Crypto Mining and impact on the PC market

[AlexTSG]

Disclaimer: I have cryptocurrency, I have mined it in the past, and I have made good money from it. I do not live in a basement

There's some light at the end of the tunnel regarding cryptocurrency mining, at least when it comes to availability of graphics cards.

Ethereum is by far the most profitable thing to mine, especially with the new 30 series GeForce graphics cards. Currently, even with inflated pricing you could break even on your GPU in around 6 months (depending on electricity and cooling costs).

However, Ethereum is currently in the process of moving from Proof of Work (GPU mining), to Proof of Stake (new coins are generated as "interest" on savings)

This move will likely take another 18+ months, but after that Ethereum will not be generated by mining. Other cryptocurrency will continue to be mined with GPUs, but may be significantly less profitable.

In the shorter term, NVIDIA has already implemented an Ethereum hashrate limiter into the new Geforce RTX 3060 (non-Ti) cards, and will continue to do so on cards released in the future, including the upcoming GeForce 3080 Ti. NVIDIA claim that this is not going to be something that can be bypassed easily (VBIOS flashing or an older driver for example). They are also releasing a range of CMP cards that are "Made to Mine". More info here:

GeForce Is Made for Gaming, CMP Is Made to Mine | The Official NVIDIA Blog

In addition to this, there is a change coming to Ethereum in July which will stop transactional fees from being paid to miners. These fees account for around 50% of the income that miners make. More about that here:

Ethereum's 'EIP 1559' Fee Market Overhaul Greenlit for July - CoinDesk

So, given all the changes I've listed above, Ethereum mining is likely to become far less profitable, and this should make cards more readily available within the next few months.

Hopefully I'll then be able to buy a graphics card for myself!

 

[Skripka]

Disclaimer: I have cryptocurrency, I have mined it in the past, and I have made good money from it. I do not live in a basement

There's some light at the end of the tunnel regarding cryptocurrency mining, at least when it comes to availability of graphics cards.

Ethereum is by far the most profitable thing to mine, especially with the new 30 series GeForce graphics cards. Currently, even with inflated pricing you could break even on your GPU in around 6 months (depending on electricity and cooling costs).

However, Ethereum is currently in the process of moving from Proof of Work (GPU mining), to Proof of Stake (new coins are generated as "interest" on savings)

This move will likely take another 18+ months, but after that Ethereum will not be generated by mining. Other cryptocurrency will continue to be mined with GPUs, but may be significantly less profitable.

In the shorter term, NVIDIA has already implemented an Ethereum hashrate limiter into the new Geforce RTX 3060 (non-Ti) cards, and will continue to do so on cards released in the future, including the upcoming GeForce 3080 Ti. NVIDIA claim that this is not going to be something that can be bypassed easily (VBIOS flashing or an older driver for example). They are also releasing a range of CMP cards that are "Made to Mine". More info here:

GeForce Is Made for Gaming, CMP Is Made to Mine | The Official NVIDIA Blog

In addition to this, there is a change coming to Ethereum in July which will stop transactional fees from being paid to miners. These fees account for around 50% of the income that miners make. More about that here:

Ethereum's 'EIP 1559' Fee Market Overhaul Greenlit for July - CoinDesk

So, given all the changes I've listed above, Ethereum mining is likely to become far less profitable, and this should make cards more readily available within the next few months.

Hopefully I'll then be able to buy a graphics card for myself!

Yea right. Keep dreaming

1. The people actually buying up the entire GPU supply in bulk...they hire ex-Nvidia engineers/developers. Nvidia can make driver and VBIOS changes all they want--those people can rewrite the driver to do what they want it to. They have been for a while. The only people that this will stop are consumers buying single cards....not the corporate/industrial hashing operations
2. Nvidia splitting its production into even more SKUs, e.g. mining-specific, there is no stock of--means there's even less GPU supply to actually go to system builders. It also means there's even more e-waste when the latest mining boom is over--because the cards cannot even be used for anything else.

2021 is a loss for GPUs at this point. Simply forget about it.

I would be shocked if there's anything on shelves before Black Friday. And once the US holiday season rolls around again--forget about it. Every update since September's disastrous Ampere 3080 launch, AMD/Nvidia promise stocks will 'stabilize' by next quarter....every time they're shown to be liars. It isn't even that they're wrong or 'mistaken'--their internal analysts know the demand, and know how many wafers and GPUs they're cranking out and sending to AIBs, and know how many cards they're selling direct to miners etc--and know that they'll never be able to meet demand, they're simply lying. They haven't even YET made enough GPUs to satisfy day one stock requests from retailers.

The zeros say it all:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX | 3060 Ti | 3070 | 3080 | 3090 » Full overview here!

RTX 30series overview und schnelle Lieferung mit Proshop a/s

www.proshop.de

AMD Radeon » RX 6800 | RX 6800 XT | RX 6900 XT » Full overview!

AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series overview ja nopea toimitus Proshop a/silta

www.proshop.fi

Big silicon isn't alone. The entire bicycle industry has basically stated there's not going to be anything to buy the rest of the calendar year. They're at least being honest about it.

 

[Valantar]

1. The people actually buying up the entire GPU supply in bulk...they hire ex-Nvidia engineers/developers. Nvidia can make driver and VBIOS changes all they want--those people can rewrite the driver to do what they want it to. They have been for a while. The only people that this will stop are consumers buying single cards....not the corporate/industrial hashing operations

I mostly agree with you, but this point ... well, it's definitely crackable in some way, but from what they've said it's not a traditional simplistic driver or firmware lock, but rather a lock based on the driver, firmware and possibly internal workings of the GPU all working together. Cracking one won't affect the others nor fool them into thinking the workload can run unthrottled. And given that Nvidia GPUs require signed firmware, hacking the BIOS is much more of a challenge than modifying a driver. Given the financial resources behind crypto there's little doubt it will be cracked at some point, but it might be complex and expensive, and possibly not widely available (anyone able to crack this would be able to sell their workaround for quite a lot, after all).

That being said, I don't see it as likely for things to improve in the short term. I've got an RX 6800 XT on backorder, and frankly I'll be happy if I have it in hand by May. Possibly the most anticlimactic PC component purchase I've ever done, but that's the world we currently live in.

 

[AlexTSG]

1. The people actually buying up the entire GPU supply in bulk...they hire ex-Nvidia engineers/developers. Nvidia can make driver and VBIOS changes all they want--those people can rewrite the driver to do what they want it to. They have been for a while. The only people that this will stop are consumers buying single cards....not the corporate/industrial hashing operations
2. Nvidia splitting its production into even more SKUs, e.g. mining-specific, there is no stock of--means there's even less GPU supply to actually go to system builders. It also means there's even more e-waste when the latest mining boom is over--because the cards cannot even be used for anything else.

I don't disagree that larger mining farms will find ways around the hash limiter that NVIDIA is implementing. However, they are running those farms as a business, and profit vs risk must be calculated.

I believe the changes to Ethereum itself are going to have an impact.

Regarding the NVIDIA CMP mining cards: Aside from the range topping 90HX variant, the other CMP cards look like they will be built with Turing chips, not Ampere.

Also, as mining profitability is largely based on power consumption, I believe the Ampere based 90HX is likely to be using chips that don't make the grade for gaming cards. They will likely run at lower clock speeds, but also use much less power. This gives NVIDIA a way to use the very lowest binned chips.

I guess time will tell, but I'm hoping we don't have to wait till next year to see improvements in availability.

 

[Phuncz]

I don't care who's right, it's an interesting and educating discussion either way.

 

[Goatee]

I don't care who's right, it's an interesting and educating discussion either way.

And done without name calling or putting each other down... Is this even the Internet?

 

[Skripka]

I mostly agree with you, but this point ... well, it's definitely crackable in some way, but from what they've said it's not a traditional simplistic driver or firmware lock, but rather a lock based on the driver, firmware and possibly internal workings of the GPU all working together. Cracking one won't affect the others nor fool them into thinking the workload can run unthrottled. And given that Nvidia GPUs require signed firmware, hacking the BIOS is much more of a challenge than modifying a driver. Given the financial resources behind crypto there's little doubt it will be cracked at some point, but it might be complex and expensive, and possibly not widely available (anyone able to crack this would be able to sell their workaround for quite a lot, after all).

That being said, I don't see it as likely for things to improve in the short term. I've got an RX 6800 XT on backorder, and frankly I'll be happy if I have it in hand by May. Possibly the most anticlimactic PC component purchase I've ever done, but that's the world we currently live in.

I don't disagree that larger mining farms will find ways around the hash limiter that NVIDIA is implementing. However, they are running those farms as a business, and profit vs risk must be calculated.

I believe the changes to Ethereum itself are going to have an impact.

Regarding the NVIDIA CMP mining cards: Aside from the range topping 90HX variant, the other CMP cards look like they will be built with Turing chips, not Ampere.

Also, as mining profitability is largely based on power consumption, I believe the Ampere based 90HX is likely to be using chips that don't make the grade for gaming cards. They will likely run at lower clock speeds, but also use much less power. This gives NVIDIA a way to use the very lowest binned chips.

I guess time will tell, but I'm hoping we don't have to wait till next year to see improvements in availability.

And, 10 days later...Nvidia, themselves, leak an unlocked mining driver for Ethereum for the 3060...that whole it isn't 'just a driver' security to limit mining...yea, the straight up lied.

Nvidia confirms it accidentally unlocked RTX 3060 Ethereum mining

A beta driver has unlocked mining performance

www.theverge.com

RTX 3060 Mining Restrictions Circumvented By Nvidia's Own Drivers

A new beta driver for the recently released GPU has accidentally undone all the work Nvidia put into making it a poor card for Ethereum mining.

www.gamespot.com

They, of course, took it down.....but come on, this is the internet, where it is permanent.

Nvidia removes driver that bypassed the RTX 3060's Ethereum mining limiter

Yesterday brought the surprising news that the GeForce 470.05 beta driver, which was available to developers under the Windows Insider Program, removed the hash rate limiter from...

www.techspot.com

 

[AlexTSG]

And, 10 days later...Nvidia, themselves, leak an unlocked mining driver for Ethereum for the 3060...that whole it isn't 'just a driver' security to limit mining...yea, the straight up lied.

Yeah. That's a real pity.

The RTX 3060 is one of the few cards that's actually available at my local retailers. I'm not sure it will stay that way since this news has come out.

Now it's down to whether the changes to Ethereum itself will reduce the mining income sufficiently to affect GPU availability.

 

[tinyitx]

Let's assume there are 15 million gamers in the world. I wonder how strong is the mining community (individuals plus large mining farms) compared to this number.
I mean, Nvidia/AMD should put more emphasis to the gaming community, which provides a much more consistent and steady source of income to them. Mining activity goes up and down periodically and is not a reliable source of income.
Currently, gamers are all like a box of loose sand without a strong coherent representation and thus, their voices are just scattering noise to Nvidia/AMD. If there is an organized 'pressure group' of the gamers, maybe this united front can put enough pressure to the card makers and they will pay more attention to the gaming community?

 

[AlexTSG]

Let's assume there are 15 million gamers in the world. I wonder how strong is the mining community (individuals plus large mining farms) compared to this number.
I mean, Nvidia/AMD should put more emphasis to the gaming community, which provides a much more consistent and steady source of income to them. Mining activity goes up and down periodically and is not a reliable source of income.
Currently, gamers are all like a box of loose sand without a strong coherent representation and thus, their voices are just scattering noise to Nvidia/AMD. If there is an organized 'pressure group' of the gamers, maybe this united front can put enough pressure to the card makers and they will pay more attention to the gaming community?

I'm not sure how accurate these statistics are, but they have a figure of 2.7 billion gamers globally in 2020!

• Number of gamers worldwide | Statista

In one of the many articles I was reading about cryptocurrency mining, and it's effect on GPU availability, they talked about the supply chain, and how lucrative it is for NVIDIA/AMD or board partners when they can sell large volumes directly to miners, as opposed to selling to gamers through normal channels.

I can't remember the quoted percentages, but when you consider that normally there's a markup being added to the manufacturing cost by NVIDIA/AMD, then the board partner, then possibly a regional distributor, then the retail outlet, it's very tempting when miners may be offering to pay SEP/RRP (or more) directly to the manufacturers.

I guess we just need to start putting together massive group buys of thousands of graphics cards to get them at reasonable prices (or at all)!

 

[tinyitx]

I'm not sure how accurate these statistics are, but they have a figure of 2.7 billion gamers globally in 2020!

• Number of gamers worldwide | Statista

In one of the many articles I was reading about cryptocurrency mining, and it's effect on GPU availability, they talked about the supply chain, and how lucrative it is for NVIDIA/AMD or board partners when they can sell large volumes directly to miners, as opposed to selling to gamers through normal channels.

I can't remember the quoted percentages, but when you consider that normally there's a markup being added to the manufacturing cost by NVIDIA/AMD, then the board partner, then possibly a regional distributor, then the retail outlet, it's very tempting when miners may be offering to pay SEP/RRP (or more) directly to the manufacturers.

I guess we just need to start putting together massive group buys of thousands of graphics cards to get them at reasonable prices (or at all)!

I estimate the number of gamers by this list of best selling PC games. Top 10 average is, say, about 15 mil. Buyers of these games are likely gamers who buy higher end cards (which are also sought after by miners). 2.7 billion might include casual gamers who play Solitaire?

List of best-selling PC games - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Surely large retailers like Newegg, Amazon, TMall, JD.com order a large number of cards from manufacturers. But then, even they do not appear to be able to receive enough stock.

 

[Skripka]

I estimate the number of gamers by this list of best selling PC games. Top 10 average is, say, about 15 mil. Buyers of these games are likely gamers who buy higher end cards (which are also sought after by miners). 2.7 billion might include casual gamers who play Solitaire?

List of best-selling PC games - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Surely large retailers like Newegg, Amazon, TMall, JD.com order a large number of cards from manufacturers. But then, even they do not appear to be able to receive enough stock.

For reference, EU retailer ProShop has disclosed their order inventory requests due to pissed customers.

According to their own numbers, they've requestd a couple thousand NVidia and AMD cards across all SKUs and models of the new stuff....and maybe 10-20% have actually been delivered since Ampere launched to now.

 

[thelaughingman]

I'm not sure how accurate these statistics are, but they have a figure of 2.7 billion gamers globally in 2020!

• Number of gamers worldwide | Statista

usually so-called 'casual' gamers would account for the majority of these kind of figures - mobile, consoles, etc. Truly PC gamers are rare breed

how lucrative it is for NVIDIA/AMD or board partners when they can sell large volumes directly to miners, as opposed to selling to gamers through normal channels.

exactly

 

[loader963]

Thanks for telling us about Little Nightmares! I got it for free too.
Lately, I play only old games because I mine ethereum (24/7)
I only lose 10% hash rate on my 1660 Ti while playing Thief (1999/2000).

Are you making any money mining bro?

 

[Bubba]

Are you making any money mining bro?

I don't want to spam/shill this forum with crypto mining but since you asked, I will tell you.

The price of ethereum and bitcoin went down recently. Profits are down and will likely stay down.
I strongly advise not to buy a graphics card only for mining.

My favorite crypto coin is Monero (XMR).
I mine a few different crypto coins, and then convert them all into Monero.
I do not cash out. I save all my crypto mining profits in Monero because I believe it is the future.

The best way to mine monero is not to mine monero itself, but to mine
other crypto coins and convert them into monero. For example, I mine ethereum or haven
on my graphics card and then convert it to monero.

Here is a good site which shows recent data for popular crypto coins.

Bitcoin shorts vs Longs - Click for BTC margin charts - Datamish

Charts for Bitcoin long and short positions on Bitinex. A unique tool for crypto traders who wish to gauge sentiment and analyze the BTC market. Check if leveraged bears or bulls are due for a margin squeeze. Charts also include Bitmex liquidations and health scores for both longs and shorts.

datamish.com

This is the pool, I mine at:

Monero (XMR) Mining Pool - MoneroOcean

Welcome to MoneroOcean mining pool! Here you can mine Monero or even more profitable coins but still get payments in Monero, the best private cryptocurrency in the world!

moneroocean.stream

At MoneroOcean, you can mine different crypto coins but the pool pays out only in Monero.

Why Monero? This is why.

 

[paulesko]

I´m another crypto guy. I mine ethereum with my gpu when it´s not doing anything and monero with my cpu. I make some money on it.
The same as investing on crypto currencies... I don´t think I´m gambling at all, if you understand those charts, they are just a representation of people´s hopes and fears, a representation of the psychology behind the investors, that normally behave the same way.

example: Elon Musk say they are going to use bitcoin and they buy bitcoin the "herd" buys bitcoin because of these good news, you as an investor should be selling or taking profit on these kind of news and on the contrary, buying or accumulating when the market is fearfull and "crypto is dead" Not gambling, just human behaviour printed on a chart.

As for the mining problem, well, this is a very new technology, and as everything when is new, it has it´s problems that have to be improved, but it has great potential to change the way the world works (mostly in the finance tasks) as much as internet changed the way humans interact with each other. But this will take time, the internet exists for a longtime, and the user experience in 1990 was shitty AF, but the potential was there, and look what it is today. The same may happen with crypto as a technology, no one can predict the future, and one can only see the negative side of things but it has a lot of potential to change our lifes for the better... as everything in life it also depends on how we choose to use this technology.

For example there are several protocols (Aave, Curve, Comp) already working (and they are audited) that gives yield for people who put their dollars there (on several types on stable coins that mimic the price of the dollar, so it doesn´t fluctuate) and with that same money, they give loans to others. The good thing about this protocols is that it´s impossible to lend money that doesn´t exists, as banks do. And also you don´t need a bank infrastructure to get a loan, or get acces to several services that traditional banks give. Another good thing is that this is just code, you don´t have to trust the banker, or the person who you are lending to, the thing just executes itself (this has some really bad possible outcomes also)

There are other kind of projects with very interesting uses like Akash that you give your computational power in exchange of the token, so you have an incentive. If someone wants to buy computational power for whatever project it has to pay some of that crypto, and you get it in the percentage that you have helped, so we have like an AWS type of thing, but decentralized.

There is also Theta that is making a kind of youtube in which the codification process happens in everyusers PC instead on a centraliced server (and you get paid theta token for it) ....

To sum up. the potential of this technology is just huge, and as everything in this world it has two sides, a good one and a bad one, it depends on us as a society to make good use of it.

The GPU problem is more complex than what it seems, because for example noone mines with AMD gpus, and they are as scarce and as expensive as nvidia. (well, maybe not as much, but close) And the chip manufacturing scarcity goes al around the world with (for example) car manufacturers not being able to provide certain extras to some cars due to the fact that they dont have supply for some chips. I don´t know much about this, but without wanting to say that mining has its impact (because it has) the global situation with the silicon market in general is not good. Remember we were talking about paper launches with zen cpus before this gpu problem.

 

[paulesko]

Oh and by the way, In dollars terms I mine with a 5700 xt and get around 100-300 dollars a month depending on the network usage and the price of ethereum. A 3090 would give me a bit more than double that, and a 3080 or Radeon VII almost double. A 6800 6900 xt would give like... 15 to 20% more. It´s more dependant on mem bandwith than anyother thing.

 

[Skripka]

I´m another crypto guy. I mine ethereum with my gpu when it´s not doing anything and monero with my cpu. I make some money on it.
The same as investing on crypto currencies... I don´t think I´m gambling at all, if you understand those charts, they are just a representation of people´s hopes and fears, a representation of the psychology behind the investors, that normally behave the same way.

example: Elon Musk say they are going to use bitcoin and they buy bitcoin the "herd" buys bitcoin because of these good news, you as an investor should be selling or taking profit on these kind of news and on the contrary, buying or accumulating when the market is fearfull and "crypto is dead" Not gambling, just human behaviour printed on a chart.

As for the mining problem, well, this is a very new technology, and as everything when is new, it has it´s problems that have to be improved, but it has great potential to change the way the world works (mostly in the finance tasks) as much as internet changed the way humans interact with each other. But this will take time, the internet exists for a longtime, and the user experience in 1990 was shitty AF, but the potential was there, and look what it is today. The same may happen with crypto as a technology, no one can predict the future, and one can only see the negative side of things but it has a lot of potential to change our lifes for the better... as everything in life it also depends on how we choose to use this technology.

For example there are several protocols (Aave, Curve, Comp) already working (and they are audited) that gives yield for people who put their dollars there (on several types on stable coins that mimic the price of the dollar, so it doesn´t fluctuate) and with that same money, they give loans to others. The good thing about this protocols is that it´s impossible to lend money that doesn´t exists, as banks do. And also you don´t need a bank infrastructure to get a loan, or get acces to several services that traditional banks give. Another good thing is that this is just code, you don´t have to trust the banker, or the person who you are lending to, the thing just executes itself (this has some really bad possible outcomes also)

There are other kind of projects with very interesting uses like Akash that you give your computational power in exchange of the token, so you have an incentive. If someone wants to buy computational power for whatever project it has to pay some of that crypto, and you get it in the percentage that you have helped, so we have like an AWS type of thing, but decentralized.

There is also Theta that is making a kind of youtube in which the codification process happens in everyusers PC instead on a centraliced server (and you get paid theta token for it) ....

To sum up. the potential of this technology is just huge, and as everything in this world it has two sides, a good one and a bad one, it depends on us as a society to make good use of it.

The GPU problem is more complex than what it seems, because for example noone mines with AMD gpus, and they are as scarce and as expensive as nvidia. (well, maybe not as much, but close) And the chip manufacturing scarcity goes al around the world with (for example) car manufacturers not being able to provide certain extras to some cars due to the fact that they dont have supply for some chips. I don´t know much about this, but without wanting to say that mining has its impact (because it has) the global situation with the silicon market in general is not good. Remember we were talking about paper launches with zen cpus before this gpu problem.

You might not think you're gambling...but if you don't know if in 5 minutes your position will be worth anything or not--you're gambling. Putting money in equities or commodities on the stock markets (the most similar thing to crypto) is gambling too; even mutual funds really are--but because the later are risk pooled among lots of people and assets they're far less volatile.

The tech is neat...and completely rife for abuse by corporations wanting to launder money. Which is exactly why they do. Which is the funny thing--for something as bent on keeping things 'decentralized' as possible--it ends up funneling money/value and therefore power back into the hands of exactly the corporations that had it in the first place that they were trying to decentralize it away from.


(Deposit) Banks are great. I know I put my money in a bank, its presence is actually insured. In the USA it is called FDIC--in the event of global financial meltdown, they will insure my deposit in order to even operate as a deposit bank legally in the USA. One of those things that came out of the Great Depression--and people having their money poofed by banks. Moreover--banks are almost never are robbed. Unlike crypto wallets and exchanges that are hacked and robbed every day of the week, that aren't insured. The sucky thing about banks--interest rates, that are paid to encourage people to keep liquidity in them, are at an all time low so your money isn't 'working' at all when deposited versus a mutual fund even in government bonds.

 

[CC Ricers]

As a crypto owner, I'm very cautious about public figures like Elon Musk hyping or deriding certain coins, as it's been known that they have the potential to manipulate the market through sheer influence alone. I do like people that actually contribute a technological developments or philanthropic causes with cryptocurrencies, but those hype men, those are ones you gotta watch out for.

@Skripka I do agree that any serious amount of funds you have need to be insured for your own benefit. That's the one big advantage from using banks and why I would continue using them. What I don't like, though, is the way they charge you for fees for things such as low balance, overdraft, etc. it's more damaging to customers that have to get by on small budgets. And credit unions are not always around depending on where you live. Banks have very low interest rates compared to CeFi crypto platforms, but that's less of an issue for me than the fees. There are more CeFi platforms opening up that can let you stake stable coins for higher APY, and I am really going to put a strong preference to the ones that do insure your money.

 

[Solo]

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