Crypto Mining and impact on the PC market

[tinyitx]

Traditional gambling (eg lottery or raffle) has an actual probability that one can calculate. Say, you can actually calculate the probability of each hand in a game of black jack or roulette. A casino does not need to cheat or manipulate anything but just relies on the slight favour in the house to win in the long run.

I think, mining is worse in this sense as it is completely unrelated to probability. And, up and down of the prices can be manipulated easily by the big players, whether it is an individual (eg Elon) or a large corporation. The money in the pond just keeps on changing hands, always from the hands of the large number of small fishes to the hands of the sharks (and a very small no of smart and lucky small fishes).
From an investment perspective, I trust Warren Buffet much much more than Elon.

It is like playing a game of musical chair. Those who always get a seat are the ones who are connected with the piano player. Go figure.

 

[paulesko]

Just a couple of things I´d like to point out.

This is the price of ethereum since its inception (more or less)

This is the same for bitcoin

You don´t need to be a genius to make some money here, It´s not like it goes to 0 in 5 minutes or anything like that. I´m not saying it´s easy but there is a CLEAR trend, and it´s a strecth to say something it´s gambling when it´s been like this for ten years in the case of Bitcoin. As i say this chart is a representation of human psychology and behaviour, it desn´t go up and down in a random way, although is a hard read. The lower the timeframe, the harder (it´s almost impossible to earn money fast).

Also, about laundering money, I get that it is something that can bother many people. but look:
(this is just the first and more recent news I´ve found about the subject)

World's biggest banks 'allowed criminals to launder dirty money', leaked documents allege

Thousands of documents obtained by journalists allegedly reveal trillions of dollars of dirty money being moved around the world.

news.sky.com

Traditional banks and traditional banks are in a completely different league when it comes to money laundry, here they are talking about 2 trillion in 17 years, and that´s only some, I guess they haven´t found all at once... Take in mind the whloe crypto market is just around 1.5 trillion, there is not enough liquidity there to do it at that pace, I guess it´s not even in the same order of magnitude because the size of the entitites used to do it are not in the same order of magnitude. "Standard" money and traditional financing system has stablished itself over the years as a very good environment to develop illicit business and criminal actions, and that was never a reason for not use money. It´s not "the thing" itself it´s how you use it, and given the fact that crypto currency is completely transparent (NOT privacy coins) and traceable, it looks like a very bad idea to develope such busineses in this system, because whatever transaction you do, it gets engrave like in stone FOR EVER.

As for the GPU market and mining, well I think, as I´ve said before, that there are more factors to it. Take in mind that it´s almost impossible to buy a Playstation 5 (at least where I live) and it´s not being used for mining, in fact the chips inside it (AMD) are not the ones that are being used for mining on GPU´s. The problem of the chip market is more complex than just miners buying gpus.

 

[CC Ricers]

Whenever I think of elon musk, I think of wannabe tech dudebros and dillweed joe rogan cult members lmfao

I think he's too awkward in front of a camera to be a tech dudebro lol. But that's including every public presentation I've seen with the guy.

He's been in it for the long haul and I don't buy the cult of personality that grew around him in the past few years. I'm just in it for the vision for private space exploration, ever since I first found out about Scaled Composites (of SpaceShip One) and the X Prize competition in 2004. It was one the few rays of hope in the wake of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. I'm not part of the pack that just heard of the guy two or three years ago. I'm just a big space nerd

 

[tinyitx]

I think he's too awkward in front of a camera to be a tech dudebro lol. But that's including every public presentation I've seen with the guy.

He's been in it for the long haul and I don't buy the cult of personality that grew around him in the past few years. I'm just in it for the vision for private space exploration, ever since I first found out about Scaled Composites (of SpaceShip One) and the X Prize competition in 2004. It was one the few rays of hope in the wake of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. I'm not part of the pack that just heard of the guy two or three years ago. I'm just a big space nerd

Elon Musk is no Cochrane and Space X is no 1701-D...lol

BTW, the 2 graphs above have the vertical (y) axis in a log scale, I suppose. One should also look at the linear scale to fully grasp the 'craziness'. Log scale has a side effect of 'suppressing' the volatile nature as the hourly/daily spikes/fluctuations are 'smoothened out'.

 

[paulesko]

Yes, it´s log scale, because in linear is just.... well.... look at it yourself. For those unfamiliar with these charts, logarithmic charts represents equal "jump" for equal percentage, while linear scale charts shows equal jump for equal amount. going from 10.000 to 15.000 would show the same candle size as going from 1000 to 1500 on a log scale chart, but not even close on the linear one.

Bitcoin on linear scale

Here, that candle near 2014 that is bigger than the others but small anyway, is a 4.000% upwards candle

 

[CC Ricers]

As for the GPU market and mining, well I think, as I´ve said before, that there are more factors to it. Take in mind that it´s almost impossible to buy a Playstation 5 (at least where I live) and it´s not being used for mining, in fact the chips inside it (AMD) are not the ones that are being used for mining on GPU´s. The problem of the chip market is more complex than just miners buying gpus.

I noticed a lot in PC gaming circles there is a lot of tunnel vision going on with the chip shortage. They don't know much on how high performance GPUs are just a tip of the iceberg of all the wafers that have to be made- most of them are put into more mundane uses, in everyday items from cars to pregnancy tests. Factories can't ship out enough cars to be made. Car rental companies are feeling these effects this year, by not being able to accept as many new cars for their fleet, driving up the cost of rentals. On the more general purpose computing side of things, there's a greater focus on SoC's for laptops and embedded since there are greater yields compared to GPUs.

Miners are an easy scapegoat for all this because they genuinely affected the stock of graphics cards back in 2014-15. So gamers are convinced history is just repeating itself in 2020 almost the same and think, "we can blame miners again", even though it's not at all the same this time. It's shutdowns of the supply chain crunching consumers, not consumers bottlenecking a supply chain.