the Venezuelan bolivar highly likely isn't going to fit that bill.

Next question, what types of things can you pay for it? Food, likely not, because again the frictional costs of BTC transactions are too high for every-day purchases. Right now the TX fees of a single BTC transaction average 4.3 USD. For comparison purposes, those lucky enough to get paid in USD in Venezuela right now -- basically the only way of obtaining qualified labour in Venezuela right now is to pay in USD, not in Bolivar -- net 300 to 400 USD/month.

So its gonna be limited to more expensive items, but that still leaves the question: Are your BTC valuable to your counterparty? Suppose you want to buy a new laptop. You give BTC to trader, trader gives you new laptop. One of the big questions is, then, can your trader themselves source the laptop and settle the purchase in BTC? Possibly, but it for sure is going to be much more difficult than buying with USD.

Therefore, in such a scenario getting BTC is going to be as expensive and difficult as getting foreign, hard currency, but the BTC is still going to be less valuable in practice than the equal denomination in foreign currency.

 

[w00key]

No one is going to hold on to the BTC they received for a laptop. They won't be able to pay Dell for supplying them with a randomly cratering and mooning currency, so the second it hits the merchant account, it is traded for USD.

Which makes BTC just a very expensive and annoying to use prepaid Visa card. Even without Tx fees if you use a different crypto you still pay two USD-crypto conversion, or you have to be those types that go to the casino after getting a paycheck and go for double or nothing.


Front page: https://meincmagazine.com/gadgets/2021/06 ... attackers/

I have no idea how but it is amazing that they managed to get back half of the ransom. Chain analysis isn't new, you can track every movement, but getting the private key? That's... new. Did they track down the receiver(s) and beat them until he talks?

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

I have no idea how but it is amazing that they managed to get back half of the ransom. Chain analysis isn't new, you can track every movement, but getting the private key? That's... new. Did they track down the receiver(s) and beat them until he talks?

They were probably able to get a court order to have the exchange unlock the wallet. So the less violent version of the $5 wrench.

 

[Semi On]

I have no idea how but it is amazing that they managed to get back half of the ransom. Chain analysis isn't new, you can track every movement, but getting the private key? That's... new. Did they track down the receiver(s) and beat them until he talks?

Don't fuck with America's oil.

 

[continuum]

/// OFFICIAL MODERATION NOTICE ///

---

As much as cryptocurrency mining can be done on GPUs-- and GPUs are indeed an A/V forum topic.

This discussion is veering way far from GPUs...

 

[asbath]

Speaking of GPUs being used for mining, my friend just sold his 2080, bought a 2060 and pocketed $500. He then used that $500 to buy a PS5. He won the 2080 in a lucky draw, but never really uses it. So why not buy a console with it instead? His kids use the computer for games more than he does, so it's not like Roblox and Minecraft need the ooomph that a 2080 offers.


UPDATE:

I wouldn't believe it if I didn't look it up myself, but people are also trying to sell the retail packaging for GPUs now, asking for anywhere from $10-50. Seriously? You're now trying to sell the box for $50? :facepalm:

 

[BFG10K]

JPR says 25% of GPUs went to miners: https://www.jonpeddie.com/blog/crypto-m ... -aib-sales

ASRock says GPU pricing is dropping due to less demand from miners: https://www.techspot.com/news/90096-asr ... emand.html

 

[rodalpho]

Is it less demand or just that new Nvidia GPUs are poorly performing miners? I guess AMD is still shipping product.

 

[IceStorm]

Hardware Unboxed has put up their monthly check of CPU/GPU prices. CPU prices are no longer being tracked as CPU pricing has returned to normal, save the 5900X in the USA.

Here's where they start discussing the impact of crypto on prices:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yqzydXAd-k&t=195s

- Crypto prices have fallen
- Ethereum fees have dropped meaning Ethereum mining is less profitable
- Ethereum difficulty is dropping

The first two above are reducing demand by miners for GPUs, which is in turn lowering scalper pricing. That last one, though, means if you're mining for the long haul, now is the time to mine Ethereum.

One thing they don't cover is that difficulty on alt coins is going up. Ergo's difficulty has been seeing increases as people move to mine Ergo, which is not impacted by the new mining limiter added by nVidia.

As an aside, I recently had a chance to sign up for Snailbot. Snaibot's monthly fee of ~$100, paid quarterly, wasn't too off-putting. Because I build a lot of ITX systems, having a bot to get tiny cards isn't necessarily a bad thing as MSI, PNY, and Gigabyte only make a small handful of single-fan cards even in good years. What stopped me from signing up was the $2399 up-front cost. Yeah... no. If i was a system builder as my profession, I could see paying that, but not as an individual. Anywho, if you wanted an idea about the cost of using a bot that works, there you go.

 

[Paladin]

That's highway robbery. I'd do anything I could to avoid that just on sheer moral grounds, let alone the price to play. Insane.

 

[debra]

Some eth miners are starting to sell off GPUs in anticipation for a big sell off.

Next week or so there is a significant upgrade to the etherium network that will reduce income from miners as much 30%. Gas fees are very low and ROI on new GPUs is not going to be there anymore.

 

[rrrhal]

Things must be getting better - you can buy a GeForce GT 1030 for "only" $115. Less than 50% over MSRP!!!